Originally shared by William Black (not my own content)
On this dark morning it's hard to find a bright note. The best of us, those who see further, and look deeper at the underlying causes, we have not carried the day, always outnumbered by brutalist voices, our work is to the longer term struggle, to build a better tomorrow.
Over the past year I have spoken out, here and there, admittedly, often ineffectually, reason is seldom heard. Just about a year ago I encountered an individual promoting a book that was aimed to essentially murder the notion that humanity could build a better society, unless, of course it was a society that adopted his favored ideology, and what ended the dialogue was his sentiment that: It is necessary to preserve all the hatred and outrage, to strengthen our cause, and punish the perpetrators.
Which is precisely the underlying sentiment that ushered a monster into the White House.
The brutalist voices are everywhere, on the Right and on the Left, and all of them have played a role in summoning the demon.
Everyone wants to cast the enemy as a homogeneous group of identifiable perpetrators, despite the evidence no such thing exists. Societies are nothing other than aggregate of individuals, not all good, not all bad, merely human.
Only the brutalists believe in a single, simple, solution.
In the realm of political activism, at both extremes of political ideology, and across the entire spectrum of American politics, the loudest voices are the most guilty of this, and with their words, and their deeds, they have been summoning the demon.
There are no simple solutions, there is only the process of working the problem. Sometimes we fail. And learning from our failures we move forward. In that sense today is no different from any other day.
Here's to hope, for a better day, and a brighter future.
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/mars/videos/novo-mundo/
If only mankind learned anything from failure, we might be evolving as fast as our technology. But we don't, you see. And it's pointless, getting worked up about it. Did some work with a guy who was measuring rates of change in DNA: seems some parts of it evolve at faster rates than other parts. Some parts don't seem to have changed in millions of years.
ReplyDeletePolitics is never about ideology. It's about psychology. Get that straight and lots more in the world will start making sense.
Mankind thinks he's so bloody clever because he now has cellphones in his pocket and can build telescope mirrors eight metres across with all those clever actuators and superchilled CCD cameras to pick off photons. Well he's not. Mankind's a vicious little hominid whose greatest skill is making excuses for his horrible behaviour to his fellow hominids. Busily eating some of them, too. That's mankind. Always was. Don't be fooled.
People say I'm a fool for believing in God - if ever the rest of the intellectuals of my acquaintance ever needed proof of why mankind just might need enlightenment and redemption from himself, let yesterday's fracas stand in mute and exquisite evidence, of mankind's hubris and of his powers of self-justification. And I don't see any enlightenment in the near term future for any of us. Newsflash: none is in the forecast.
And this little brute will not be content, fucking up the world, until he has to wear a spacesuit to go to work in the morning. That space station overhead? That's not a stepping stone to the stars. That is preparation for life on a ruined planet, life in a beer can, of hard radiation and drinking our own distilled piss.
I'm hoping that the Republicans and Democrats do a serious postmortem here. They can't just blame xenophobia and misogyny on this one. Not that they don't play a big roll, but it's the two parties that created the environment that allowed it to dominate the political landscape.
ReplyDeleteIt would be easier to forgive if it hasn't happened so many times before. The lesson for all of us is no country is immune. When your populations becomes disenfranchised while seeing a standard of living they once took for granted erode around them, deal with it.
Trump will be an unmitigated disaster. All we can hope for is that he's too much the buffoon, and the system of checks and balances robust enough, to not allow him to do what he says he wants to.
What I also hope for is that our American friends stop supporting their political parties in the same way they support their sports teams. You don't have to live and die with your party, and the opposition is not the enemy intent on destroying everything you stand for. I'm thinking in particular of their idiot congress and state legislatures with so many politicians on both sides so obviously on the take from special interest groups. Vote the bums out!
I am going to be depressed for the next 4 years.
ReplyDelete