I just feel like stating the obvious tonight. I've been getting worked up, like everyone else. Then I just woke up from a dream that literally opened my eyes to the reality, of my own emotions, and just about everyone else's.
For some reason, I didn't have a car. I was riding around, believe it or not, on a tiny little mechanical duck. At an intersection, a guy in a pickup cut me off, and I yelled at him. He stopped his truck and came out, menacingly. Instead of fighting, we had a loud argument about who had the right of way, and I berated him for nearly running me down on my tiny duck with his big vehicle: I was cogent and intellectually justified, while scathingly insulting at the same time. Then I stormed off on my little duck. Then I woke up, and felt like shit.
Please turn to Page 2
I saw the metaphor right away. The duck is my sense of inadequacy in the face of large, mainstream forces of society that seem aligned against me. I can't fight them physically, can't compete with them economically, but I've got my brain and my words, and my well developed sense of self-righteousness. I can shoot down most opponents in an argument, the angrier the better. I believe in my beliefs, in my rightness, and I'm generally outraged enough by the state of the world to stand up and fight, in a virtual, cyberspace, verbal mano-a-mano (or femano), any time, anywhere.
Just like almost everyone else who wastes their time on this site. On political blogging in general.
But the truth? Can you handle the truth? Can I?
It's just about ego. The guy in the truck cut me off: he was pissed and in a hurry, I was pissed and humiliated. We're all pissed, stressed, anxious, unhappy, scared, frustrated, despondent. So we lash out; it's a primal instinct. Sometimes they lash out first and we relish the opportunity to lash back. Other times we start it, knowing that the sinister motives and inner evils of our adversaries are deserving of our invective, even if, somewhere in the back of our minds, we vaguely recall that we were supposed to be "better" than all that: the peace-lovers, the rational ones, the civilized, intelligent, calm and collected sage gurus on the mountaintop.
It's so easy to get worked up and self-righteous, and in some small way gratifying, but never satisfying. We always need more: anger fuels anger, and pretty soon we're addicted to righteous indignation, it almost doesn't matter who or what is the target. And now the Internet allows us the perfect forum, 24/7, to find both a trigger and an outlet for our perpetual need to unleash that bottomless well of anger. It doesn't make us feel better, just feeds the addiction, serves the demand of our egos that we find a conflict and demonstrate our worth, endlessly.
We come onto this blog hankering for that fight: looking for something to be outraged about, or else for someone else's well-phrased outrage that we can join with a clever "Yeah, you tell 'em!" The louder the rant, the more support it gets, as well as the more opposition: it almost doesn't matter what "side" you're on, as long as there's a rumble to jump into.
The vast, almost total majority of us have no real stake in politics. Shit, most politicians have no stake in the political decisions they fight over, other than their desire to keep their jobs, and of course feed their even more massive egos. This isn't about the days of labor organizers delivering basic rights to workers in the face of leg-breaking goons. It isn't about delivering women from outright repression, or minorities from enforced third-class non-citizenship; it's not even about corporate-sponsored War machines sacrificing tens of thousands of helpless soldiers for bankrupt ideologies. The policy fights today are just tinkering with the edges of modern American society, who gets slightly bigger or smaller pieces of a pie that is so overstuffed, compared to most of the world, that we don't even realize that we're arguing over crumbs.
I'm writing this from Nigeria. You think "health care reform" is even remotely on their radar? Their political arguments are about how to reduce the incidence of voters being killed at the polls, and politicians simply buying and intimidating their way into power, where they can sutff their pockets with public money. Last month I was in the Philippines, where supporters of an entrenched political clan massacred 57 members of an opposition party on their way to register for elections. You think they're worried about financial market regulatory nuances?
We have the luxury of this type of forum, to express alternative views and try to influence elections and policy debates in an unthreatened and anonymous manner. But in our confused state of comfort and disquiet, we've transformed it into an arena of ego combat, pretending that these battles are "important", because it's more energizing. They're not. They're just excuses to vent and rant. We all could find much more valuable things to do with our time, starting with working on our anger issues.