Stay focused

I've always been inspired by the notion of incremental change as a way that earth reality may become less terrifying in the future. I think Prof. Laura Nader presented that idea as a kind of cold comfort after spending the semester destroying everyone's dreams in her famous Controlling Processes course. There is a history of people plugging away at correcting great injustices through small strategic efforts, like maybe in a tiny way voting for the crappy marijuana prop. tomorrow that is expected to fail, just so California and America will understand that there is support for legalizing marijuana and maybe next time it will have a chance. But I'm concerned sometimes that if Team Destroy Injustices is organizing to win skirmishes in the struggle for incremental change, isn't there Team Hateful Right Wing A-Holes who struggles just as vigilantly and passionately, possibly exactly cancelling out our every victory? There's a hateful evil Christian right wing majority Judy rubbing her palms together evily in Utah. She's working so hard to keep the bus line out of her neighborhood and make sure that the war goes on forever, and communists don't get grants and to make sure no spliffs are ever spluffed by Good Judy. Such a hater.

More words about Prop 19: In the end, the courts will interpret the law, big business will find loopholes and other ways to exploit and shit on consumers, and there will be endless other externalities that few of us are clever enough to foresee. When it comes to big idea issues that we really want to move forward like gay rights and sticking a fork in the swollen prison industrial complex full of people who don't need to be there, we need to ignore the nitty gritty details in the wording and send a big clear message that will hopefully get us where we want to be someday: POT -- YES, GAY -- YES, etc. We'll probably end up with some shiny new bullshit, but the world will know we're ready for the big gay yes.

UPDATE: Here's someone else who is also concerned about troublemaker evil Judy:

I think Nader actually said that incremental change is more like when you're an accountant somewhere and you notice something unfair and you blow the whistle. Anyways... I got more things to say about pot laws and their fallout, but my neighbor is screaming in Portuguese and and the ice cream cart guy is dinging his bell and it's most likely too many convoluted words to put here. Should probably go read about government regulatory institutions or whatever.