Looking at the ground on a Spring Sunday afternoon in 2021 on public lands near Nowheresville.
Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives.
(Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (Harper and Row: 1958), 103–104; see also cac.org/...)
My dear comrade NY brit expat wrote movingly last week about her July 4th-born mother (m.dailykos.com/...), a story it has taken her 19 years to write. I said in a comment it was a balm to hear the personal because I have been going through “a lot.” Friends like NY brit expat here had noticed my lengthy absence after many years of faithful and intense participation. When they reached out, I sincerely apologized for frightening them by not at least touching base.
”A lot” is an imprecise term. I am not suffering from a serious illness, so please do not worry about that. My own problems are nothing extraordinary, and my octogenarian parents are still living nearby under my care, having survived a bad COVID-19 battle and a host of other serious medical challenges. Suffice it to say, I am being forced by circumstances of life to grow as a person beyond my comfort zone. This lack of clarity of “a lot” is not about trying to be grandiose or Stoical or to pull myself up by my bootstraps. We all need each other. But some growth must come on our own. I need not get into the details, even with kind listeners who would be open to the details.
I do want to place my almost total absence since early 2021 in the context of my anti-capitalist beliefs. These beliefs are important to me. I do not want my participation level to imply otherwise.
I hope that this explanation is about more than my own personal struggles. I expect that this is the last time, at least for a long time, I will make you read about my personal "journey." If you've already read enough about that, please turn back now, no questions asked. If you choose to keep reading, first I will give you the rather depressing lay of the land, and then I will give you the more optimistic Ghost Dance (en.wikipedia.org/...) I am determined to dance come what may as part of my socialist practice.
As I've been boring readers with for years, I live in Nowheresville, Deep South. Nowheresville lies on a fringe of the land of cotton in the reddest of red areas. In other words, for family reasons I live where I am, as a socialist, least wanted but arguably most needed.
My mixed Hispanic-Anglo background (son of a Miami-born Canarian/Cuban father and a Clay County, Georgia farm girl mother) gives me sensitivity to the concepts of divide-and-rule and fitting in with the white establishment. The son of a Southern Baptist minister, graduate of a historically Southern Baptist Convention-affiliated university, I understand the culture. And, for all its variables and faults, I love the entire Southern working class. My parents' eclectic roots ensure that. And despite my life of relative privilege, I have a natural toughness that has gotten through "a lot" in the past, although it is no longer adequate to these days. So, for all the cognitive dissonance, I could say I feel a socialist "call" to be here on what seems like the least promising of U.S. cultural frontiers.
Choctaw and Creek Indians as well as African Americans know this as a place of domestic terrorism, pure and simple. Due to my "whiteness" and professional employment, I can generally choose to remain safe from the most obviously paranoid dangerous fringe in this fringe of the land of cotton, although lone wolves can pop up anywhere.
As long as local Republicans stick to voting, I am somewhat politically content to work with fellow Democrats on voter registration, GOTV, and voter protection. There are many nice Republicans, such as my parents, here. But one can expect that there will be ramifications for getting publicly out-of-line.
Increasingly the line that one must not get "out of" is way over in Crazyville. The ramifications for doing so are unpredictable, which is part of their evil charm. Books like Right-Wing Resurgence: How a Domestic Terrorist Threat is Being Ignored (rowman.com/...) have tried to wake the federal government up to the risk for years. That book documents, among many others, a domestic terror incident in my county that occurred within days after my predicting in a somewhat courageous letter to the editor in the Nowheresville newspaper, based on personal observations at a nearby "Tea Party," that something like this was going to happen. It did.
When might something like this happen again locally? We are meant to be too afraid to find out. Peaceful-as-can-be student BLM protestors take their lives in their own hands. Local Proud Boys and militant anti-government types, some arrested for their January 6 activities, and their paramilitary forebears have flaunted their stuff around here for generations.
But so too do ordinary generally decent people with penchants for guns and sick views, and in recent years, Trump flags and gas-guzzling boat parades. Internally debating whether they are truly separate kinds of rightwingers or merely on a continuum can cause a headache. Doing that every day of your life is unhealthy. Fearing and obviously hating are dehumanizing. But some fearing is logical.
To even possibly be seeing "them" on the next pew? Is there no sanctuary from this madness? Whatever happened to the Kumbaya Christianity of the church trips of my 1970s youth? Judging whom to fear is dispiriting at the very least and seems vaguely inconsistent with the Sermon on the Mount.
I avoid some of this temptation to judge my neighbor in the next pew by being an Episcopalian, a relative oasis for open-minded and tolerant Christians (www.episcopalchurch.org/...). Meanwhile most white evangelicals in the county are subjected to indoctrination in the same agile, Bible-thumping, shape-shifting fundamentalism/political-economic philosophy that justified slavery and Jim Crow. In the tradition of a host of persons of faith including MLK, I do not regard Christianity as the necessary centerpiece of the injustice committed and perpetuated in my society, sometimes in Jesus’s name.
Christians vary, as do the followers of all religions as well as agnostics, atheists, and the unaffiliated. These days the churches are increasingly depopulated in favor of other pursuits. Congregationally-chosen evangelical preachers, even more than centrally-appointed mainline clergy, generally must avoid conservative antipathy and apathy to keep their pulpits.
Political calculations aside (www.nytimes.com/...; nymag.com/...; www.theguardian.com/...), I certainly understand why many good people do not mourn the decline of religion in the U.S. Truth and reconciliation found few friends in the Southern Baptist Church of my youth and find even fewer today. Yet, for some of us, religion is not only a potential hegemonic force for evil but also a potential fount of meaning, joy, self-improvement, and positive self-sacrifice.
