I love OCD wrote an interesting diary the other day about how the Republican 'good news', as flatulent as it is, is an easier sell than our harsh reality. I think there is a lot of truth to that.
STFU is their internal shriek. Don't tell me. Don't make me think about this.........
........let me believe that my company would never outsource my job, make me train the person who is taking that job to India, and then stiff me on retirement benefits that were entirely mine, no help from the company.
Do not tell me we're all going to die because we love our cars so much. Do not tell me my kids have mercury and arsenic and heavy metals in their bodies because Congress gutted the PCA. DO NOT TELL ME ANY MORE SCARY STORIES! I'm on the ragged edge because I already know my job could disappear tomorrow. I know I'm likely to end up working for $12 an hour. I know my neighbor's daughter died from e-coli in spinach. I know I'll never have employer provided health insurance again.
From a messaging point of view this is a matter worth pondering, just as pointed out by I love OCD. But as I read her piece I couldn't help but think of the denial that exists on our side of the philosophical divide. Not about global warming but about other perhaps similarly difficult to think about things, such as:
We are the most warlike nation on the planet.
We are the biggest arms dealers in the world.
We are dominated by an out-of-control Military Industrial Complex that sucks up all the oxygen and all the money. This is the primary reason that we don't have free post-secondary education or free universal health care.
We are lied to constantly by our government about important matters not involving national security.
Our political system is warped and twisted by Big Money corruption.
Our justice system is a bad joke on those who can't afford it.
Our politicians are either bought-and-paid-for or so heavily influenced by their need for massive cash donations that they cannot be trusted to do the right thing...ever.
Every kind of bigotry, ignorance and dumbassery is tolerated, compassion and progressive activism are not.
Lying the country into war, torturing helpless prisoners and robbing the common people blind are all tolerated – dissenters, whistle blowers or those exposing the lying assholes at the top are not.
The democratic party has become more and more like the republican party forcing the republicans to go batshit crazy in order to distinguish themselves.
We wax indignant about political prisoners and human rights violations in other parts of the world, too often ignoring the fact that we are in many ways no better than the Soviets of old or the Taliban – just ask Don Siegelman or Leonard Peltier. Bush walks, Don goes to federal prison for six an a half years – there's some cognitive fucking dissonance for you. And they've been torturing Leonard Peltier for decades. What Bradley Manning's torture lacks in quantity, by comparison, it makes up for in quality. People are being cruelly mistreated by an anti-humanitarian system that some of us still support. If you've not been radicalized, as we used to say in the 60s, you've not been paying attention.
44 years after the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago we are still sending in the storm troopers to beat our children in the street for daring to demand a better deal, a better life and a better world – and some of us stick up for the cops. Don't get me wrong, the real blame doesn't go to the cops - they are just tools of the establishment after all. They do what they are ordered to do. But to support them and those who command them in their organized brutality against righteous young protesters? That's irrational, uninformed and mean spirited. How can people be so thick, so gullible, so naïve, so ignorant of history, so easily exploitable? If you've not been radicalized, you've not been paying attention.
Vulture capitalists have free rein to prey on the little people and exploit their weakness and misery, but if you're poor and you step out of line, a man comes to take you away. Steal a few billion or start a bogus war, no problem. Get caught stealing a car or a loaf of bread and see what happens to you.
The rich and underhanded are allowed to amass unimaginable fortunes and avoid proper taxation, while our national infrastructure and the commons are left to rot, even as they slice and dice the social safety net the rest of us rely upon.
Politicians scream 'austerity' as they threaten medicare, social security, Pell grants and everything else that helps make life bearable for those of modest means as they jack up the cost of education to unreachable heights and then unleash the predatory lenders on aspiring college students. And then they pass a law saying school loans cannot be discharged in a bankruptcy. This is slavery all dressed up for church.
Some of us are confused about who to trust, the authorities or those who expose their wicked machinations, the cops or the protesters, the silver-tongued politicians lying their asses off to us or those brave souls who dare to tell us the truth about these assholes. Should we support the whistle blowers or those who prosecute and persecute them? We have entered a world eerily like Orwell's 1984 and still some otherwise intelligent people cling to Big Brother.
Some who one might expect to be dissidents or protesters or at least not mindless-supporters-of-the-status-quo insist on trusting the authorities, the very same ones who brought us innumerable bogus wars, a hateful, oppressive surveillance state, the Drug War, secret renditions, prisons for profit, the Constitution-crippling Patriot Act, Wall Street thieves who operate with impunity, torturers in Lear jets, millionaire war profiteers, extra-judicial executions of American citizens, the Citizens United corporate coup, predator drones in the skies and mercenary armies as official American policy and who are pissing away our national treasure on profoundly evil enterprises, the sole purpose of which is to make the filthy rich even richer and even filthier – all while ignoring anything to do with human rights, the poor, actual honest-to-god justice, the finite and immutable limits to growth or catastrophic climate insanity.
We can point the finger at republicans with complete justification, but it hasn't just been them. They've been enabled and willingly so by democrats and others who are compromised by all the Big Money. It's really not about parties. It's about the powers that be. It's about the 1%. They own our government and both political parties – they just allow us to play around in them as a fine way of bleeding off the enormous energy of our righteous indignation. Our political system contains us and empowers them. It is a perfect system for the 1%. That is the problem.
Denial, theirs or ours, helps no one. Thank you very much.