The Day After We Turn the Check Down

I have a confession. I have written and campaigned about politics for years, and I have never once written or seen a piece like this one. I have written about the greed. About the corruption. I've campaigned about the wars we didn't vote for and the price hikes we didn't cause. I have watched trillions climb upward while wages lost ground to inflation, and I have said so loudly. I could have kept going that way until the day I die, and the country would look exactly the same.

Nobody should hand you a blueprint from a mountaintop and call it liberation. Movements that do that have a habit of ending in a new boss who never leaves. But at the same time, a movement that only points at the problems without building solutions is wandering in circles and exhausting itself complaining about the scenery. A direction is knowing what type of society you are trying to arrive at, so that every fight along the road can be measured against it. That is what this piece is. Not a blueprint. A bearing, or the beginning of one.

A World No Check Could Buy

Remember Dana, the worker from our last piece, doing the math on five thousand dollars? Under seven dollars a day for two years of sitting, staying, and voting right.

Here is what that check is for, and why it exists. It exists because needs can be held hostage. The world we are building is one where nobody needs five thousand dollars from anybody, because nobody's family can be starved into obedience. Food on the table. A roof that doesn't eat half the paycheck. A doctor when you're sick. School for the kids. Care when you're old. A floor under everyone. Does that mean getting rid of the billionaires? At the very least it means nobody gets to hold your family's basic needs over your head.

You cannot bribe a man who cannot be starved. That world, not the check, is the destination.

A Simple Test for Any Future

Rather than writing blueprints from the mountaintop, here is a rule of thumb I use instead. It's smaller than a blueprint and bigger than a slogan. Picture your children or the neighborhood children. Picture them growing up in a world we create.

Do they walk to school, and who do they meet on the way?
When they speak, does anybody hear them?
Is the first thing they learn about strangers a welcome, or suspicion?
Is their future already sold, or is it open?
And when they get in trouble, is there anyone nearby who knows their name?

In other words, what kind of world should our children be raised into? Any future that fails that test, we don't want it, no matter who's selling it, including futures sold to us as our own. The test is the destination, described at street level, and notice that not one word of it is exotic. It's the world most of our grandparents were promised in exchange for their taxes, their wars, and their lifetimes of work. We're not announcing paradise. We're announcing a road we can build together.

It Has Been Done Before, and Here

Nothing in that test is a fantasy, and none of it arrived from nowhere. Your grandfather may have helped string it. When the private power companies refused to wire the countryside, farmers strung the wire themselves and owned the utility together. It worked so well that it's still there: nearly 900 of those member-owned electric co-ops keep the lights on today for about 42 million people across 48 states, including almost every county in America the private economy left behind. They aren't customers of those utilities. They're the owners, and every year the utilities send over a billion dollars back to them.

And almost 146 million Americans keep their money in a credit union, which is just a bank the members own. Each of those doors deserves its own piece, and they'll get them. For now the point is smaller and larger at once: what we're announcing isn't a foreign import. It's an old American habit that got taken from us while we were busy just trying to make ends meet, and a habit can be picked back up.

Demands Along the Road

None of that excuses us from the mile we're standing in. People are hurting now, and the fights don't wait for the destination. Wages now. The union now. The healthcare, the heat, the rent, now. Anyone who tells you those fights don't matter until after some great day of reckoning, one big storm that washes everything away, is selling you someone else's agenda. Every fight we win does three jobs at once: it feeds somebody this month, it proves to us that we can win, and it trains the muscle we'll need for the next one. Take the victories. Stack them.

The fights are already finding us whether we schedule them or not. Who controls the data centers draining our towns' water and power. What happens to our jobs when the machines learn them. Whether the air stays breathable and the rivers stay wet. Whether anybody's finger stays off the last war button. Whether the vote itself survives. Those are stations on the road, not the end of it. A movement that knows its destination can walk those stations in order, and pick up passengers at every one, without losing the thread. A movement that only knows its grievances can only march in place.

Who's Writing This

I owe you the disclosure. I'm a public school teacher. Not a scientist, not an academic, not a politician, no organization behind me. I do this on evenings and weekends. And I don't speak for this website — I built it, but it's meant to outgrow me. So why should you read further? Because I looked, hard, for the thing I'm about to describe, and I couldn't find it.

Both big parties belong to their donors, and their donors are doing fine. The left press is full of fire and prophecy, thin on destinations. The right has no use for any of it. What I could not find, anywhere, was an outfit that walked the walk on the one thing that would actually change our lives: real democracy, everywhere, including the workplace, the advocacy organization itself, the political party. If it's out there, show me, and I'll join it tomorrow.

Until then, we built it because pointing at the fires is the industry standard, and building the house we'd rather live in is nobody's job but our own.

One Brick at a Time

We don't run this site to tell you what to think. We run it to think out loud together, and this piece thinks loudest when it gets answered. So bring your answers to the comment board. It's open, unmoderated, and yours.

What do you say to the $5,000 bribe?  
What would you do with the money if you got it?  
What should we demand this year, while we're walking?