Letter to America

Please don't end the world, America. It's "competent politician" (yes, with all the usual corruption and self-serving agendas that implies) versus a latter-day Nero, only more orange and with nuclear weapons.


Originally shared by Edward Morbius (everything that follows is not mine !)

A brief note to my American friends

1. Please don't fuck this up.

You've got the choice at the top of your ballot for a highly competent and exceptionally tested leader, and a nightmare from a dystopian fantasy late-night B-movie. Clinton is very clearly the only possibly sane choice, and if your vote is in a state in which the outcome is even possibly in doubt, do whatever it takes to vote for her. No abstaining, no third parties.

Leaning Clinton now are New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Virgina. Keep them blue.

Leaning Trump now are Nevada, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, North Carolina, and Arizona. Possibly in play: Texas. Turn them blue.


2. Down-ballot matters. A whole fucking lot.

Much of the current state of American politics has come about through an exceptionally skillful manipulation of both Congressional and statehouse politics. Things have reached a point where I find zero justification for a Republican vote on any race, no matter how small. The GOP is a cancer. It must be stopped.


3. I'm preaching to the choir.

Mostly. I'm aware of that. I've spent the past few days wondering what I could possibly say to turn the mind of someone who doesn't agree with me, or perhaps is even sitting on the fence. I've come up with little.

Part of that is directly related to a massive problem, not only of this election, but of American political and media discourse of the past two, or three, or five, decades: we're living in a post-fact age.

This ends badly.

The best I've got are:

a) Ask yourself, what would it take to change my mind. And reflect on whether or not, in the light of changing your mind the evidence supports that.

b) Step back, look at yourself and the general situation, and ask yourself if you could really live with voting for either Trump, and all the foulness and stench he is, and the party and movement which have created him.

c) Yes, shit's fucked up, yo. But I have a hell of a time seeing how fucking it up yet further gets us anywhere better. We've seen this movie and it ends poorly. Italy and Germany in the 1930s. Ireland in the 1970s. Much of the Middle East and North Africa in the past decade.


4. Shit's Fucked Up, Yo.

I stand with the Black Lives Matter movement, against the systematic and endemic racism, oppression, violence, and denial of opportunity that's the legacy of 300+ years of an extremely ugly history. The US has made several attemtps to change this -- in 1784 as the Constitution was being hammered out, in 1861 as the nation was literally torn in two, in the post-Civil War reconstruction era, in the 1950s and 1960s with the civil rights movement. That effort is nowhere near finished.

I also stand with the white working class high-school educated man who's finding that the dream he'd been sold was smoke and mirrors, a mythology, a big white lie (in more ways than one). And who is seething in rage watching both what he'd dreamed for and what he'd actually managed to accomplish slip from his grasp. That pain is very real.

The leap, though, is to realise that those are both the same fight and battle, and that their enemy is the same: a game of systemic oppression and deprivation which works against all but a few, and turns the losers against one another. This is why though I am for the rights of blacks and browns and yellows and gays and muslims and hindus and jews and athiests, I am not about them. That is: the goal is to raise up all, especially the least among us as the great socialist philosopher Adam Smith wrote, but not divide ourselves in the process.

Let's work together.

The real problems run deep. Some are complicated. Some are distressingly simple, but not easy. Wishful thinking won't solve these problems or make them disappear. All of us have some very unpleasent truths we're going to have to face.


5. This is bigger than the United States of America.

The United States is the biggest, most powerful, most dangerous, and most promising empire the world has ever seen. Its influence extends vastly beyond its own borders. Its neighbours, Mexico and Canada, will be profoundly affected by what happens this week, as will distant parts of the world: the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, India, Iran, Pakistan, China, Africa. Whether or not we have a future at all, thanks to the endogenous human threats of global climate change, pandemics, financial collapse, nuclear war, overpopulation, hunger, and more. Clinton is well aware of these threats, and I suspect hopes to resolve them to maximum benefit. Trump denies them publicly, though if he does actually believe in them, seeks a resolution that benefits principally himself.


6. Media are a huge part of the problem.

Several authors have declared losers of this election. Email. America's respect in the world. Bigger than any of these is the fourth estate, the essential nervous system of a democracy: its media. As with other countries (notably the UK, or what's left of it, and Australia), a mix of deliberate deception and manipulation, a systemic rot, a shattering economic foundation, the cancer of advertising and a crass commercial "marketplace of ideas" philosophy, and yes, the outrage-and-eyeballs dynamic fed by Google, Facebook, and online media, the capacity for the US to be sufficiently, accurately, and meaningfully informed has been lost. Much of the current political state devolves directly from this.


8. The election isn't the end of the fight but the beginning.

No, my preferred candidate isn't in the running. The ideals of that candidate still are, and can and will continue to be championed. Hillary Clinton's most compelling qualification is that she is a consumate political creature with decades of experience in many of the most challenging fights. As such, the real pressure is on you, as Americans, to hold her feet to the fire, and to apply those talents to the change that will help turn this ship around, raise up the oppressed and the abandoned, and just maybe thread through the multiple perils between the present and a hopeful future.

I've been asking for several years, "What are the Big Problems?" You might want to consider that question, and what the points of influence on those problems are for effecting a positive outcome.


So get off your damned ass, vote, and do everything you can to help those who think likewise to do so as well.