Meanwhile, this is happening....
and I kind of don’t.
I’ve been watching the primary pie fight from the cheap seats and trying to stay focused locally as there are only a few places I could possibly make a difference in my state and the Presidential race ain’t gonna be one of them. No matter who wins the nomination, my state will go Trump (or R, if they find a way to block Trump’s brand of crazy and prop up another in his place). Happily. Proudly. I’m gonna be apologizing for another four years to my friends in the blue states, but..I’ve made my peace with that. To paraphrase one of my least favorite people in the history of the universe: you go to the voting booth with the state you have, not the state you might want or wish to have at a later time.
And here’s where I don’t understand why everyone is down in the weeds trying to score tiny, patronizing, condescending points off each other. The personal attacks make no sense—it makes it impossible for anyone to contribute to a discussion without fear of somehow looking like they’re choosing a side and getting flagged or given a time out. No matter how you feel about your candidate, no one on the other team is going to listen to a word you say once you have called the other candidate (using the terms of choice: evil, racist, idealistic, unelectable, wrong, out-of-touch, bought, single-issue) satan and the person who supports said candidate satan’s minion.
Isn’t this the point in the election cycle where we look at our platform as a party, study our stances, discern the strengths and weaknesses of policy and try to build the platform we’ll run on in the general? Isn’t this when we kick the tires, get all wonky about the pros and cons of current issues, and discuss ad nauseam how well, or how poorly, they represent us as a group? I thought that’s what primaries were for—to challenge preconceptions, push for the ideals we want our party to support. Aren’t we always talking about trying to shift the party back to the left? Aren’t we trying to get people to accept that what are now considered liberal ideas are actually pretty moderate? Isn’t this the place where I constantly read about moving the Overton window? Why the rush to have a nominee? So we can all sit back and stop having to examine our own systems of privilege, pretend that all is well, not ask why the Chamber of Commerce, CNN, and Forbes wants the horserace to be over? Is it so difficult for us to be around people who feel differently than we do on certain policies that we have to start a screaming match of the rox/sux variety every single day? I swear, sometimes its like watching The Real Housewives* around here as everything devolves into some idiotic cult of personality. That’s kind of stupid for a reality-based community, isn’t it?
I’m not going to the polls to vote for a person, I’m voting for ideals that person is supposed to represent and uphold. And I’m interested in voting for who best represents that to me. No one else. At this point, on this blog, someone new coming in wouldn’t be able to tell who represents what ideals because if something positive is said about one, the counterpunch of how that’s a lie or they did something equally awful is never more than 2-3 comments away. And yeah, I’ve stopped going into the comments because they are, for the most part, supremely unhelpful. I would never presume to tell someone else how to vote or what is the most important thing to care about. That’s infantilizing and demeaning.
Now me, personally, I care about climate change. That’s the main issue that informs my choices. I don’t give a damn about anything except trying to save this planet. Its the ONLY one we have and whether Trump (yeah, I know, I throw up in my mouth a little every time too) is President or Clinton is President or Sanders is President, this planet is still getting sucked down the whirlpool of destruction as fast as the fossil fuel industry can make it happen. Glacier National Park will soon have no glaciers, the arctic ice is frighteningly thin and summer is on the way. We’re getting hotter every year and as more fracking wells get dug and more infrastructure decays, there’s less and less drinkable water anywhere to be found.
So the only thing I care about is who (amongst those still standing) is willing to fight—with the bully pulpit and whatever other authority is theirs to wield—to save this planet. Who is willing to sign a bill that puts a nationwide moratorium on fracking? Sets up nationwide solar and green energy subsidies and takes them away from the fossil fuel industry? I want someone who will roar, daily, about what’s happening to our planet and what it is costing us in lives, economic stability, health—you know, the general welfare mentioned in the constitution (that thing the conservatives scream about all the time but don’t like how liberal some of it actually is).
And the truth is, none of them would be able to sign anything because it’ll never get through the House and Senate that we have now. Which is why I’m watching from the cheap seats. Do I care about women’s reproductive rights? Gun control? Income inequality? Institutional racism? Healthcare? Well, yes, yes I do. Very much. But those things mean nothing if there’s no unpoisoned food to eat, unpoisoned water to drink, unpoisoned air to breathe—and a surface temperature that doesn’t allow our species to survive.
For as long as Mitch (nothing is getting past me) McConnell is heading up the Senate and Paul (let them eat cake) Ryan is heading up the House, we can just keep holding hands and skipping off into the darkness because nothing is going to change (thankfully, people are working on that). The corporate owned state will stay just the way it is, profits over people, growth at all costs and war forever, amen. I find it terrifying how myopic people can be about the presidential race as though it, and it alone, will sway the path this country is on. For 40 years, the corporate state has eroded the actual state, cutting into education, turning news into propaganda, making sure that it makes total sense to the majority of Americans that those poor corporations only making a billion or so a quarter really need a tax break in order to offer their employees anything besides part-time, no-benefit jobs. And they have to strip mine, because if we don’t need that coal, by gum China does. And fracking is how we free ourselves of foreign oil dependence (although we export more than we import now and multinational corporations have f**k-all to do with us a nation and how our resources are handled by them). Oh, and the TPP is how we get an economic windfall for everyone and elevate the working standards around the world.
Its nuts—all of it—and yet we’re yelling at each other on blogs about who is more electable. As though the person sitting in the White House, like Superman, can bring about miracles with a body of 535 mostly bought and paid for wholly-owned subsidiaries of Exxon-Mobile, Verizon, Monsanto and Bank of America.
I want the primaries to go as long as possible because I want people to actually pay attention and I’m not as interested (beyond my own personal primary vote) in who winds up on top as much as I care what platform the democratic party espouses when nomination time rolls around. Are we still going to be for fracking, strip-mining and drilling on public lands? Are we still going to be for subsidies for the fossil fuel industry? Are we still going to pretend that large, industrial agriculture/livestock behemouths aren’t poisoning and fouling our land and water at the same rate (possibly higher) fracking is? Are we still going to act as though the TPP won’t allow polluting industries to sue us and likely win over their right to pollute and kill us because, you know, the cost of making sure the water and air are clean costs them profits? Because if we are, then this particular big tent doesn’t want me as a member.
If we (as a party, I don’t mean individuals) are going to support all those things, then, truly, where are we going to distinguish ourselves from the Republicans? Because being pro-business, in its current manifestation, means the only difference will be who’s standing behind the presidential seal telling us that tar sands are our best hope for energy independence, Shell can drill safely in the arctic, mountaintop removal is safe and necessary, clean coal is a real thing that exists, windmills kill birds (and cause herpes), incandescent bulbs are a matter of choice, and it’s too costly to invest in renewable energy.
At the end of the day, we all vote for what matters to us, in whatever form that manifests. Yelling at each other about what that should be for everybody—if they’re a real democrat/liberal/progressive—is just alienating and pathetic. You can pound your keyboard all day long and no one on the internet is going to change their minds just because of your latest brilliant insult. I certainly won’t.
(*Please note that I have never watched an episode of ANY version of the Real Housewives, but I’ve seen enough clips on The Soup to know what kind of crazy, scripted train-wreck it is)
