Hey, I'm gonna keep dreamin' until I have to wake up. <smile>
I remember, the morning after Trump's election, really feeling, and I'm not
kidding, that I was really dreaming and that I would wake up and it wouldn't
be true. I know a friend of mine said the same thing.
That feeling lasted for some days in fact, but I gradually had to convince
myself that I was not going to wake up because I was not dreaming; it had
really happened.
Evan
-----Original Message-----
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Saturday, November 03, 2018 5:32 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] The Fire This Time - It Will Keep Burning Long
After November 6
The Fire This Time - It Will Keep Burning Long After November 6
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
03 November 18
The election will be a moment of truth for the country, and then what?
Perhaps enough Americans in enough numbers in enough places have woken up to
the wildfires consuming our country. Perhaps these woke Americans will throw
some water on the fires in the November 6 election. Perhaps an emerging
American majority will slow the Republican burn of American idealism,
decency, and justice. Perhaps an emerging American majority will elect
enough new Democrats to prod old Democrats out of their lazy collusion with
burning the country down. Perhaps.
Whatever happens November 6, the fires of political fascism and capitalist
authoritarianism will continue to rage out of control. The conniving right
has been feeding these flames for decades and it's likely to take more
decades to extinguish them, if that's even possible. The Long March of the
right from the debacle of Goldwater in 1964 to the triumph of Trump in 2016
has been astonishingly Maoist in its determination, orthodoxy, and political
correctness. One has to acknowledge them for their sheer ruthlessness and
determination. Minority rule is no mean trick.
The Republican right had help from supine Democrats with no coherent
alternative. They had more help from media quislings and collaborators (yes,
that's Fox) whose idea of analysis involved telling "both sides" regardless
of what might be true. They had more help from an educational system
producing increasing compliant, ignorant voters who could no longer reliably
assess what was real or important or even in their self-interest. And they
had still more help from elitist leaders who, rather than engaging the
country as a potential unity, dismissed millions of people as deplorables in
love with their guns and their religion (as if either of those were
unquestionably evil).
Whatever happens November 6, we'll still have a president who aspires to
dictatorship, as illustrated by his assertion that he has the power to
rewrite the Constitution all by himself. We'll still have a ruling party
that relies on racism to maintain power, that enables its bigots to spread
hate by graffiti and murder. We'll still have concentration camps full of
migrants and migrant children separated from their parents, rounded up and
held with no due process of law.
We'll still live in a country where Twitter enables the president to release
a shamelessly dishonest racist ad scapegoating immigrants and libeling
Democrats. We'll still live in a country where Facebook profits by selling
lists of likely customers to white nationalist marketers promoting myths of
"white genocide." We'll still live in a country where the dominant culture
makes it unsafe and sometimes lethal to be different, where the president
invites the military to kill innocent, unarmed people with impunity. This is
not politically correct, but it is true: even as we mourn the synagogue
murders in Pittsburgh we remain silent about Israeli executions of innocents
in Gaza or Saudi genocide in Yemen.
We'll still live in a country where the government no longer makes grants to
organizations fighting US terrorism. We'll still live in a country where the
government deliberately pursues policies that threaten the global climate.
We'll still live in a country that abrogates nuclear weapons treaties and
pursues new, "usable" nuclear warheads and the domination of space.
In a sense, November 6 is a moment of truth for the country. In a deeper
sense, that's fundamentally facile and false. Nothing magically changes on
November 6, no matter the outcome. The election of a Democratic House looks
like the most likely best outcome. But that Democratic majority wouldn't be
seated till January, leaving Republicans two months to feed the flames
consuming us. The reality is that every moment is a moment of truth. Radical
Republican reactionaries internalized that decades ago. Perhaps the
realization that the moment of truth is now, always now, has finally
generated a humane, tolerant, democratic majority in America - and maybe
even an enlightened majority that can sustain itself. It's worth dreaming.
Email This Page
e-max.it: your social media marketing partner
