Wow, we just passed the 10th anniversary of Sep. 11. An event that changed so many countries forever, and affected so many lives, including my own. But we Kossacks have spent this week mostly at each other's throat, not even about meta anymore (e.g., what's Obama's game plan? Is he "with us" or "against us" etc.) - now it's about meta-meta.
Da Purge. Da Boycott. Yada Yada.
My heart is with Markos. I know how it feels to be a disgruntled parent. I am a lousy parent when frustrated - just ask my 3 boys. It's a universal debacle, found (I like to believe) at every home once in a while: the chaos, the acting-up, the lame-ass excuses and bad faith between siblings. So you just go wielding your mean-daddy axe, meting out quick judgment and getting some semblance of peace and quiet.
----- Start of Israel-Palestine Digression (skipping allowed) -----------------------
Yes, innocent heads will fly. At this moment, a superb 7-year veteran member called "weasel", a prolific diarist and one of the site's best Middle East analysts, who also pioneered the amazing coverage and sense of connection we've enjoyed here during the Arab Spring - is banned (hopefully temporarily). Apparently, a balancing act with the banning of... an 8-year veteran (name withheld) who published some four(!) diaries per year. The rest of this other member's site time was spent making nasty comments in diaries he didn't like, reeking of ad-hominems and baiting flamewars.
On a positive note, apparently the swing of Markos' daddy-axe has finally picked at the tip of the iceberg of an entrenched and well-camouflaged pattern of collective bad-faith behavior in Israel-Palestine threads, a pattern in which that said user was master and mentor. In my own 5-year experience, this pattern has been the main engine poisoning Israel-Palestine threads; look no further. Naturally, the group of offenders is now kicking, screaming, and once again trying to camouflage themselves in this summer's favorite colors: "fighting against bigotry" of all sorts - anti-LGBT, anti-Black, anti-Jewish. Somehow, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry never make it into their solemn list of evils to fight against - but all for the better. Kossacks are finally wisening up to the game, realizing that the allegedly intractable symmetry of bad behavior between "I"s and "P"s has been fake. So maybe this ugly game is up, and the Israel-Palestine corner can move back from flame and poison to substance and activism.
---------------- End of Digression; back to main topic ---------------------------
I don't know much about other sectors of the site, and our I-P corner is a bit unique in the challenges it faces. However. If we all just return to the established Daily Kos routine - free speech or not, bans rescinded or not, and a rich helping of meta - eventually more policing and prosecution will be needed. Then more, and more. This is not the progressive way. The progressive way is to look for root causes and fix them, to implement effective prevention.
The ill winds periodically blowing through the heart of the community, whether in 2008 between Obamabots and Hillarybots, or this year w.r.t. to the President, are mostly the result of collective frustration.
Markos and this community have built one heck of a platform. Some of the best news and analysis, written by citizen journalists and analysts, can be found here. Almost as important: some of the best rants are here, when rants are in order. And if you are a progressive Democratic politician, or (almost) any Democrat looking for some election fundraising and support, this site is an amazing vehicle.
But what the progressive grassroots need - MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE, DAMMIT! - is a vehicle in the opposite direction: to help us take back the country, affect its agenda, change its course, make our politicians accountable. And in this, elections or not, news, rants, etc. notwithstanding - Daily Kos has been a miserable failure, even an obstacle.
Because what we really need is a tool to help us get masses of asses onto the streets. Not in the service or at the calling of this or that politician running for election. At the service of causes. Of issues. Of values. Of democracy.
It is high time for Americans to take a cue from other countries - first and foremost the Arab Spring. If Israelis, for all the mutual disdain and animosity that sometimes prevail between us and the Arabs, could do just that and erupt into the Israeli Summer, then Americans can bring about the American version of Tahrir in 2011-2012.
The devastating plutocratic status quo that strangles us all will not change unless we go to protest en masse, and keep on protesting until we are heard and heeded. And any progressive forum that does not do everything it can to help us do it, any site that channels our energies in other directions (or even worse, into poisonous meta and meta-meta) - is in the way.
Follow me for a some more. Some meat about real activism.
Re-introducing myself in case a reader who doesn't know me comes across this.
I am an 45-year-old Jewish Israeli. Have been Stateside for the past 9 years (we have dual citizenship, thank you very much).
Israelis from roughly my age and younger - our Generations X, Y and Z - have been notorious as one of the most apathetic, cynical, short-attentioned, short-sited constituencies under the Sun. Most of us don't bother to read the news, only "Reality Shows". And in recent years the Israeli public has been consumed by escapist consumerism and hedonism. That, and stupidly blaming Arabs and "Leftists" for all trouble whenever trouble erupts.
If, two months ago, you had told anyone who knows mainstream Israel - myself included - that by the summer's end, week after week, hundreds of thousands of those hopeless apathists will crowd city squares screaming "The People Demand Social Justice!!!!" - you would be institutionalized as a dangerous lunatic. But this is precisely what happened this summer.
That's not all. Those apathetic Israelis have started talking to each other politics and policy and values, to develop a new debating culture and and build diverse agenda, in tent encampmants and other venues all over the country. People have started to see right through the government bluffs that have worked so well. And enough of them seem determined enough, not to back off until they see a change.
