[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]
Sorry to stop sliding in the tubes so suddenly for the weekend, but I became ill on Friday. Bummer. I’m supposed to be on rest again today but I do want to pixelize a few thoughts before I’m off.
A very, very good essay Saturday at Daily Kos that I was too weak to comment at the time, a completely understandable crush of frustration at little people American’s ability to take abuse, there is no tipping point. We’ll never get real change until everyone rejects the notion plain citizens are not merely easily-manipulated economic chattel, why aren’t we at least as mad as the Europeans rightfully are?
Oh, there’s a tipping point, all right, there always is. History and political science have veritable handfuls of rebellion from little people’s who would not take it anymore—many successful, many not—but the overriding characteristic of all was the appallingly long period of horrible abuse, often up to six or eight generations (czarist Russia) before the tipping point commenced.
Human beings crave authority and belonging to an identifiable cohesive group. It takes a horrendous amount of negative sustained abuse to break out of those behavioral patterns. Of course from a dry macro perspective one shouldn’t abuse little people to avoid the violent chaos of rebellion, but my position is that the immediate hellish pain of a dysfunctional society is a failure of governing duty reaching into unforgivable levels.
Interestingly, the most glaring variable to commencing rebellion or tipping points is the significant absence of available women to marry for a generation or two of young men. Very fast very bad trouble consistently happens when young men can’t settle down, leaving out all tangled sociology of it, ultimately the males come out looking rightfully deficient in with a significant amount of growing up to do, a rather familiar story for humanity, yes.
[sigh] I’m feeling tired. But the point, so to speak, is that the process of regressive abuse is always horrific just for the first generation, let alone all that have to follow, let alone all the horrific risks and consequence from it all.
It’s my opinion we’ve been in denouement to democracy since that awful Ronald Reagan was inflicted upon us, the results are glaringly obvious what abuse to the American little people have wrought. Currently we are in the second generation of degradation with a horrific 20% poverty rate among our children. The obliviousness to the amount of societal risk we deem to America with that appalling statistic truly is remarkable, never mind all the howling misery of it.
Turning that around American 21st century variable set requires an industrial policy for little people and the earth, not corporations, and a complete abandonment of warfare and the military-industrial complex, we’ll never be able to take care of our people being so smashingly militaristic. Those are the two great tasks before us.
Not that anybody gives a shit, right, but my general political optimism meter will teeter in the present in tuned to how aligned we are as a country to those great goals. Yep, I’m one sunny happy dude most days, yeah.
I’m going to labor in my food bank garden after apologizing to noweasals of Daily Kos for storming around her thread enraged on Thursday or Friday, I don’t remember precisely, I wasn’t in the mood to get my game on when I knew I must be ill soon. Excuses are always lousy and I’ll feel much better for just being plain sorry at fucking up, then some California sunshine in a tiny oasis of gifts for anyone who is hungry.
Such is life. I don’t know if I’ll ever see those great goals accomplished, but in the meantime there is always a great deal to do, it isn’t hard to make the world a better place with your own two hands, no matter the great tide of events all around us.