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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTariq Ali: Trapped in a System Where Nothing Changes, We Can’t Breathe
We live in a post-racial society, Obama enthused, referring to his own victory, soon after entering the White House. It sounded hollow at the time, though many wanted to believe it. Nobody does today. Not even Toni Morrison. But the response of tens of thousands of young US citizens to the recent outrages in Ferguson, Cleveland and New York is much more important and interesting than the vapours being emitted in DC.
There is a vital energy to these protests. The scale, speed and intelligence of the protesters took the country by surprise. In New York they emerged unannounced at different locations avoiding the pitched battle scenario in Berkeley, created by the Bay Area cops whose penchant for rioting at the first possible opportunity is well known. Two miles outside Ferguson, white supremacists torched a black church while cops maintained order in the city. There is police-state talk of making the use of phone cameras illegal in these situations. In other words, mass arrests.
In Chicago, medicine and law students came out and lay down on the ground. Its hardly a secret that they tend to be among the more conservative students on campus, eclipsed only by the engineering faculty and lavishly funded business studies departments. Their solidarity with the victims of state brutality against African-Americans is an impressive sight. Might it be more than a one-off?
Radical politics in the US was badly derailed by the destroyed hopes and betrayed illusions of the early Obama years (not a few of those who occupied squares in the 99 per cent movement voted to give him a second term, despite the wars and drones and a refusal to hold Bush, Cheney and gang responsible for manufactured lies and torture). Has the worm finally turned or will we see a similar outpouring of joy for Hillary Clinton, led this time by deluded feminists? If a mixed-race president could not move towards a post-racial society, what chance is there of another warmongering Clinton (with dodgy positions on almost everything including abortion rights) paving the way towards post-patriarchy? We need a break and perhaps this generation will provide one. Perhaps.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/12/we-cant-breathe/
Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)The facts are that the far right Republicans really are worse than the center right Democrats. We have two bad option, but one really is worse than the other. That doesn't mean we should stop protesting, stop organizing from the left, we can reluctantly vote for Her Inevitableness and be out in the streets.
Katashi_itto
(10,175 posts)bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)Maybe there was a time when your prescription made sense. But not now. By virtually every measure I can think of we are worse off - or no better off - than we were forty years ago. The environment? Worse - far, far, incredibly frighteningly worse. Civil liberties? Worse. There's no longer even a pretense. War? As bad - it's just slow, endless, and more disguised. How many vets is it committing suicide every year? Racism? Hard one to gauge if worse .... it was horrible then too - but as least as bad if not worse. Inequality? Far worse (except for people of color, for which it is not much different, I think - it was always bad).
That's where "the lesser of two evils" has taken us.
With Obama, we thought we had a chance at real change. A real beginning. We all know how that went. As Ali mentioned in the cited article:
Radical politics in the US was badly derailed by the destroyed hopes and betrayed illusions of the early Obama years
(I would just note that I don't think we had any "radical" politics - the politics which Obama promised us were just old-fashioned "liberal" politics, nothing that coming from a Democrat would have startled, say, a Nixon. Though after the BFEE years they probably seemed radical)
Over at the LRB blog on this article http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/12/11/tariq-ali/we-cant-breathe/ , a NYer makes a comment similar to yours, and when disputed says:
we take what we can get, for now. Gradualism and concessions to political reality are not something I would guess you understand
Well, I understand "Gradualism and concessions to political reality" just fine. I understand that our occasional incremental and isolated "victories" are a sop and a diversion - a delusion, really. Just like those fake environmental orgs "partnering" with the Corps to "save" an acre here or there or build a "green" corporate park so we can "love our Subarus" while we spiral toward ecocide. It's meaningless.
No. "Gradualism and concessions to political reality" are no longer even slowing down our death spiral.