Greens Can Learn From Dems

Here:

Ohio’s religious right deserves much of the credit for routing the amendments. Russell Johnson, the founder of Ohio’s Patriot Pastors movement, began focusing his fire on “Ruin Ohio Now” this summer, when many progressives were barely aware of it. Ministers from more than a thousand Ohio churches are active in the Patriot Pastors, according to Johnson, and in the weeks leading up to the election the group held meetings with 800 leaders from more than 300 Ohio congregations. On the Sunday before the vote, Johnson, like conservative ministers across the state, asked his congregation at Fairfield Christian Church to pray that Ohioans would spurn the “forces of the secular left” that were behind RON.

Many Democrats hear such rhetoric and dismiss Johnson as one more religious zealot bound to lead Republicans into the political wilderness. But in his office after Sunday services, the easy-going Johnson chuckled at his critics, who “see us all as Neanderthals marching in lockstep.” Wearing a slightly rumpled suit, Johnson seemed more a kindly professor than a crazed preacher.

The take-home for Greens is that they need to stop acting like elitists. Things will not fall into place for you just because both of the other major parties are corrupt and near-worthless. Sorry to disappoint, but reality is happening while y'all keep talking about issue that voters just don't care about.

And someone else saying 'everything is connected':

John Liu, director of the Environmental Education Media Project who spent 25 years in China and witnessed the disasters there, has an unapologetic, four-alarm warning: "Every ecosystem on the planet is under threat of catastrophic collapse, and if we don't begin to acknowledge and solve them, then we will go down."

One of the marks of a global civilization is the extent to which we begin to conceive of whole-system problems and whole-system responses to those problems," notes political scientist Walt Anderson in his book "All Connected Now." "Events occurring in one part of the world are viewed as a matter of concern for the whole world in general and lead to an attempt at collective solutions.

I'm not buying into the 'all connected' argument. It sure sounds nice - it may even be true to some extent - but it's still too 'out there'. Greens need to talk about what actually matters to people in their neighborhoods. It's actually pretty simple, if you ask me. But, nobody's asking. :)

This is good. Something Greens should support.

And more connectedness.