bEcAuSe I cAn bE pEtTy, tOo. in Those Public Entries

You know who you are. Forgive me, but I thought we were both past high school? Or have I got you more fucked up than you’ve got me?

Let me address your “criticisms” of me, point by point.

1. I’m not a Democrat. At worst, I’m a Democratic Socialist. I only vote Democrat because I understand that leftists are never going to get any change effected unless we get some real political power. If Democrats would put aside their political theater and work with us, that could happen, but I also completely understand why they don’t want to. To wit: Leftists don’t want to work with Democrats, because “Democrats and Republicans are all the same.” Kinda hard to work with people who actively and vociferously don’t want to work with you. Look, for most leftists, AOC is “too conservative.” That’s what they’re supposed to work with? How? I’m genuinely asking, because I don’t know how AOC is “too conservative” to be a leftist, and I disagree with her on many things. Just because I disagree with someone doesn’t mean I think they’re my enemy, or that they’re a Republican or alt-right. That’s bullshit Anakin Skywalker logic: “You’re either with me, or you’re my enemy!”

2. I’ve been donating to mutual aid funds, going to protests, volunteering with Food Not Bombs/Cops, and sending money to Palestine via clicks on Arab-dot-org. It’s not much, but it’s what I can reasonably do. Just because I don’t make a point of posting what I do doesn’t mean I’m not doing it. I just don’t want praise for it, because as far as I’m concerned, this is a moral imperative. It’s what I should be doing because it’s the right thing to do. “Remove the plank from your own eye before removing the speck of dust from your neighbor’s.”

3. Hard facts and figures are difficult to come by, but if I had to ballpark a number, I’d say that less than 2% of American voters are Democratic Socialists or socialist. Even fewer than that are communists. Some Americans viewing capitalism less favorably in 2022 than, say, 2016, does not mean that they are now socialists or communists. It just means they see the flaws in the system. Most Americans are neither socialists nor communists. And they probably never will be. Mainly because there’s no such thing as a truly communist/socialist country in this world, and there has never been, so there’s no model of how it would actually work. (No, North Korea, China, and the USSR are not communist. No, the Nordic countries are not socialist. All of these countries are capitalist, just in different ways from the US. To wit: The latter are “capitalist, but with a fuckton of regulations to keep it from becoming American capitalism,” the USSR was “capitalist with nods to socialism” ((the USSR is one of my niche neurodivergent hyperfixations)), China is straight-up capitalist, and North Korea is a military dictatorship in which the Kim family act as royalty sans primogeniture.) Which isn’t to say it couldn’t work, period; I think a socialist country could not only work, but be great for everybody. Come on, the Federation made it work, how hard could it be? We just have to get most of the 8 billion people on this planet to agree!

4. I know how algorithms work. Algorithms are easily manipulated by prolific posters; that’s why you can train your YouTube landing page and curate it as much as you want, but you’re always going to get ads and recommendations from PragerU and The Daily Wire. I haven’t watched TYT in ten years, I still get their videos recommended to me, and it’s because they’re prolific posters. Left-of-center Threads and Twitter are the same way. Remember, “80% of tweets come from 2% of users, and those 2% are prolific tweeters.” They’re fucking the algorithm, not me. If I could fuck the algorithm, Threads would be all cat and dog pictures, SoberThreads, and QT games, because in my opinion, that’s all one-click social media is actually good for.

5. If you’ll recall, I did specifically call out the Terminally Online Left. You know, the ones who really are just shitposting. Unfortunately, because leftists in general are small in number in the US, Terminally Online Leftists make up a big percentage of all American leftists. With as few people as are willing to openly identify as leftists, we have to be all in, or we’re not in at all. Do you know why anti-Israel protests in the US aren’t getting a lot of attention? Because people aren’t attending them in large numbers. Certainly not in as large numbers as, for example, the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, or the Vanilla ISIS parades of the last few years. Pro-Palestine/anti-Israel protesters aren’t shutting down city streets. They’re not commandeering freeways. Outside of New York, and maybe Chicago, they’re not holding sit-ins at state houses (they’re definitely not holding them in Montpelier; closest I know of is a glitter bomb being set off in the office above mine). Because way too many of the people who should be attending them are coming up with excuses not to: “We’re in the middle of another covid surge!” Wear a mask. “I can’t get N95s!” You don’t need an N95, just get the basic ones from Walgreens, or tie a handkerchief over your face. “I have social anxiety/autism and I can’t talk to people!” No one’s asking you to talk to anyone, just hold a fucking sign and/or march! I have fucking asthma and I’m barely five feet tall; if I can wear a basic-ass mask and stand in a crowd (where, because I’m small, I could get trampled if things go horrifically wrong) holding a sign, I don’t see why taller people with functional airways can’t. Maybe you could explain that to me, since I’m clearly a drooling moron.

Again, I have to give MAGAs credit: They hate each other, but they understand the common goal they’re working towards, so they set aside their petty differences and work together to achieve that goal. Leftists, online and off, hate each other and refuse to understand that they need to put aside their differences and work toward a larger goal. Because we can’t agree on what that larger goal even is.

Case in point: The first (and so far only) DSA meeting I attended was an hour of petty Mean Girls infighting about how a member of the group sent death threats to other members, and half agreed that they should have been kicked out, while the other half accused the half who kicked her out of sexual misconduct. Zero discussion of policy, canvassing, handing out fliers, or anything that implied this was a political meeting. That’s not taking action, and I am not impressed by it, nor do I particularly want to associate with those people. I’d literally rather work with an anti-Trump Republican than most leftists, at this point. The anti-Trump Republican might think I’m a dirty commie, but they’d be willing to work with me on keeping the Orange Shitgibbon out of the White House.

I vote Democrat because I want to push the party further left. If leftists in general really “understood the assignment”, they’d be doing the same thing. Instead, we’re being petty to each other online. Such wow. Much progressive.

Finally: Don’t think I don’t know what’s at stake, here. I am a queer, neurodivergent woman. I work for the federal government. I’m half-Jewish (which means Zionists hate me for not agreeing with them and Nazis/plenty of anti-Zionists hate me for existing) and I’m pro-Palestine. I am physically incapable of having children. I have been a leftist longer than Prosebox has been around. I write online, and it wouldn’t take a genius to trace all of it right back to me and zero in on my location.

And yes, the stakes are much higher for other people (trans people, for example, or Palestinian-Americans, or BIPOC in general). I don’t think that should be the case, and I am willing to do whatever it takes to ensure the safety and human rights of all people. If that means working with Democrats, then that’s what it means. If it means actually starting a revolution, I am very willing to do that and get my hands dirty. I know plenty of gun owners, and I can learn how to shoot.

But I can’t do this on my own; no one can. No man is an island.

If we, as leftists, can’t agree on what our goals are, put aside our differences, and work toward those larger goals, then, to quote the late, great Larry Kramer, when he was addressing these same kind of petty, splintering differences among AIDS activists, “Until we get our acts together, all of us, and until we learn to plug in with each other, and fight, and make this president listen, we are as good as dead.”

Last updated August 25, 2024