Over the last few years, and in particular in the last couple, I’ve noticed something about myself: I’ve become a lot more rude in my political dealings, including with many people I used to consider allies. At first this worried me a bit, because I couldn’t quite pin down why, beyond the fact that I was angry.
Now I’m not someone who believes anger is always a bad thing. I think certain things should make you angry, and if they don’t, something’s wrong with you. When people are dying, being raped, being tortured, being denied basic rights, being beaten and so on, you should get angry. You should use that anger as a weapon and as fuel for the fight.
Still, anger isn’t a strategy, or even a tactic, and one has to be careful, because anger can blind you and turn you against those who should be your allies.
And that’s the crux. Allies.
What I’ve come to realize lately is that I’m not on the same side as a lot of people. If you’re for the Afghan war, aka. for eternal war, I’m not on your side. If you believe in indefinite detention or the President’s right to assassinate whoever he wants, I’m not on your side. If you believe that Wikileaks is evil and that citizens should be kept in the dark as to what their governments are doing, then I’m not on your side.
Through the Bush years opposition to Bush made a lot of people seem like friends, who weren’t. Sure, we all hated Bush (yes, hated. I hate people who torture and engage in aggressive war, and I think that’s the appropriate response), but that hatred, that opposition, concealed the fact that a lot of people didn’t really object to what Bush was doing, they just objected to the fact that it was being done by a Republican, or that it was being done incompetently. They would have been ok with the same policies if they’d worked out, as with all the “liberals” and “progressives” who were pro-Iraq war until it turned into a clusterfuck.
The Wikileas imbroglio was a real turning point for me. At least half the “progressives” I know revealed themselves as, simply, supporters of authoritarianism; revealed themselves as mushrooms who wanted daddy to keep them in the dark and feed them shit. Revealed themselves as fools who didn’t either understand or, worse, believe that government exists to serve its citizens, who have a right to know what it’s doing in their name.
But while the watershed, it was merely the latest in a string of horrible behavior from the “left”. Whether it was teacher’s unions stealing food stamp money to pay for their raises, unions selling out their own members to support Barack Obama’s health care bill, which was bad for most union members or whether it was the progressive caucus promising to vote against any HCR bill without the public option, then folding like wet cardboard, it was clear that there was no spine and no solidarity on the left. Every little interest group was always willing to sell out everyone else, sometimes for their own interests, but often not even for that: the leadership of organizations was so corrupt that they would sell out their own members interests so they could feel like members of the DC Village.
I have no time for these people. I have no politeness or kindness for them. They are traitors and in many cases cowards, and their actions or lack of actions are, objectively, killing or impoverishing people, both in America or abroad.
So screw politeness, and screw reasonableness. Reasonableness in the current political environment means “willing to sell out the people whose interests she or he is supposed to care about.”
So count me out. I’m not interested in being reasonable, if reasonable means “a spineless sell out”. I’m not interested in being pragmatic, if pragmatic means “understands that nothing can actually be done to fix any problem”, and I’m not interested in being polite to people who make their living by destroying lives or apologizing for those who destroy lives.
America is going down, and the world is spiraling into an age of war because everyone wants to be “reasonable” rather than do the right thing for their own people. Everyone who matters wants to pander to the rich, rather than care for the masses. And as for the masses, they have treated politics as a spectator sport, allowed themselves to be lied to and made fools of, and have and will continue to reap the bitter harvest.
You not only have only the rights you are willing to fight for, you have only the economic livelihood you are willing to fight for. Americans, being unwilling to fight for either, will soon have neither.
And I have nothing but contempt for those who have led them to this impasse, and with them, much of the world.