"Politics is not about power. Politics is not about money. Politics is not about winning for the sake of winning. Politics is about the improvement of people's lives. It's about advancing the cause of peace and justice in our country and the world. Politics is about doing well for the people."
"The only way to change is to vote. People are responsible."
Both of those quotes are from Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone. He worked tirelessly for the nation's oppressed. He refused to accept the Washington norm, the politics of money and power. He stood up for justice when nobody else would. But Paul Wellstone is dead in the literal sense, killed in the same accident that claimed the life of his wife, child, campaign/policy advisors, and pilots. Wellstone wasn't the first progressive to lose his life in the midst of his campaign for justice. Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy inspired hope in a weary nation as well. And they were met by the same fate as Wellstone, killed by people who hoped to silence their messages.
Paul Wellstone might have died in a tragic accident, an unfortunate plane crash that cut short his cries for peace that prompted Vice President Dick Cheney to tell him, "If you vote against the war in Iraq, the Bush administration will do whatever is necessary to get you. There will be severe ramifications for you and the state of Minnesota." Or he might have been killed by people with the same intentions as those who ended the lives of King and Kennedy. Either way, we cannot let his message die.
Four years later, we live in a morally bankrupt nation. Wars overseas dominate our attention while battles fought in the domestic arena go largely unnoticed. Tens of millions of Americans are without health care, a basic right afforded to citizens of nearly every other wealthy nation. Millions of workers give their sweat and blood, and more importantly, their own dignity in exchange for a minimum wage that has not increased since nearly a decade ago.
Don't get me wrong, our main focus SHOULD be terrorism. But not all terrorists wave the Koran and strap bombs to their chests. Many of them wave Bibles and let younger men do the bombing. Many of them tell distraught women that they deserve the death penalty for having abortions. Many of them tell the working class that they will lose their jobs if they dare to form unions. Many of them try to use black people to scare white people and white people to scare black people and Muslim people to scare everyone. Many of them tell Americans that homosexuals pose a threat to their own marriages. Many of these terrorists get their money not from illegal drug sales or fraudulent charities (although some of them do) but from PACs and special interests.
Many of you are probably wondering why you should even bother voting. Many of you would probably feel more comfortable waiting in your makeshift plexiglas and duct tape bomb shelter for the Apocalypse. Many of you would like to say that by washing your hands of the political process you are absolved of the corruption of this nation. But like Paul Wellstone said, "Politics is about doing well for the people."
A plane crash doesn't change that. Bullets can't change that. Not even a thousand corrupt K Street lobbyists can change that. As long as there are people sincerely participating in the system, "Politics is about doing well for the people."
So tomorrow you can wait at home for change to come to you, or you can, as Gandhi said, "be the change you wish to see in the world". But whatever you do, remember the words of Paul Wellstone, who is alive in all of us who believe in justice:
"There is an elementary aspiration which undergirds the humane impulse in our history and our culture and binds us together as political activists. This is a simple, irreducible, indisputable aspiration. It is the 'dream of justice' for a beloved community, in which the level of terror in people's lives is sharply reduced or maybe eliminated. It is the belief that extremes and excesses of inequality must be reduced so that each person is free to fully develop his or her full potential. This is why we take precious time out of our lives and give it to politics."
Don't ever forget why we are fighting.