One of the things that distinguishes Greens from other political parties is that we Greens have core values that we're not afraid to state, specifically, and we openly demand of our politicians that THEY hold these values themselves if they want our vote.
As a world-wide collective, we have different ways of expressing these values. Some, for example the California Greens, state them as a long series of interogatives which has the advantage of simply asking the right questions without compelling specific answers. Others, like both the GPUS and GPUSA, use rather cerebral articulations in an almost scientific way, while still others use flowery prose or artistry, and yet others use simple lists. In fact, a simple web search produced so many different articulations of these values, this author found it astonishing. Surely the reason for so many articulations is because we're all trying to share what it means in ways that make the most sense to us, yet they all have the same fundamental core. This writer is rather impressed by the European International Greens who see this diversity and boil down to four fundamentals, also adopted by GPUS, which they call pillars. These are:
Of the many varriations in the articulation of the Ten Values, this author happens to like the articulation found here because it's free of any accidental / inadvertent self-contradictions that I'm sure other authors either don't see or would say, "you know what I mean." ...It will be left as an exercise for the reader to review these and the many other variations out there, however, at least for those of us in the USA, there's an interesting story about early adoption of Green Values statements on our shores which can be found here.
It's also worth making a sharp contrast here: Wouldn't you rather belong to a party (and even more importantly VOTE for members of a party) that has stated values that it demands its candidates follow in order to be considered a valid member of the party as opposed to either the Democratic or Republican Parties which will accept anyone who claims their name no matter the values they hold? For example, what, today, does it even mean to be a Democrat? In 1940, we knew. Today?
