…Al Gore had been president? I thought about this today when I heard that Gore threw his support behind the Occupiers.
This is the guy who won the popular vote in the presidential election of 2000, who went on to win the Nobel peace prize, became a climate change activist, started Current TV, and always seems to come down on the side of the people.
“With democracy in crisis, a true grassroots movement pointing out the flaws in our system is the first step in the right direction,” he wrote on his blog. “Count me among those supporting and cheering on the Occupy Wall Street movement.”
Would Gore have invaded Iraq, as Bush did? Would he have allowed Wall Street to continue its heinous practices with derivatives? If we’d had 8 years of Gore instead of 8 years of Bush, how would our country be different now? Would millions of homes be in foreclosure? Would the financial meltdown of 2008 have happened? Would banks and financial institutions that are “too big to fail” still be operating? Would we be in Afghanistan? Would we have universal health care?
I voted for Gore in 2000. But we had recently moved and had so much trouble at the polling station that we had to return two or three times with proper documentation before we were allowed to cast our votes. After the hanging chad debacle in our county that went straight to the Supreme Court, where Sandra Day O’Connor cast the deciding vote that ushered Bush into office, Palm Beach County switched to Diebold voting machines. Hardly an improvement.
In 2004, when I cast my vote for Kerry – Bush’s name came up. It took three attempts before I was able to cast my vote for Kerry. We all know who won the election in 2004.
But let’s say Gore had become president in 2000. Would he have invaded Iraq? Probably not, since Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. Would he have invaded Afghanistan? Probably not. I frankly can’t recall the specifics of what we’re doing in that country, but no one has ever conquered Afghanistan. Just ask the Russians. Read James Michener’s novel about the country, Caravans. Gore might have cut off our access to Saudi oil, however, and forced the auto and power industries to find alternative solutions quickly.
I remember the embargo of 1973, when I used to sit at a local gas station for three hours, waiting to fill the tank in my aging Pinto. Between then and 2000, when Gore might have become prez, nothing changed. Gas got more expensive, cars got larger and hungrier, the cost of electricity went through the roof.
After Bush came into office and offered tax breaks that facilitated the purchase of a Hummer, I saw so many Hummers on the road that the vehicle became symbolic in my mind for the militaristic point of view. The local paper interviewed women who drove Hummers. Their consensus?I feel safer.
Really? Safer from what? IEDs? Sorry, wrong country. Another woman replied that she liked sitting up high in traffic, so that she could see the the cars. Uh-huh. And while you’re idling in that traffic, you’re using up the gas in your Hummer, which gets – what? Five miles to the gallon?
I think Gore would have accelerated the creation of alternative fuels, green jobs, all the buzz words you hear these days from Democrats. But if Gore had won, would he be the activist and visionary he is today? How have these events shaped who he is now?If we’d had eight years of Gore, would Obama have won he presidency in 2008? That depends.
If 8 years of Gore had left this country in a more prosperous place, with more peaceful and environmentally aware policies, people might not have been so desperate for change. Then McCain and Palin might have won. Sobering thought, that if Gore had won, we wold now have a Veep who thinks she can see Russia from her front porch.
So in the bigger scheme of things, how would that alternative history play out? I can’t even go there.
In the end, perhaps it comes down a few simple tenets. We are where we are, the U.S. government is like a two-year-old in the midst of a temper tantrum, no one is held accountable for anything. But, oh yeah, there’s a ray of hope in the Occupier movement that grows by leaps and bounds. Maybe it all comes back to that, the grass root movements that usher in real change.
The right wing has stopped just short of calling them terrorists. They are anti-American, un-American, anti-capitalism. Yet, when a few hundred Tea Party protestors got together last summer, the extreme right lauded them as heroes. The left wing has been reluctant to endorse the Occupiers – oops, we can’t rock the boat here, we don’t want to look too much to the left – but more of them are crawling on board each day.
Listen to what Matt Taibi, a writer for Rolling Stone who has been following the Occupiers since the beginning, has to say about this movement.
And since Gore didn’t win and Bush did and Obama did and I’m living in this version of history, I’m off to make an Occupy sign to stick in my front yard.
