A Labor Day Facebook Selfie Shattered Years of Solidarity. New Blogs and Podcasts Probably Won’t Repair the Damage, but I’ll Give It the Old College Try.
The whimsical lefty-ish side of me upset a couple of my Trumpy former Union Brothers.
DISCLAIMER: THIS T-SHIRT IS A JOKE. I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Communist Party. I do not and have not ever identified as a Marxist, though there was one year in the 80s when I read Lenin and walked around for several months chanting “Something, something bourgeois this!” and “Something, something bourgeois that!”
The backstory of why, after brief exploration, I became disillusioned with the hard left as a political avenue (aside from the pay being worse than the austerity of Reagan-era minimum wage jobs) can be summed up briefly: the New World Order, left or right, looks the same to me regardless where I am standing. I resigned from the Democratic Socialists of America. I can and I will criticize the stupid anti-Jewish politics of DSA, so I saved myself the trouble of being tossed out for lacking group think. I still have love and respect for some of the comrades. They are not all virulently anti-Israel or mindless cop haters, but enough of them are. They are the hard left I rejected in the 80s when I chose DSA to work within the Democratic party. Their anti-liberal rhetoric gives me Reagan flashbacks just like Joe “There will be deductibles!” Biden does.
We’re looking at a boot stamping on a human face forever, but instead of working for a more perfect union, we’re having a massive political fight about what color the boot should be or what color the face should be. Of course, our forever might not be long for this world.
Cooperation, tolerance, and peace are supposed to be dead hippie dreams and after all, the military-industrial complex won’t have it while there’s money to made reducing human population during an escalating climate emergency… just one of a few ecological catastrophes threatening all mammals on Earth. Many mouths need food and water while our capacity to provide both is on the verge of collapse. Happy fracking New Year! Frack the ground water! Frack us all!
The pandemic might be spring training for the brutal summers ahead. I had decided that I am neither little, nor Dutch, nor a boy. Nothing I can do will plug the leak and stop the fire or the flood. Nothing I can say will give Grandpa Joe a clue or make him seem more cogent or deprogram anyone from the Orange Scumbag Cult.
Yet, here I am. Recently unretired poet and punk rock poser turned blogger and podcaster. I believe that libtards and deplorables need to come together, but I get discouraged from that idea when a guy I befriended and respected for years sends me a bunch of hateful stupid crap for posting a picture on Facebook wearing an existential comics T-shirt. I told dude: it’s a joke, but he insisted that I want to destroy America and should move to China.
G-d forgive me, but I told him “Go die!”
Sometimes I suck as an organizer and sometimes I suck as a person.
And speaking of sucking as a person… here’s our former President. I’ve tried to give the devil his due, but my former #DemExit comrades on the left are wrong about the threat level of this Twitler.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-jews-rosh-hashanah_n_6507ece3e4b04435d25fcd5f
Unfortunately, they may be correct about the threat level of his main political alternative, President Joe Biden.
We can have a reasoned policy debate on the success or failure of this administration, but I fear the outcome of the next Presidential election will be determined by the obvious perception that this President seems less cogent than Reagan did while serving his second term with Alzheimers disease.
I suspect if Reagan or Trump were conducting US policy in East Europe the same as Biden, Democrats would be soiling themselves in hysteria, but we seem strangely detached.
Again, maybe because both parties ignored the warning given by President Eisenhower and the needs and wants of war profiteers has become more important, on a policy level, than the lives of Americans or Ukrainians or the fate of humanity in general.
Our government does a great job of working for the people that control it… just follow the money to see who that is, but not so much for We, The People, left or right. Political power works for the powerful, left or right, but no so much for We, The People.
I have some ideas about fixing this and I’d like to get some folks to sign off on those ideas. I intend to look at some of the ideas other folks have about fixing this.
It’s not all doom and gloom, but don’t kid yourself. There’s some fracking doom and gloom out there and we better wake the frack up. Step One: sound the alarm. Step Two: All hands on deck! All hands on deck!
Adam Broad 