Today Was Hard, All the Tomorrows are Harder
Well, if all the Senators get to give coup day speeches, why can’t I?
We are not each other’s enemies. We have legitimate grievances and pain, for sure. But a simple lie is always easier to sell than a complex truth. The underlying problems we all feel don’t stem fundamentally from Proud Boys vs Progressives or an auto worker in Tennessee vs a writer in New York. As one of my math professors used to say, “These are not different things, they are the same thing in a different dress!” We have all been disadvantaged by the political and economic elite, then they convinced us we did it to each other. Apologies to Occupy for not getting onside a decade sooner.
They’ve convinced us that they didn’t make you a “freelance” worker, earning less than minimum wage with no health insurance, because they systematically removed worker protections in an economy they don’t even understand based on well placed industry lobbyist recommendations, it’s because an immigrant “took your job.” They convinced us it wasn’t that they were unwilling or unable to do the work necessary to help mitigate a once in a century health and economic disaster, it’s that we should all exercise our freedom to walk maskless into a grocery store and possibly infect a brown woman who has no choice but to keep coming to work as a cashier.
Since WWII, we’ve been told that it’s our due as Americans to do better than our parents, to have unlimited hope and opportunity. The fact that reality falls far short for complex and often hard to confront reasons is what leads a white man from Oregon to join a militia and a black boy from Queens to join a gang. The intrusive “policing” that disrupts and destroys urban communities comes from the same place as those who drive ranchers off public lands so they can sell it to private pipelines.
And I don’t want to diminish the racial element here. It’s certainly undeniable and has been used skillfully and effectively. I don’t doubt that there is a deep wellspring of racial suspicion, ignorance and hatred among Americans (and people in general, unfortunately it’s a paleo brain trait). And that well of fear and distrust has been plumbed over and over, cementing these ideas in our very institutions. But the reality is that we’ll all continue to be ground underfoot whether we have a white supremacist dictatorship or the first mixed race woman as Vice President. The problem isn’t that one underserved group is causing pain to another. The problem is that we’ve all played into and been played by a system that allows a very, very few people to accrue a great deal of power and they will do anything to keep it. This is only about Trump and the 2020 election in that he is a master showman and manipulator who has played those cards to the greatest advantage. Very little will be different for any of us on January 21.
Part of me thinks it’s time to start from scratch, after all France has had 3 different Republics this century. But I’m still a sucker for The American Experiment, so I think it’s time we all faced up to our responsibility as citizens and make the system live up to its stated ideal. Find a party you actually agree with — Free Staters, Libertarians, Working Families, Socialists, whatever — volunteer, learn about candidates, run yourself!
And press for term limits on Congress! Imagine how much better your life would be if your fate wasn’t in the hands of two 80 year olds fighting a turf war for power instead of looking after the needs of the citizens they supposedly represent! Imagine if Congress was truly “of the people” and comprised of waitresses and doctors and iron workers because they couldn’t make it their career to just sit there for 30 years and become a modern day Aristocrat! Imagine if, when your plant closed down, those in power didn’t say “learn to code!” but actually tried to find solutions because they truly understood your predicament!
I know I’m very guilty of being lazy with my Democracy — I took it for granted, thought it would always be there, working in my best interest while I did the day to day of earning a living and trying to live the American Dream. But between the BLM protests this summer and today’s mob attack on the Capitol, I can see it’s past fraying at the seams. But I still don’t think it’s hopeless and I don’t think it’s too late to realize that all of us with our feet on the ground and hands in the air are not each other’s enemies, we’ve just been fooled into thinking we are. We’ve been duped into being the foot soldiers of robber Barons and wannabe Kings, whose cause is not ours. Our cause is the same, and if we finally saw that truth, we’d be pretty hard to keep down.
