An open letter to the Green Party

Dear people in the Green Party,

I will be blunt.

Parliamentary politics have failed. We are clearly at an impasse, and we are fighting an advancing forest fire with a garden sprinkler, and running backwards as fast as we can.

We are steadily losing ground. Do not pretend we are even holding ground, much less advancing. The entire strategy of the Green Party is a complete failure. Please pass this on. It is time for a radical reconsideration of strategy.

The goal, the objective, is not to be right, but to win a sustainable and just world. Being in the right is meaningless if your strategy is useless. Do you want to be the Neville Chamberlains of the environmental movement? Come on! Let’s get serious!

Let’s face the facts, and get on with it. Time for revolution. Time at least for another, and more serious strategy.

Please, pass this to Elizabeth [May, leader of the Green Party of Canada], and let her stop sending me “Important messages” which do not go anywhere.

Please take me off your wish list of supporters until you have something more serious to offer. I’m sorry, I know all of you have your hearts in the right place, but this is mindless, and strategically stupid. It is obviously losing. Reconsider your approach, please.

At least shift your focus, if not to the extra-parliamentary and the grassroots, where real power lies, and always has, then to the local, and to municipal action where real change is still possible.

Right now, due to a failure to get proportional representation established, and more critically, election financing reform and media democracy, federal politics is essentially a write-off, and a grand waste of time and a distraction.

I realize that having a voice in federal politics means something, but it is futile other than that, at this point, and should not be the primary focus.

At the level of the grassroots and the local municipality, it is still possible to win real victories, and to build momentum with that. At present, movement-building, which is all-critical, has stalled at the federal level, and if it is building at all, it is at a glacial speed, which we have no time left for.

Build your movement where the opportunity lies. Read Sun Tzu. Spitting into the wind is not virtuous, it is simply foolish. Redirect your energies, and let us save this earth.

JTR,
December 2012