Debt Rattle May 3 2021
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Oldest child just ran into the (metaphorical, sans DUI) brick wall that years of alcoholism was taking him to.
{/crosses self} I can wrap my mind around the gravity of that. I live in a caucasian working-class suburb that makes Saturday night on fraternity row on college campuses look like a Mormon church-picnic in comparison!
I know that “they” are doing as “they” please, and are confident that we cannot do a thing about it. We can protest with impotence, we can write endlessly online and show our hands, we can write angry letters to whomever, and “they” just chuckle and continue on their merry ways. Always, always, they cull for the traitor, the psychopath, the secret “hero” or “agent x” who will lend them a hand or agitate and start rabbit-hole arguments about this or that fine point of argument.
“They” are like mercury on a gently jiggled plane- coalescing and gathering in blob strength. What we need to do is to figure out how to tip that plane and send that blob careening over the edge.Liz Cheney talks about the “Big Lie” (a rigged election), George W Bush wrote “the GOP metastasized into its terminal form” and Cindy McCain voted for Joe Biden. The US corporate political duopoly fell due to January 6th insurrection and the coronavirus pandemic. There is now a single global, Davos oriented, Western Establishment — the Empire and everyone else.
The underlying unmentionable is that the US and Canadian governments are lackeys to global corporations and billionaires. There is no better indication of the colonial servitude of the peoples of the Americas than the 1,242,031 who have died in the USA, Brazil, Canada and Mexico due to COVID-19. WaPo points out that the Mexican excess deaths are vastly under counted by half.
The tragedy of the New World is that all of the governments are so corrupt and incompetent it is simply impossible to judge the risks. The mRNA vaccines are being wasted. Gene therapy does cut down the risk of death and severe illness but at the risk of known and unknown side effects. Due to the variants and jab hesitancy the Holy Grail of “herd immunity” will never be reached. But the vaccines together with a vigorous competent national public health program of testing, contact tracing, isolation, masks, social distance and personal hygiene can eradicate the virus. However, the Establishment won’t spend the money or restore democracy. Professional Managers need the exploitative privatized healthcare system to have an income. But, millions of dead cannot go unnoticed. Unrest and Succession are certain if the virus remains endemic in the Western Hemisphere.
1491 repeats itself and will keep reoccurring if strong borders and good government are not restored.
@ sumac.carol
“What is the difference between one expert calling “bullshit” and getting their colleagues to sign a letter and, say, a hospital cleaner noting the lack of PPE for fellow workers, getting them all to pickett? One is virtual, the other is in-person. Theoretically, the non-retired letter-signatories could be subjected to some non-physical “attack” (maybe delay in receiving tenure or other promotion) by their place of work for stepping outside the bounds of the narrative. I don’t see a qualitative difference between these two scenarios.”
A HUGE difference. A letter is not a mob. Reprisal is not synonymous with manipulation but is a subset of manipulation. What the individual risks to create group consensus is one thing; what happens to the group, what the group does, or how the group is interpreted through the media lens, is another. Footage of people throwing rocks at windows can be spun countless ways. A carefully worded letter signed by a group, not nearly so much. It is a stable artifact. One can quote it out of context, etc., but it stands alone as a singular artifact while a movement is, well, in motion, changing, composed of countless complex confused human beings. Black Lives Matter can become Death to Cops, or a self-appointed body of authority deciding who is or isn’t “black”, or White People Suck, or…
Jesus started a movement based on divine love. Its followers split into countless factions, many of them ruthlessly murderous. The Romans embraced the general tide of this/these movement/s under the brand name of Xtianity/Holy Roman church and perverted it even more.
When enough people agree about something to march in solidarity, it becomes a crusade, and those things tend to turn inside out and become downright antithetical to their origins.
@ my parents said know
” What we need to do is to figure out how to tip that plane and send that blob careening over the edge.”
Build. Don’t oppose or destroy, build. Opposition is easy to identify, track, and corner because it is defined by that which it opposes. Building is whatever one builds and doesn’t necessarily have any direct relation to the existing power structure.
You can see a mob coming from far away. You know where it’s headed (the king’s palace) and the king knows what to attack. Leading with your chin is rarely a good strategy ion a fight. FIghting is rarely a good tactic of conflict resolution, although when push comes to shove…
Madamski
With GPS, buildings are also easily trackable. Just try building something and wait for your municipal inspectors to arrive.
I remain committed to direct action, even with current tracking technologies. Most of what we value has been achieved through peaceful protest that successfully disrupts the official narrative and captures the hearts and minds of the fence-sitters.
Defining or measuring the success or failure of protest/social movements is difficult – it is a moving target, sometimes the success or failure of one contributes to another. Social movements are messy, and can be dirty and ugly. As the rallying cry says “This is what democracy looks like.”
You do not seem to propose any real alternative to direct action. Is letter-writing the preferred alternative? But should we write letters preferably as “individuals”, since a group letter will inevitably require a “leader” to take the pen, and the rest of the folks will be “followers” who may not have an equal commitment and understanding of the issue at hand? This sounds dangerously close to something called Facebook…
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