There are a few things that I want in this world: some sort of attachment to my bike that would allow me to carry things, a cooking thermometer, more shelving. Most of what I want is material and not particularly important; I can carry most things in my backpack, assess approximate water temperature on the back of my hand, and continue to pile papers and books and work materials on top of each other. But one thing that I really want, that isn't material and that is important, is the luxury of outrage.
My rent is rising a hundred dollars. My husband just got a bill from the dentist that is a hundred dollars more than we expected. Gas prices have stayed high even though summer was over two months ago. Food prices have gone up in the past year or so. I'm accumulating massive amounts of debt by going to school and at the same time, working for some big crappy corporation that seems to be constantly on the verge of firing me so they can make even bigger profits and trying to run a business from my home. Even if I had more time to make more money, I wouldn't have the energy from it. My resources are finite and almost completely stretched to the limit already.
Yet I'm better off than a lot of people in this country. I have a job and shelter, food, and a car, skills and family to fall back on if I absolutely need to. I would say that I'm above average intelligence and take great pride in the fact that I can innovate ways to do things when necessary. I'm young, mostly healthy in body and mind, and have managed to avoid a lot of the problems that hold other people back, like having children too young or getting stuck in a low-wage, dead-end job. Even just having a computer and internet connection puts me ahead of a lot of people.
And I still can't muster the "proper" outrage most of the time.
I don't have the time or the money or the support to be outraged; I'm too busy trying to keep myself alive. I'm too busy struggling to carry my own burden to throw it on someone else, or to take on any more. Every last ounce of me is already devoted to just maintaining my life and maybe (hopefully) getting a little step up. I want to be outraged. I wish my biggest worry was some abstract fear of mistreatment by my own government. But that's a minor consideration next to fear of losing shelter, food, work, and health. If I don't have any of these, the government is the least of my worries; homelessness, hunger, unemployment, and serious debilitating illness are far more threatening to me at any given moment than some minute chance that I might be tortured or held indefinitely (a possibility about as likely, at this point in time, as another terrorist attack).
This is a major blind spot that I encounter constantly here, securely middle-class liberals acting as though everyone has the same abilities and time and energy to ferret out the information we share with each other and get worked up about it. But it requires a certain security - not the homeland kind, but the personal kind - that a lot of people don't have. Kossacks love to call Americans stupid, to say that they are too complacent and comfortable, but it seems to me to be exactly the opposite: most Americans are too busy knocking down the daily obstacles directly in front of them to look up and see the greater problems hanging just above their heads. Condemning them for this just drives them away from the party more. The Republicans are, we all know, oblivious to the suffering of the common people, but so are a lot of Democrats.
It makes me feel completely alienated to read comments that never take into consideration the very real difficulties in my life and the effect those difficulties have on my political involvement, and I'm a firm Democrat. It makes me angry to see calls for things like general strikes that give no indication of the logistics necessary for such an act, that seem to ignore the fact that so many people are simply not in a position where such a thing can be done or would matter if it could. So I can only imagine how a tentative liberal would feel faced with the same sentiments.
Many Kossacks seem to idolize the populists of the early 20th Century and wish for such a movement, without ever realizing that the populists took care of the basic needs of the people before asking them to help in the political movement. And so I guess the point of me writing this is meta, in a way: hoping that I can inject some pragmatism into the idealism, and help us build a real movement rather than a castle in the clouds. If we prioritize the basic needs of a huge part of the population, we can not only give them reason to support the Democratic Party above the Republican, we can give them the luxury of outrage.