Positive self-sacrifice for the common good, as opposed to morbid self-sacrifice to obtain a heavenly reward, is something all socialists can understand. This represents a potential connection with some persons of faith.
Our world cannot be made a better place for all by good people remaining silent in the face of evil. On that we can agree. But “evil” is a term human beings need to handle with care. It is not per se the brainwashed persons I encountered in the supermarket during the height of the pandemic who refused to wear masks and even now refuse to be vaccinated. It is certainly not per se the persons with whom I take communion on a weekly basis.
But when a socialist lives for years connected to other socialists mostly by digital means the contradictions can be accentuated internally by isolation. “Desperate times” have manifested so profoundly, visibly represented by no longer cryptic neofascists, that desperation can consume us. And, speaking for me only, when my own personal life intervenes, including my own shortcomings as a human being, I can be a very poor vessel for the life of solidarity I desire.
For decades now, mostly coinciding with my conscious socialist journey, I have been on the conscious journey of a pro-choice Christian contemplative. I perceive this to be an integrated, potentially cohesive, personally authentic journey as a socialist contemplative, with both aspects being grounded in the other. I have sometimes written that my religion is “one hundred percent socialized.” This is aspirational, not realized. But I do not accept as my own any religion that accepts an unjust world as God-ordained. I believe that if God exists and loves the world, as all Christians claim, positive transformative actions must flow from this, not to establish Constantinian domination but to spread tolerant and material love.
I must myself be as loving as I can be in and to the world. This includes the duty to work in democratic solidarity with all others of good will and tolerance to root out injustice and establish liberty and justice for all. Not every injustice can be reduced to “capitalism.” Racism and sexism abound, for instance.
Socialists must also acknowledge a degree of responsibility. Democracy is hard but necessary. Undemocratic military-style responses to capitalism have themselves sooner or later been failures undeserving of the word “socialism,” although capitalist hegemonic forces and sometimes assassins have made sure of it. Democratic implementation of socialism by definition requires both the continuing democratic support of the masses and a society based on fairness and equality. Giving up one’s personal and political autonomy to any overlord or master class is not in keeping with our duty as human beings to be rational, just, and loving. Capitalism is undeniably incredibly adept at democracy-subverting divide-and-rule, ginning up new ways or reminding us of old ones to get us to shun one other or another as we compete for our needs and wants. Fear and greed are as ancient as it gets.
I’ve had a lot to say politically over the years. Due in part to my political isolation, my online political voicing generally flowed like a river of the personal, loaded with self-reference and loner self-aggrandizement—“socialist cowboy walking into Dodge City” braggadocio and hyperbole. (This ode to a socialist contemplative journey is no exception.)
Some of my online writing has been useful, but some of it has been immature, vindictive, or worse. Most of it has been published as stories or comments at this website, which I deeply appreciate. I have left most of it online, for what it’s worth, but over a dozen stories that I’ve published were so ridiculous, unwise, or inappropriately hurtful to others that I’ve taken them down over the years, and many others probably should have been taken down that are still up.
Through life’s challenges and contemplation, I am slowly learning in my daily real world life that I need to be a better person in ways I never even or more fully contemplated. That in turn is requiring more periods of calmness and reflection that require a certain discipline of life that doesn’t come naturally in our frantic world.
Getting the ego under control, especially if one has egotistical tendencies, is a good and necessary thing. I am not a religious contemplative because I learned to be one in the Southern Baptist Church growing up (that's for sure) or because I am good (see previous parenthetical) but because I believe I will not become the person I hope and need to be otherwise. If my life is ruled by loudness and reaction I will be miserable and, even when I am trying to do good, shed unproductive confusion and cruel judgment as byproducts like dandruff.
I tend to be an overly confrontational person, with what I deem unjust, but also about all manner of small things, shades of gray, and matters of purely personal opinion with persons I love but take for granted or at others’ expense simply because I am fearful or to give my own ego a boost. Mindfulness matters.
Especially in the Deep South where I live I am tempted on some level to "fight the enemy" on a daily basis. People flaunting their disgusting bigotry and hate on bumper stickers do piss me off, and I do not intend to become numb to their evil. But I do not want their evil to control my thoughts and actions.
Anti-capitalism and anti-fascism must be about much more than flipping on an ever-ready anger switch. I do know that I must not get into physical fights and that, fortunately, I in fact do not want to do any physical harm to another human being. But I do see open neofascism in the part of the world I inhabit and too often want to fight back with reckless fighting words when some other measure is warranted. Choosing battles is not my strong suit or natural inclination.
In summary, I, Galtisalie, am alive and if not well, at least getting more, not less, well. I am not going quietist on you. The Great Socialist Dog 🐕 in the sky is not finished with me yet. I love you. My digital words no longer flow like a river. Maybe they will again some day. But maybe they won’t. But whatever it is will be a good thing.
I am trying to live the life of a socialist contemplative, and it brings me the quiet joy of silence and growth. But it is not and never shall be quietist. We have to struggle and work together for the world all the people of today and tomorrow deserve. It will not simply happen. We shall overcome.
One final note to ACM members: Part of my journey since January of this year has involved long, generally Sunday afternoon hikes on public lands near me. This has been richly rewarding but often left me outside and/or exhausted during the publication hour for the ACM group. If all I do is show up late Sunday night with a recommendation and tip, please recognize that this is what I have to give but that I, then and always, quietly but enthusiastically, deeply love you and greatly appreciate you being my dear friends and comrades. Your collective voice and words are my voice and words these days, and I am so grateful to you for your socialist work.
