Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is also, paradoxically, the drink.
There’s a funny thing that happens when tyrannical rulers train their populations to accept untimely and unnecessary death as an everyday occurrence: the populace becomes ever more likely to rise up en masse and put their lives on the line battling those hired to police them and, eventually, making their way to the throats of the rulers. The same mistake the French and then the US military and its civilian chess-masters made throughout their colonial misadventures in Indochina are being made on the streets of every major and minor city in the world.
The people will win. Even against the other people, because the other people are worshipful tools of the tyrants. Against the cops, because we vastly outnumber the cops, and they seem to be nothing more than a subset of the worshipful tool people anyway. Against the military because, in the last analysis, even the military is divided between worshipful tools and real people. And once we get past all these tools, we’ll win against the rulers, because the only thing protecting them will be their technology, and they need people to make that technology work. And, being the people, we have those people on our side.
In short, the more they take from us, the less we have to lose. And when the people have nothing to lose, the people can’t lose.
The evil idiots who presume to be in charge of everything crossed the line ages ago. This week in Milwaukee they shot another unarmed, entirely innocent black man in front of his children, partially paralyzing him. In Glasgow, Scotland, a Ugandan refugee starved to death. The Greeks have been dumping refugees alive into the sea. Oh, and the death count from Covid-19 under Donald Dump’s distracted negligence is over 175,000. They’re coercing people to choose to work during the plague or be forced out onto the street. They’re dumping refugees in the desert to die. They’re putting as many poor people as they can into prisons and jails. They’re cutting down the few forests that aren’t on fire, depriving indigenous peoples of homes and livelihoods. They’re letting the food supply decay in the ruins of Iowa, as farmers go without aid, a policy of massacre-by-negligence which seems to have begun with the Dick Cheney administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina.
Crops are failing, empires are bombing cities already in ruins, the northern ice cap of the Earth is in molten tatters, plastic is continuing to be dumped and burned, and fossil fuels are still a thing.
Meanwhile, on the same planet, humpback whales are launching their entire bodies vertically into the air, cats and dogs and donkeys and pigs are forming lifelong friendships, Black artists are making historically-informed woke horror and sci-fi movies, drinking water from Fiji still appears in liquor stores even in Trump country, women complain on Twitter about being exposed to lectures on Goodfellas from their boyfriends, I continue to buy fruits I’ve never tasted before, air conditioning makes life bearable for some people in three-digit-Fahrenheit heat, and cheaper cooling strategies are available to others. Almost everywhere in the world, there’s a social media way to keep in touch with the rest of the rebellion.
Personally, I always assumed that when flagrant moronic overtly racist hate-filled fascism took over the USA, I'd have been dead long before it ever got to this stage. But as the memes and commercials say, “life comes at you fast.” It seems like only yesterday I was being admonished not to overuse the world “fascist.” It would make people take it less seriously, like the word, “wolf,” when the boy cried it too often. Or maybe it was like taking the lord’s name in vain. Someone else said, “I don’t see them sending people on trains to concentration camps.” That was back under Bush. I said, “Yeah, I’d like to prevent them from getting that far.”
And now here we are. The fascizing process joyfully kickstarted by Ronald Reagan and helped along by every Democratic and Republican president since then – along with countless lackeys in the legislature, in think tanks, and on court benches – has landed us here, today, where the GOP is basically a consortium of hate groups under the protection of an organized crime family racket.
The Democratic core leadership is a crime organization, too, but at least they use public service as a front, and in order to keep their front up they periodically have to commit some public service. The GOP’s only front is their hollow offices. Usually they don’t maintain a front, it’s apparently enough for their supporters that they demonstrate the great American traits of self- interest, greed, xenophobia, and cruelty.
Producer Alex put up an article from The World Socialist Web Site entitled, “The Biden campaign and the attempt to ‘rescue’ American hegemony.” It sounds like it’s warning people off of voting for Biden. It’s not. It’s warning people off thinking that voting at all is going to change the direction of the USA’s imperialist project. It describes forces in the foreign policy community jockeying for dominance during the time Donald Dump has abandoned paying attention.
“The struggle against war will not go forward through the selection of either Trump or Biden, but through the independent struggle of the working class,” the author concludes.
So, foreign-policy-wise, it’s a toss-up. What about on the domestic front? There’s an argument that one should vote Dem to get pro-choice judges appointed. A good argument. There’s the argument that Dump remaining in power is good motivation for the left, but Occupy and Black Lives Matter might like to challenge that narrative, having begun during the Obama regime. We definitely can’t push Dump left. Can we hope to push Biden left? I don’t know. I do believe we can shame a reasonably self-aware regime to make our lives less horrible while we’re fighting them.
We come then to the idea of not voting. I vote for voting. I vote for forcing the more malleable regime into power, and with luck putting the crime family in prison. What about voting for a third party? Well, I haven’t noticed the left clamoring for Howie Hawkins or Angela Walker, or indeed any other Green hopeful. But it has been brought to my attention that a third-party candidate can qualify for $20 million in campaign funds from the FEC in the next presidential election. That would be a big help for a third party, and we desperately need other leadership choices. So, in a state that’s safely blue, or unalterably red, I say go for it.
This is my attempt at pragmatic thinking, which ends up amounting to my personal preference, but my angrier thinking is I just want the Dump crime family to receive the come-dumpance that is their due. But in the longer run, which is probably the short run, a civil war is brewing. The GOP establishment is our worst enemy. Do not for a second think otherwise. Regardless what Malcolm X and MLK said on that score. People normalizing hunting Black Lives Matter protesters or marching around with automatic weapons shouting anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant, anti-woman, red-baiting, or anti-queer slogans, ready to point those weapons at the targets of their bile, are a far worse immediate danger than the strategically tactful liberal at the current moment.
Violence will erupt. It’s already erupted. The states that vote blue in this election, in a contiguous semi-perimeter up the west coast, across the northern border, down the east coast, should secede and join Canada if the US military is arrayed against us. Like I said, I really hoped to have been long dead from natural causes before this happened. I sure didn’t want to be an aging fart machine with sciatica, high blood pressure, and sleep apnea once the revolution rolled around, but I see there’s no stopping it. I have nothing to lose, and they’re trying to take even that away.
But we will win. The more they take from us, the less we have to lose. And when the people have nothing to lose, the people can’t lose.
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!