"Jill Stein"

This Week with David Rovics

I'm not much for playing Charades, so I never actually got around to voting in an election until Ralph Nader ran for president in 2000. I also sang at various events with him, and at the Green Party national convention around that time, and at the last Green Party national convention online, and many other Green Party events in between.

I've also voted for lots of Greens over the years since I started voting more consistently, here in Oregon, where you're automatically registered to vote when you get a state ID or driver's license, the ballots arrive in the mail, making it all extremely easy, even for an anarchist to bother with.

I wrote this song, "Jill Stein," in 2016. I never got around to making a good recording of the song, but after seeing some particularly offensive posts about Jill on social media, I felt inspired to make a better recording of the song, after changing one word in it. See if you can guess which one!

With concern to the US political system, we can either keep on playing along with the "lesser evil" philosophy and hope to speed towards that proverbial wall more slowly, or we can turn the train around. Given those options, supporting Jill Stein seems like the right decision to me. I understand why other people disagree. It's a hard choice, between the near future and the further-off future. I've always been one for the long game myself, though I can also be very impatient.