What do you all hope to accomplish by continuing to post here? What difference do you think that you will make by writing your congressman and signing the upteen millionth MoveOn petition? What do you think will happen with your piddly $50 contribution to a politician that has no chance of winning in your conservative area? What good will it do for the cause when you protest the evils of Bush and the Republicans, while the media focuses on the guy in the funny hat screaming while being led away by the police which defines you and all the other protesters?
I ask all of this not to cause you all to despair, but to get you to think. This moment, at least for me, is one of the darkest and hardest times in my fight to bring about the America that I was taught we were supposed to be. Let me explain a few revelations I've had about the uselessness of my own actions, as well as the things that I think we have to do in order to have some difference, if that's at all possible.
Revelation #1 -- They're not agreeing with you or taking you seriously, they're just humoring you because they don't want to make a scene. You know how you've been continually talking to your conservative dad via email and you think you've made some progress? Well you haven't. He just is tired of the same old subjects and thinks that you are hysterical, wrong, and that you still need to grow up. There was a verse in the bible that applies to this, something to the effect of Jesus saying that a prophet is respected everywhere but his home town. You will never convince the friends and family that knew you when you were in diapers or playing with G.I. Joes that you know more than them. They are simply not capable of understanding that, and when there is clear evidence that you do know something more than them, they will consider it useless information or something that you may be right on but don't have the full picture. So if you want to convince people that you are right and they are wrong, it will be easier to do with a stranger or an acquaintance.
Revelation #2 -- The right is willing to stoop to any low to win, and thus can only respect winning. This is something that is so bizarre that I am even still unable to fully comprehend it. However, once you start to realize how this form of "logic" works, you will understand a lot about the right. To them, winning an argument is not about facts, logic, or honesty. It is about being the loudest, being the most emotionally intense, and being the most focused on a single thing without ever being able to change their view. This is why people like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly are successful in the right wing; they are able to talk over people and get angrier than their guests. This is a sign of being a winner when it comes to the right. In fact, I'd dare say that the "Dean scream" scared the shit out of the right because it proved that not all Democrats were boring, unemotional, and cold. Dean's passion scared them, and they worked quickly to have it dismissed as ridiculous.
The right are huge fans of using character assasination in order to win an argument. This is what they did with people like Michael Moore, and they dismissed him as a left-wing lying sack long before most people heard of him or saw his movies, which kept people away from them. As a result, very few of us take anything from him seriously, even though if the Democrats would have made use of his film they would have won major elections in November. Even I have right wing assholes on my case claiming that I am a liar, arrogant, too young to know anything, and all sorts of other bad things about me. I experience it to a point of absurdity where any statement I make such as, "I walked the dog five minutes ago" will be met with claims of, "YOU ARE A LIAR! IF ANYONE ELSE SAID IT I WOULD BELIEVE IT BUT NOT FROM YOU!" Seriously, that sort of thing has happened to me. I'm tired of it.
Revelation #3 -- We can't beat the corporations like this. I am a firm believer that it is useless to do anything against the corporations at this time. What I mean is that if you are worried about the environment, the economy, healthcare, or any other of a multitude of important factors, you are going to lose. This is not me asking you to give up, but simply to refine your approach rather than wasting your time. If you want to win, you have to either find a way to help the corporations make more immediate money by adopting your strategy, or find a way to pit corporations against each other. Sure, occasionally a nice law gets passed by grassroots movements, or by making an issue known in the news, but people occasionally win the lottery as well. I don't like those odds. So, what we need to do is find a way to get around this impassable barrier.
Revelation #4 -- Corruption is the rule, Tom Delay is not the exception. Seriously folks, if you think that getting 100 friends to write letters to your congressman is going to outweigh the weekend in the Hamptons that the opposing group has given him, you are deluded. Our politicians are generally corrupt and respond to bribes and other selfish stimuli. I don't have the lack of morals or the resources to bribe my politicians, so I effectively have no way to have my voice heard. The only chance comes every few years when I can influence an election by volunteering for someone I'd like to see win, however even then there is very little influence that I can have on much more than a city-wide level. You should also realize that, and instead of wasting your time working for a campaign like John Kerry's, you should help out local politicians that you can have a bigger influence on. There is a huge amount of spin for and against the huge national politicians that most of us work hard to counteract, when it would be easier and more effective for us to focus on smaller campaigns. Everyone has opinions of presidential candidates, but most do not of the guy running for county commissioner or anything else like that. Therefore, if we simply get the names of our local candidates out there where people will remember it, when they go into the voting booth they will simply vote for whoever's name they recognize. If we can start building up our grassroots efforts on smaller levels, that will make it easier to eventually build up to the national level and have all of our localities as a base to work from. As it is now, we have local politicians who are on the other side and influence the federal elections in favor of the other guys, e.g. Ken Blackwell.
