"We The People" Must Demand Change

Occasionally I like to spread 2GreenEnergy’s wings a bit further than the confines of renewables, talking about various concerns that most of us share in sustainability more generally. In particular, I’ve written before about what Monsanto is doing to control the food supply, maximizing its profits at the expense of the health of the consumer.

Those of you in California know that, had our “Prop 37” passed on Tuesday, we would have been the first state in the nation to mandate the labeling of genetically engineered foods, joining more than 60 countries whose consumers have won the right to know if their food has been genetically modified.

According to this terrific article:

But the prospect of Proposition 37 terrified the junk food and pesticide companies that want to keep us in the dark about what we eat.  The “No on 37” campaign spent $46 million burying the state’s voters in an avalanche of misleading ads and outright falsehoods. Their efforts defeated the proposition, 53 percent to 47 percent. But Monsanto and their peeps didn’t just spend $46 million promoting their opinion. They also lied and got away with it.

The author goes on to enumerate Monsanto’s lies, before concluding:

“The arc of history is long,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told us, “but it bends towards justice.” As we’ve seen time and time again, when enough people demand it, eventually, change does come.

Absolutely right. As I often say: the world is in its deplorable condition precisely because we tolerate it.  I often quote abolitionist, lecturer, author and slave Frederick Douglass:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them…. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.