Hey Kossacks, I really need your help.
-- not with dKos Mojo, but with my mojo. My Political Will to Live.
I'm so discouraged lately! I haven't been commenting much these days, or even lurking much, because it all seems so depressing and pointless, and I feel so powerless to change anything in this f***ed up system.
I want to be energized. I want to be positive. I want to keep fighting, but I'm just so sick of it!
Yes, it's official -- I'm a WATB at the moment, and I need your help to snap out of it.
Let me outline my thought processes here.
- Wealthy people, and some borderline sociopathic people, control the government, and they cannot be reasoned with.
- These same people control so much of the message that they control the stupid and easily-manipulated people through slick marketing.
- The stupid people make up enough of the population that they keep electing the wealthy sociopathic people/wealthy sociopathic people's puppets to government.
- Lather, rinse, repeat.
How am I a WATB? Let me elaborate.
Right now, I just feel tired. I feel tired of talking to congressional staffers. I feel tired of sending emails. I feel tired of writing snail-mail letters and making the 3-block walk to the mailbox. I feel tired of talking to friends and family and being patient and non-confrontational and trying as best I can to plant seeds in their barren ground of ignorance. I feel tired of engaging in respectful debate of Facebook. I feel tired of sending money to losing campaigns, and to many winning campaigns. I feel tired of keeping on top of the news.
I feel tired of feeling so small and ineffectual. I feel tired of thinking that corruption is inevitable.
I feel tired of caring.
I feel envy in my heart for people I know who just want to save up enough for a bigger flat-screen so they can watch American Idol and Real Housewives and then talk about it a work, and who don't give a shit about anything else because they have good jobs with health insurance.
Mostly, I'm a WATB because I have a good job, and good health insurance, and a beautiful child and wife. We're a bit screwed because we're gay, but on a day-to-day basis, we have the means to pay the extra taxes and get the extra documents, and our families aren't going to be contesting any wills or anything. I want to stop caring about all this other shit like the fact that tens of thousands of people die every year because they don't have health insurance, and that bigots are getting more and more fired up, and that LGBT parents can have their kids taken away or lose their jobs for no reason other than other people's bigotry, and that my taxes (that I pay more of because I'm gay) pay for uber-wealthy people's "bonuses" for defrauding the world and wrecking the planet's economy, and that the earth is warming and it's 2009 and people are still debating whether this is happening (not to mention debating whether evolutionary theory is sound science despite overwhelming scientific evidence from all corners, as opposed to the "evidence" found in a 2000 year old book of mythology), and that children I work with are beaten at home and we don't have enough pencils at school.
Wouldn't it just be better to enjoy what I have and stop worrying about everything else?
I am one of the Depressed Base. (Not clinically, thankfully, just feeling down.)
I know that I have it so much better than so many, and that's traditionally why I do the things I do (there but for the grace of god, etc.). But right now I am a big old
WHINEY ASS TITTY BABY.
I've lost my mojo. Everything political seems pointless.
If there's one thing I know about this community, it's that when some are at their nadir, others are at their zenith. So if there are any zentithy characters among you, please push me back out there into the ring, or some other such fighting-like metaphor, or some other metaphor that's not so adversarial and more zen-like or whatever, because I can't get my head in the game.
What to do, Kossacks, what to do?