Revelation #5 -- We are defined by the right wing in every category. Democratic moderates are called "Republican-lite", real liberals are considered to be nothing more than against everything that Bush stands for without thinking about it, and even many of the things that people accept as reality are right-wing lies. We really need to focus on truth, and adopt a more scientific method to our actions. We should assume nothing, and learn to love researching things. My personal pet peeve around here is how uninformed or misinformed the majority of people are about immigration issues, but those types of problems exist in most things because the right has dominated our education, our media, and even our culture for so long.
Revelation #6 -- Most of us are just as stupid as most of those on the right. This sort of ties in with the last thing I brought up, but it's true. We're really not any more informed than the right, despite how well educated and how more informed we are of current events. Those are very important things, but as a result of us being better informed in some areas, we make quite a few big assumptions that make us just as bad as the right. The right bases their arrogance on their mob rule and their biased information; we base our arrogance on the fact that in some things we are the best educated and most informed. Our flaw comes in when we have an issue that we know very little about and can't admit it. I do this myself, but it is something that makes us look like asses regularly. It is especially bad when we base our information off of glancing over a liberal-biased source of information. Even when a piece of evidence we find backs up what we think is true, we have to find some way to validate it scientifically, not just assume it's correct because we want it to be true. We base so much of our wrong views on bad or limited information, and even if we are mostly correct, the right uses those things against us to make everything we know look suspect.
Revelation #7 -- The right wing is a myth. There is no unified group that we are fighting against, there are many special interests and levels of people that we have to work against. This is good for them because it means that they have many seperate things that they have rolled together as a complete package and seem to generally work together to fight against us and win. It makes no real sense for Christian groups, warmongers, and corporations to be on the same side (however superficially), yet they are. On the other hand, the fact that there are so many different groups combined under the Republican banner we can find the differences between them and blow them out of proportion to start infighting and have them tear their own coalition apart. One thing that we need to keep in mind when trying to come up with stuff to focus on is the fact that the lower level Republicans are uninformed, ignorant, overly emotional, and have a religious belief that their party is the correct one annointed by God. Higher level Republicans are cold, calculating, and willing to exploit anyone and everyone to keep their ignorant followers hooked. If you want to understand the Republican party's relationship between their followers and their leadership, your best bet is to research religious cults and gang psychology. We also need to find out what aspects of their core values we can find contradictions in, and bring indirect attention on those contradictions and get their party to fight itself. I think that we do a decent job of this on some levels, but we could do better. We have to realize that we can't defeat them, but we can help them defeat themselves.
Revelation #8 -- Actions speak louder than words. This is something that I still am not sure about and would hope that people here can help me figure out what we need to do. The opening of what I've written today deals with this. I'm convinced that most of what we do is a waste of time. I can't convince my conservative parents that I am correct by bringing in evidence and presenting facts to them. They will be the last ones to believe me, long after everyone else in the world. We also waste time by writing letters to our politicians, protesting, and in some cases even writing to the media. The right wing has control of the media, and corporations have finaincial control of the media and most of our politicians. We simply can't win by writing petitions or anything else like that. Every media victory we've had in the past few years has been subverted. The discussion of Bush's questionable military service was killed by the CBS documents. Abu Ghraib is nothing more than a college prank where a few soldiers made naked prisoners get in a pyramid. We can not win this fight with words, no matter how many listeners we can get, because the right will find a way to twist it or drown it out.
So what does this leave us to do? I'm not sure. I do think it is a great idea to help local politicians and be involved locally. The effect we can have at home is tremendous. We also need to remain informed so when the time is right we have the knowledge of what we can do. Live your life in such a way that it exhibits your morals and things you believe in. I eat organic foods, small amounts of meat (very little beef), and enjoy walking and other forms of exercise for many reasons, one of which is because I'd like to outlive the conservative pricks. I refuse to be polite to conservative idiots just to keep the peace, with a few exceptions, where I will tell them that it is inappropriate to discuss it at the moment.
Even this is not enough though. I don't really know what we need to do, but I am tired of wasting my time canvassing or debating with people who are not playing by the same rules that I am. We need to be more aggressive, more outspoken, and much more active than our opposition. We must come up with our own rules of engagement, our own things to stand for that are not tied to what the Republicans believe in. We need to take more action, even in things that would seem ridiculous or sneaky at times. We need to do more. What do we need to do? I don't know, you tell me.
Revelation #9 -- I'm wasting my time. All of these words posted, and I doubt they will make any difference. Those of you who read it this long are probably just as passionate as me if not moreso about making our country and our world a better place, but also just as frustrated with the lack of options we have. You're probably going to agree with most of what I said, shake your heads, maybe post a comment, then move on to the next topic. I think we really need to come up with an image stronger than "not to think of an elephant" and we need to be willing to do more than our opponents are willing to do. Unfortunately, on a large level I don't think we will, so unless I participate with my focus on the local level, all of this is a waste of my time and yours.
Revelation #10 -- We are the proles. We can't depend on anyone else.