I simply refuse to be taken in by all this back and forth, all
this bickering about issues ranging from healthcare to tax
shelters for the rich, right up to and including the budget
proposals to cut medicare, medicaid, and social security. It's
not for real; it is a phony diversion. These are not stupid
people. Immoral, greedy, egotistical, liars, perhaps, but not
stupid. All involved know what is at stake here, and I am not
at all convinced that it is racism, anti-liberalism, elitism,
conservatism, or left or right wingism that is fueling these
ongoing battles. These are, after all, phony separations we
use to alienate ourselves from one another because we don't
like ourselves all that much. No, these isms appear to be
tools that are being used to distract us, to keep us from
seeing what is going on beneath the fiction published in the
newspapers, or shown on TV news shows. I think the
corporations are taking the money and running. I think they
have a plan and all this posturing being done by both
democrats and republicans is designed to condition us to
accept a much lower standard of living. We are not going to
convince them to stop, not with the vote alone. I mean, by no
stretch of the imagination can Obama be called a liberal. Any
more than we can call the Republican's claim to
"care" about the "deficit" authentic or
patriotic. The capitalists have simply removed their masks
because now they have helped to create a massive pool of low
paid workers overseas and they can snub their noses at us.
Old forms of racism and classism are again rising to the
surface and are being allowed to influence policy making. We
must consider that no president or boss ever came to the aid
of workers or any struggling groups unless their goal was to
keep the country from moving so far left that it wasn't
capitalist anymore. They never wanted to give us the
concessions we won, too often with our lives. Looking back,
it appears to have been a mere tactical retreat until the
"need to belong," so rampant in all of us, was
soothed; and this was evidenced by how much we bought into the
McCarthy era, anti-communist scare and lined up on the side of
the people that had been starving, cheating, even killing us
only a couple of decades before.
We keep blaming the two parties, the Tea Party, and everyone
else except ourselves. All "using" is a two-way
street. If they used us to fill their coffers, what were we
using them for? I submit that we were desperate for them to
allow us the opportunity to become one of them even though we
knew what they were capable of. We mistake the force they
wield for real power and we covet it, try to become a part of
it, hoping that it will rub off on us and we won't have to be
afraid anymore. Had we (labor, civil rights, etc.) not been so
anxious to "fit in" with a system that had no
problem starving and killing Native Americans, Blacks, and
White workers and poor people, and doing so with the go ahead
from the highest court in the land, perhaps this would not be
happening to us now. We live in a country, a world, where
people have to be hypervigilent just to stay alive. We have
to fight with these people for everything from clean air,
water, and safe nuclear reactors (if there was ever any such
thing), to decent food, jobs, and healthcare. What does that
say about them? About us? Why is this death camp environment
acceptable to us? Why are we still champing at the bit to
become and/or remain a part of such a rat race
political-economic model? What kind of society allows or can
accept that one must vote, demonstrate, sit-in, boycott,
rally, be investigated, do jail time, or even be killed,
simply to keep someone else from killing them off? Kill them
off with low wages, processed food, no universal health care,
the outsourcing of jobs, the flight of whole companies
overseas, racist drug policies, privatized penitentiaries
whose main job is to make a profit by filling the jails with
inmates readily available for labor exploitation and
scientific experimentation; or with bad air, water, and the
list just goes on and on.
We act, all of us, like a collective battered woman. If we
knew of a battered wife being abused and beaten by her
husband, the way we are being beaten and abused by the
capitalists we would urge her, strongly, to leave. We would
whisper among ourselves our total amazement at the fact that
she won't leave; that she would rather stay even though we
know that her husband is probably going to kill her
eventually. Yet, we try and try to manipulate our own
conditions, just like the battered woman, so we can stay. She
tells herself that he will change. We tell ourselves that
capitalism can change; that the violence against us and others
that it perpetrates and perpetuates is something that can be
negotiated, even though all evidence has been to the contrary,
and capitalist disasters increase in depth and frequency, as
they have always done. We treat the brief periods of
prosperity like the rule rather than the exception, just as
the battered wife treats the gifts and affection she receives
following her increasingly severe beatings as the rule rather
than the exception. We even admire the capitalists, and many,
many of us wish to follow in their footsteps--even though they
are killing us with every policy they enact. We make no move
to take a long hard look at our own dependence on the
down-side of capitalism, and how our codependence sets us up
to fail; and, we can always blame the capitalists, democrats,
or republicans for whatevver happens. Without them we would
have to become responsible for actually developing our own
resources and creating new life models. We would be the
experts, not the politicians, the capitalists, nor the
"smart" people. We need to begin to question our
own values and what it is we believe in, and to honestly begin
to accept the probability that capitalism is too weak, too
dependent on despair and inequality to ever bring about the
kind of world that is so necessary to the health and
well-being of us, our planet, and the surrounding atmosphere.
I believe we are, like the batterer and the battered, in
terrible pain, and so we hurt each other over and over again
as we spin round and around on this merry-go-round of denial
and delusion which has convinced us we are powerless to change
ourselves enough to precipitate a real change in our world.
Our relationships with ourselves and others reflect this, so
how could our governing bodies not be that way as well. They
are not separate from this phenomena; in fact the government
is the culmination of our codependence on pain and the
artificial remedies for it; two of which are "being
accepted and celebrated," and the accumulation of wealth
as a "proof" of our worthiness. The way in which we
treat oursslves and each other is the only barometer to
measure who we are; not wealth, SAT scores, positon, class, or
money. These are delusions that keep us blind to ourselves.
There are as many obssessive-compulsive behaviors, addictions,
and OCD's as their are people. In fact, more. So is the
reason for the condition we find ourselves in just the
"fault" of the capitalists? Or do we enable their
self-abnegation with our own?
I do not hate the capitalists. How can I? How can we? For
they and we are far too similar to honestly hate one another.
We all opt for the elitism and self-hatred (believe me they
are the same thing) that capitalism nurtures and perpetuates.
But, like the batterer, the capitalists are killing us, and,
like the batterer, when there is nothing else to buy, or to
take that will numb their pain, they will kill themselves, or
force us to do it, for they are perhaps even more self-hating
than we are. Why would you destroy the world you have to live
in? Why would you set yourself up for some kind of violent
reaction from the people you are hurting? This doesn't sound
like mere greed, but something much worse, much harder to
discern, and even harder to overcome. We have to decide if we
are going to enable them just because we don't want to take
our lives in our own hands and at least refuse to cooperate
with the enforcement of policies that are tantamount to Nazi
Death Squads in their outcomes, both actual and perceived. If
we continue to do this then we will just make them weaker and
they, in the long run, will not thank us for this. Nor, should
they. The time passed for negotiation after the Civil Rights
Movements and other Grassroots movements of the 70's. We can
no longer opt to "get in," but develop the courage
to "get out." We have to have courage to learn how
to love ourselves and from that learn to love others in a real
way, and then we will begin to love the earth, and the whole
of our environment. Only then will we take care of it and
ourselves. Love is naturally democratic, naturally fair,
natually intelligent, naturally giving and nurturing; and we
must build a practical life model with this fact as its
foundation.
It is up to us now.
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