I'm reading a lot tonight about Black Lives Matter disrupting Netroots Nation and the appearances of Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley. A common thread among commenters seems to be - why are you attacking your friends and the people who hold your interests most in common and who have been most in union with you? Don't you know you're working against your own best interests? How can you be so obtuse?
And at first, I have to say, that I was fully in accord with those comments. BLM is attacking the wrong target, don't they know who their friends are? Why aren't they attacking Republicans, etc.?
All I can say is I had an epiphany and I suddenly understood why it is necessary to sometimes attack those who are believed to be your friends and who are supposed to be on your side. I also came to understand how it is that sometimes your best friends can become, if not your enemy, a very close substitute.
This all comes back to a concept that has been discussed ad nauseum on the various liberal and Democratic web sites I have frequented over the years - lesser evil.
Our party may disappoint us, but they are still the lesser evil. They don't give us all that we want or need but they give us something, even if that something is as amorphous as hope for a better tomorrow or judges that may be more wise in the future, or a prospect that our small lives, while grim, are not as grim as they could be. Our party is our friend, it wishes us the best, it wishes it could do better for us, but it is constrained, after all by the boundaries of what is achievable in the base and corrupt world in which we exist. It could be worse. We could have the Greater Evil, the Republicans, who are always huffing and puffing and threatening to blow our houses down and often succeeding.
Why would anyone address any complaint or concern or issue to the Republicans? We know they don't care. So it only makes sense to address the people who say they care and who are supposed to care, which would be Democrats and which would be the most liberal and progressive of the Democrats - Do more! Do it faster! Do it better! People are dying here! Embrace this cause!
And yet, if we want to brutally honest, we would have to admit that Democrats in general have been very poor protectors overall. They took torture and going to war under false pretenses "off the table" as too painful to discuss or review. They sold us hope for a better future, but then gave us a world which still ignored the financial crimes of the oligarchs, and still turned a blind eye to the rampant and blatant judicial and policing injustices served up to POC on a daily basis around the nation.
Democrats and Liberals and Progressives deserve to have their asses kicked. We've tolerated too little for too long. We've accepted the concept of "lesser evil" without recognizing that "lesser evil" turns out to be the greater evil because it paves the road for the greatest evil through incremental acceptance of what we will tolerate.
Now apply that same lesson that Black Lives Matter is teaching us to every nook and cranny of what we have grown to tolerate under the supposedly benign rule of our current Democratic Party.