I don't know if anyone is actually reading this or not, but I want to get a few things off my chest.
It's certainly been a long year, but people talk as if 2020 came out of nowhere. It didn't. I'm not talking about Covid 19, or the economy crashing, or the climate (though they're all connected). Even our Fearless Leader is a symptom rather than a cause. I'm talking about the sheer ugliness of 38±5% of my fellow citizens.
The ugliness in question is the dividing of the world into "us" and "them." People have always done this - we're hard-wired to divide the world into an in-group and an out-group. But if you're a good person, you can often work past that and usually you can succeed. The right-wing in the doesn't want to work past it and is for the most part proud of their hatred.
I know in writing this I'm dividing the world into "us" and "them." Yes yes, you're very smart, shut up. Here's the difference: I don't want them brought down. I don't want them cast out. I want them lifted up. Many have written and talked about poorer whites in the US voting "against their economic interest," and they do have legit complaints about the hand life has dealt them. They're just attributing the responsibility in the wrong place.
It's easy enough to look back at our parents' and grandparents' times and think "things were better then, let's be like it was then" which leads to "make America great again." But here's the thing. The prosperity that the Boomers think of as "natural" and the way it should be isn't, really. American postwar prosperity came about primarily because we were the only major industrial nation that wasn't in ruins, and we need to remember that. The conditions just aren't the same.
People also need to remember that a significant portion of white Americans' prosperity in the era came at the direct expense of Black Americans'. It's easy to have a maid if you can pay her next to nothing. Tax dollars go farther if garbage men and road crews get paid next to nothing. Textiles are cheaper if the cotton is grown by sharecroppers barely able to survive.
And another feature of the "us and them" thing that evolution hard-wired into us: part of how we judge our own prosperity is who we can look down on. As Lyndon Johnson said, if you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he'll empty his pockets for you.
So the blame for struggles lands on uppity Black people (the Civil Rights movement roughly overlapped with the end of white postwar posterity), and immigrants, and others. And in more recent years it's expanded to include "the libs" in general. And they managed to elect a president whose appeal is that he says out loud all the ugly things that used to be whispered. He tells them their beliefs are valid and right.
So that brings us to the present. When a duly elected president is considered illegitimate because of the color of his skin. When a large swath of the country would prefer dragging everyone down rather than risk the "undeserving" getting helped. (Seriously, look at the stats for food stamp fraud, and balance that against children going hungry.)
It has infected everything. We can't effectively fight a freaking pandemic virus because the right made it into an us versus them thing, and you can never acknowledge the "they" are right about anything. We can't deal with the climate. We can't fight injustice. We are absolutely paralyzed as a nation because a little more than a third of us feel that winning over the other side is more important than anything, and if they can't win, the next best thing is making sure the other side doesn't either.
That's a major part of what pisses me off so badly. What happens if the left wins? The people fighting against them get health care, their kids go to college, and the air gets cleaned up. Oh, the horror.
If you're offended by this, I honestly don't care. I'm pretty sure you're part of the problem. My audience here is my fellow people who feel the same kind of helpless rage I do.
Fight. It only takes one side to make a fight, and we're in one. Don't let casual bigotry slide to keep it polite. Our Fearless Leader has shown very clearly who he is; anyone who supports him supports him BECAUSE of who and what he is, not in spite of it.
Argue. Be pissed off. No matter what, Fearless Leader's brownshirts are going to be committing violence in the run up to, during, and after the election. Be ready for it. Stand with each other.
I'm not a great battlefield orator, so this is just going to kind of peter out. I'm tired. I'm so fucking tired.
Make America sane again.
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