The World According to Ash

This is something I wrote as part of an invite to a political summit I am organizing in Provo from December 28th-30th. If you would like to attend, you can email me for an agenda at sanders.ashley@gmail.com.

As I traveled around on my Nader speaking tour this last month, I stayed with a dozen different friends. Every friend I visited wanted to have the same conversation. They were scared because they had entered the adult world of real jobs, real budget concerns, and real time constraints. They were worried that they would never find out what they really wanted to do, or, if they did find out, that they could never make it happen. They were worried that the restrictions and unimaginativeness and sheer drudgery of most organizations would suck their soul and keep them from being the person they wanted to be. They admitted they had a hard time standing up to the structures and managers of the status quo to demand what they really needed or what people in general really needed. They fretted that they were becoming slaves of a paycheck mentality, and that they were giving up their old ideals to be ‘practical’.

In short, they realized that they were becoming the people they said they would never be, and they realized that this transformation did not occur overnight. Adulthood was waging a much more subtle assault on their ideals than they had imagined. They admitted that they thought their moments of defiance would be just that-moments of principle against egregious or unethical requests made by sinister bosses with ominous agendas. Instead, they acknowledged that losing your soul was a very mundane process-that they were losing it in a thousand miniscule concessions, not to overtly unethical propositions Read the rest of this entry »

In a world of purebred blogs, this one’s a mutt. It can and will be anything it wants, since it is the result of a thousand opinion-crossings and philosophies all at once.

As the author, I should say that I work for the Nader campaign and yes, I will use this blog to convince you to vote for him. I could give you the tired line about just wanting you to be informed this election year and do whatever you think is right, but the truth is I have done my own research and think that voting for the two major-party candidates would be a truly devastating mistake (cue argument about Nader and Gore and devastating mistakes in three…two…one). That’s right, this year I am bucking the cowed non-profit-non-partisan model of persuading people (which requires even political feelings to be expressed in thoroughly non-political terms) and am saying that the consequences of not voting for real reform are too real and too immoral to smother with niceties about rocking the vote (whichever one you want to rock!) and the civic responsibilities of making it out to the polls. I want you to vote for a certain person or give me damned good arguments about why you are voting for someone else.

That said, I will give you fair information. I will not try to mislead you. I will welcome disagreement and discussion. My goal is reforming this country, not proclaiming allegiances to a certain candidate. I disagree with Nader on certain things, and I will say so freely.

But that isn’t the sole point of this blog. Philosophically, for example, I disagree with almost the entire institution of electoral politics. Like I said, I am a mutt. I am here to Read the rest of this entry »