Voting With Your Dollar

"My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it. So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century."  (Noam Chomsky)

I think the hardest part about really understanding what Chomsky is saying here is what anyone is to do about it.  The knee-jerk reaction is "go and vote and change things," but I think that after being involved, as a country, in almost continuous global war since the end of WWII, its reasonable to suggest that voting doesn't really change anything.





But there is another way to vote, and that's with our dollars.  And that's where the real complications start.  Because its not simply a matter of buying only organic, or donating money to the Red Cross via our cell phones; its a matter of deeply altering our daily lifestyle.  One simple (???) example is the gas we all pay for and put in our cars.  Considering that we import a majority of the oil we consume, each dollar we spend on gasoline means that we are voting - even if indirectly - to continue amassing that oil from abroad by whatever means happen to be "acceptable" at the moment.

But to stop paying for gasoline - be it for our own cars or for the taxi driver's car or for the public transit bus - we probably have to change where we live.  And then we probably have to change our jobs, or even our careers.  Just to do one simple thing - to not buy gasoline - would require each individual to virtually erase his life and start over.

And so it becomes easier to not think about where oil comes from.  To not worry about what is happening in places far away, where oil is produced.  To not concern ourselves with the myriad stops that dollar makes on its way from our gas tank back to the hole the oil was pulled from, and all the violence it helps to incur along that path.

Real and actual change is not brought about "liking" the KONY movement on Facebook or recycling the 50 water bottles we consumed this week, though these things might make us feel better about ourselves in a powerfully superficial way.  Real and actual change is initiated by refusing to participate in the system that allows such things to be perpetuated in the first place and, in America, the only real way to refuse to participate is by refusing to spend our money on anything that leads back to things we disapprove of.  (Wherein lies a particularly robust challenge:  knowing the origins of the things and services we pay for so that we might be able to choose where properly to spend our money.)




I've always found it particularly ironic when I see someone driving a car with a bumper sticker that says "War is not the Answer" when, by driving the car in the first place, the driver is affirming that yes, war is the answer, at least for as long as it takes him to get where he needs to be.