where we are now, Dec 2016 in life stuff and misc.

In the end, conservatism, fascism, libertarian-ism, all the right wing ways of thinking don’t even really count as ideologies. They are cancerous cynicism at best, Stockholm Syndrome cowardice at worst. They say “don’t change anything”. They believe you can’t really change anything, that it’s best to just appease the born-rich and the con-men, the generals and the priests, the big-business monopolists and the cultural oligarchs. They tell you to retreat into cut-off rural spaces where you never have to be challenged with processing the differences of your fellow man. They tell you that you can only protect your own, hunker down in that farmhouse with your rations and your guns.

At best, if “God loves you”, if you “work real hard”, you can succeed on your own and then you must horde that wealth for yourself, your family and your nearest lackeys only, fuck everyone else because caring about anything other than your core tribe “can’t work”. Horatio Alger might make you rich, Jesus might make you rich, otherwise let the people who were already “blessed” with wealth make all the big decisions. God made them rich, they say, so they must know what they’re doing better than you.

And time and time and time again, progressives have proven them wrong. That with slow burn wide-spread cooperation, people can have public education. Women and minorities can have all the rights only the “God-given hard working white male landowners” once had. That we can have national health. That we can protect our working classes with unions and a strong government that punishes businesses that would put profits over human dignity. That we don’t need to be armed to the teeth if we live in a culture that says “no, that’s fucked up, if we deter that, people will release that you only need to be armed in a culture that says that’s so”.

We have lost, from time to time, but only when we’ve gotten complacent or distracted enough for the old powers… and the ignorant suffering their Stockholm Syndrome worship of the old powers, believing that to be the only way they have a chance to prosper… to cheat and take back some of our gains. The left has its own problems, of course. We fall into purity firing circles sometimes, attacking those doing good in the system for being a part of the system no matter how much good they accomplish, attacking those doing good outside the system for making us look “bad” no matter how much good they accomplish.

We on the left, liberals, progressives, socialists, mixed-marketers and so on, we get picky. We get messianic and hero-worshippy. We want leaders ideologically and personally perfect sometimes, we’ll rebel against those who know how to work within the system sometimes because we don’t like how that work sometimes looks “icky”.

We want leaders personally pure when the personally pure do not exist, especially amongs those of us who have that little bit of mental sickness that causes one to want to be a public figure. People who want to be famous or who even will accept all the bullshit and complication in their life of fame to do good with it, we’re all just a little bit sick in some way.

But most of all, we get impatient and spoiled for change, on the left. 300 million people are a lot to govern and have so many social, ethnic, religious and economic forces struggling inside them that to make change without a backlash or a coup or an uprising takes a lot of vectoring, a lot of wheeling and dealing, a good heap of gradualism to get that progress installed without quickly falling apart.

We on the left suck at admitting how complex a large society is and how sometimes even the most detestable things need to be phased out with a light touch and in increments to make them suppressed for good or, at least, for generations. We see injustice done and we want it gone NOW. Our desire to see compassion and mercy and justice done makes us trip over our own good intentions. And that’s when the bastards snap.

Two-bit cowboy actors, shitty game show hosts, failed Austrian painters and failed baseball team owners who know how to manipulate the media of the time are propped up by the old powers to take progress back, that their profits and powers might return. A culture’s slow ability to figure out what is real, what’s fake and what’s for sale in a new medium is leveraged when we on the left are splintered by our righteous lack of patience.

For Hitler, the rise of radio and talking films, for Reagan cable television, for Bush, the 24 hour news cycle on radio and television, for Trump, social media. The people tugging at their strings use this two pronged opportunity… a blurring of truth by a lack of mass media savvy and a left split between those who have learned the hard patience of history and those who do not… who only see injustice and jump for a messiah promising them everything without knowing how to enact it.

And the forces of rank cynicism and worshipful cowardliness don’t even win then. They don’t. They never have, they never will, but they lose by a small enough margin where they can cheat in the cloud of dust kicked up at the end of the complicated process of democracy. They burn the Reichstag, they tamper with election results, they collude with foreign powers to leak decontextualized espionage and they get just enough to pretend that they won.

The cowards in the press roll over, of course, because the owners of their outlets are rich people who even if they are well-intentioned will abide to any status quo to stay stably rich.

So here we are now. The old powers held up a shitty television star, focused his message through fake news that a certain part of the masses couldn’t understand was fake because they didn’t understand the medium yet, got useful idiot impatient idealists on the far left to leak stolen documents for them because it reinforced their “we need a messiah who promises everything now, not a competent woman who would enact steady progress!” battle cry, suppressed the minority vote in the South… and still lost by three million votes… but in the dust at the end, claimed victory anyway and the cowards who feared being slightly less rich if they stood up against it and lost, decided not to fight for the truth.

This is it. This is where we are now.

We can get our progress back but not just through voting now. Our impatient sisters and brothers fucked us, the old powers and their lies fucked us, the cowards in the media fucked us. We can no longer just fix this through votes. We have to march into the streets, now. We must actively scream against the hate and the regression in our every day lives now. When they stole the election, they stole the ability to fight back in ways that were normal and easy.

But we can overcome. We can learn the lessons of the near-past and realize that nothing comes fast or easy, certainly not now that they’re re-rigging the system as you read this. We can learn that we need to educate those in Stockholm Syndrome to our side and, yes, educate those still in Messianic Quick Change denial back to our sides.

We will lose jobs, we will lose businesses, a lot of us will be jailed, some of us will be shot in the streets like animals but, then, the bastards were doing that to the underclasses all along, some of us just through that we could look away. We will over come, we will over come, we will over come someday.

And we will say, no. This is not the president. There is a real president and I am with her.

We will overcome… someday.

Last updated December 20, 2016