To top it off, this movement has started from the most unlikely of sources - a young woman immediately recognizable as a "North Tel-Aviv Ashkenazi Leftie" - the Israeli analogue to "Clueless Latte-Sipping Pinko Librul from the Left Coast". Ladies and gentlement, here's Daphni Leef on July 16, inviting everyone to the first Rotschild tent encampment.
Leef exemplifies the demographic and political identity whose public image has been run most thoroughly through the Israeli mud in recent decades. It is no wonder that the first response from government circles was "this is a radical-left protest, so join us as always, for the ritual collective spit in their faces, and then let's move on, nothing to see". This punchline has worked so well, like a clock - until this summer when it exploded in the government's face.
What happened? What has changed? I'm sure heaps of words will be written about this when the time comes. But this much is clear: there were enough people, determined enough, to form a critical mass. The public need was there. The people needed a spark, and they couldn't care less whether that spark looks like them. So in the end, the initial organizers' identity in the stupid "divide and rule" culture-wars didn't matter at all. The public joined hands with them. And the Israeli public now loves that North Tel-Aviv Ashkenazi Leftie, Daphni Leef.
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I'm no Egypt expert, but this Israeli Summer seems to be a (yet-unharvested) repeat of Tahrir. In Egypt, too, there was an unlikely coalition across social gaps. A notoriously apathetic public gears into action and becomes an unstoppable force. The government first plays ignore, then scare (and beat up and shoot), then duck and wait. The public persists. The public wins.
Now America.
There was never, never a real majority support to invade Iraq without international backing. Imagine, if after the huge massive demonstrations of February 15 2003 in attempt to prevent the Iraq war, we had persisted week after week like The Arabs of Egypt and Tunisia, and the Jews and Arabs of Israel, have persisted in 2011. Could Bush et al. have continued ignoring them?
Trying to stop the war was the defining issue of this generation's progressive movement. And we have failed. We had many more chances after 2003. Iraq featured heavily in the 2004 campaign, and Bush had no answers. But most of us settled for watching the debates and the polls, for putting down some $ for TV ads, and for manning phone banks. When we should have been in the streets - not for this or that candidate, but to stop that damn war.
By 2006 the war had become an undeclared genocide. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, a destroyed civilization, no end in sight. A millstone around Bush's neck, and a godsend to Democratic politicians, who in those days presided over one of American history's most anemic oppositions. The public's wish to stop the Iraq war, and its disgust with the Katrina scandals, gave Democratic politicians a Congressional majority that (on a personal level) they did not deserve. So it was no huge surprise that after they won, they turned around and let the war continue. And needless to say, they didn't do almost anything about Katrina either.
Why? Because we were not out in the streets forcing their hands, holding them accountable. Actually, I personally was in the streets. From 2004 to 2007, almost on a weekly basis, I ran a small anti-war vigil on the junction near our family housing. Usually with 2-3 other freaks and my kids and a couple of their friends. Holding candles. We hoped to be one of the sparks. The drivers loved us - they honked and all. But there was no means, no tool out there to connect all the millions who were sick and tired of that shameless needless massacre, and of the spineless politicians who made promises with very little intention of fulfilling them.
When we could piggy-back the vigil onto a Move On event, I always posted it - and then we saw 50, 100, even 200 people around the junction, making a presence. I tried to collect emails, to start a listserv. I'm a lousy organizer. And Move-On is a top-down organization. The grassroots can't get their agenda up their slippery organizational stonewall. Daily Kos too, despite having way more grassroots features, is still a top-down operation.
The Arab Spring, the Israeli Summer, and other similar revolutions, the good ones not the sinister ones, they always work from the bottom up, driven from the grassroots.
Daily Kos needs to become an enabler and greenhouse for grassroots, on-the-ground, development of REAL activism and protests. God knows we need this. By now, the list of critical life-or-death issues is not just "Iraq" or "Iraq and Global Warming" - by now the list is endless.
Whenever someone starts a serious discussion about using this site for activism, the inevitable idiot will come around the corner throwing the book at them - waving the famous 2004 Markos rant about "electing more and better Democrats" as if it was the goddamn 200+ year old Constitution, as if this precludes anything else.
What about being a little reality-based? Learning from this past decade? This site did wonders to try and elect more and better Democrats. But even "better Democrats" are only politicians. If you don't pressure them and hold them accountable while in power, they will forget you and sometimes even piss on your faces. Even during this site's short existence, this has happened again and again and again and again. So learn from reality, please.
We.
Need.
To.
Go.
Out.
To.
The.
STREETS.
NOW. NOW.
And stay there.
And we need to think big. Settle for nothing less than a change in the entire direction of this huge mishandled ship of a nation.
The nightmare won't end until we do it.
...With all the brave activism face I put here and elsewhere, I'm still a Gen-X heart and soul. I have family job etc. etc., and a million other ready excuses for not showing up. You will need to drag me to the streets.
Please, Daily Kos. Drag me. Help us drag each other into the streets.
Once and for all, justify your existence. Use it to make the world a better place in a big way.
Thank you. God bless you all.