Grrrrr.... I'm going to rant, so just be warned.

from http://www.calyouth.org/hey-youth-vote/

Ok, so while this is not strictly what you might think of as a One Earth Revolution post because it is not exactly about the environment or social movements, it IS about our society. It's about this business of campaign finance and the insistence of our Supreme Court to be complete imbeciles when it comes to the interpretation of our Constitution. I've got a BA in political science, so I think I've got some right to rant on this and anyway, any American with at least a rudimentary understanding of the English language has a right to rant on this. And here is my issue; Spending money is not speech. I don't care how creative they get with their definitions, handing over a wad of cash is not speech and is not a protected right under our Constitution. In fact, allowing a bunch of rich fat-cats to hand over a whole lot of money to purchase the right to be the only one that a congressman will listen to is both not speech and has the very detrimental outcome of effectively silencing the free speech of ordinary Americans who don't have the means to buy themselves a congressman! No one however seems to be concerned about the abridgment  of our right to free speech or this squelching of our voices. 

Speech is speech people. It means that you have a right to say what you believe. It doesn't mean that you have a right to pay people not to listen to the opinions of other people, which is basically what this comes down to. We have the right to speak our minds, whether that be on a soapbox in the public square or on national TV. We also have freedom of the press which allows us to put into print what we want to say. That's freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

We have to stop the buying of our Congressman and there is only one way to do it. We need to mobilize the vote. We need to start letting OUR voices be heard over the voices of those with the money. We don't have a lot of money, but we all have one vote. Maybe if we all start using our votes the money wont be quite so important. Do you realize that in off year elections less than 50% of us exercise our most fundamental right as citizens? And in presidential election years it is little better, hovering around 60%. We also have the right of free speech and it is time we stop feeling like we can't do anything about the issues and start using our voices and our pens. Write to your newspaper, email your congressmen, put a sign on your front lawn. If we don't exercise our rights as citizens, we should be little surprised when we find them slowly and then more and more rapidly being stripped away from us.