MAKING A DIFFERENCE

My last post in January was a call for a national boycott of the President Day Weekend Sales. I posted the same call for a boycott on the blog’s Facebook page. I followed it up twice and paid Facebook $130 to “boost” the posts using algorithms to reach a larger, like-minded audience. The posts reached 10,991 people. They were shared 933 times reaching another 16,491 people (a total of 27,482 people). They received 1346 “likes” and several hundred “comments”, almost all of which were positive. The idea did not go viral and, therefore, did not attract the attention of the media, which would have been necessary to have a multi-billion dollar impact. But, I don’t think the exercise was a waste of time, either. It had some financial impact and exposed a lot of people to the notion that We The People have the economic power in this country.

Interestingly enough, although I don’t think there is any direct connection, at about the same time this call for a boycott was circulating, some of the surviving students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida went to the Florida State Legislature to seek support for gun control legislation. They were essentially told they were too young to understand politics and should go back to school. They learned an important lesson from that visit. They learned that politics is all about the money. So, they decided to go after the money. They used the access they had to the national media as a result of the tragic shooting at their school and urged students all across the country to NOT come to Florida for Spring Break until Florida passed gun control legislation. Within a matter of weeks Florida passed gun control legislation. That’s more than all the marches, petitions and phone call campaigns organized by the Resistance in the past year have accomplished.

Those young high school students in Parkland, Florida “got it”. I hope all of you reading this “get it”. Human behavior is determined by the consequences it produces. As long as the way people behave gets them what they need and want, they will continue behaving that way. It is not until that behavior stops getting them what they need and want, and better still, gets them the exact opposite, what they don’t need or want, that they will either adapt their behavior or perish.

Politics in this country in the 21^st Century is clearly all about the money. But, keep in mind, the Fat Cat Robber Barons who are controlling the political process in the United States don’t keep their wealth stacked to the ceiling in a safe somewhere. Their wealth is in their investments. Those investments only have value if they produce a profit. And, our labor as workers and our purchases as consumers are what produce that profit. Cut off that profit and they will have no choice but to tell their minions in Congress and state legislatures to give us back our country.