( – promoted by buhdydharma )
When the whole George Bush/BushCo thing happened, I was pretty much banned, among friends and family, from discussion of events in the years 2000-2004.
After 2004, the Iraq war cracked the perception of even busy busy people that things weren’t, um, going right. Not to mention the freaky weather and crazy gas prices. It must be that Bush is stupid. That’s it, they thought. It’s simple.. No. That’s not it. Bush is not stupid or compassionate or interested in the United States of America. And this is far from simple.
It’s one thing to get people seeing and even agreeing with you that the president for whom they voted is making a boatload of bad decisions. It’s totally another thing to suggest to these busy people that fascism has emerged in America. Because, and by the way, about that you are definitely NOT right. You, my friend, are a radical. And all your blah blah blah::: oncoming depression, water wars, peak oil, pandemics, broken government, broken bill of rights… becomes more threatening that any eventual occurrence of these things.
No. You are not only NOT right, but you are simply a downer. The bearer of bad news nobody wants to hear. And you know why? Because you don’t offer a credible way out.
America: Home to those of us learning to be brave in a whole new way
It’s what we lefty bloggers do. Bring bad news. A major part of the Antarctic ice shelf just collapsed. The economy is not far behind. And America? Freedoms lost, government broken, and landscape plundered. Our schools are in shambles and our army decimated by bad decisions, bad strategy, and the wrong war.
And when it finally gets personal, like people we know losing their jobs and fearful of losing their homes, it doesn’t seem to help make the point that ::: we are in trouble.
As a matter of fact, i’ve found that those more mainstream than i actually get angry. They insist that climate change is cyclic. And wars are just human nature. And that everything evens out in the wash.
It gets really heated when i say::: NO. Climate change doesn’t just happen. Such things are cyclic, sure. But cyclic due to some catastrophic event, like an asteroid hitting the planet or greenhouse gases emitted in such quantity that weather and winds change. They don’t want to hear that humans and their activities are the latest catastrophe to hit planet earth.
They don’t want to hear that we have a choice about how we act out our human nature. and that Iraq or Vietnam or WWII did not have to happen. They want our actions to be part of some unseen, unstoppable nature for which they they are not really responsible. It’s human nature: We are excused. Exempt. It’s not really our fault.
I’m sure people around me think these things, because they believe, with their whole heart, that somehow things will just work out. That there is some balance in our favor that will make it all right. You know, like God will step in and punish the wicked and free the righteous. Or something like that. People and groups like George Bush and BushCo know exactly how to exploit that willingness in humans to cede power and responsibility to monolithic institutions that promise to make everything alright.
And that’s how BushCo types get away with it. They give us specific kinds of bad news (like “others” will come to your country and try to kill you). The power play, the genius, is that they have the solutions to all of our problems. The first being: these problems are NOT OUR FAULT. That’s a biggie, not being responsible for your lifestyle choices. Those being bombarded by reality only have to give up power to BushCo and God (and make sure they continue shopping) and things will be taken care of.
God is an essential component in this sales pitch. God, working side-by-side with BushCo, Ralph Reed, the dead Jerry Falwell, will provide relief in the next life. Even if you endure nothing but crap in this one. Yes, because brothers and sisters, if you follow BushCo et al, the keys to Heaven are yours. And far more valuable then the keys to the home upon which Bank of America has just foreclosed.
See, what we lefty bloggers do is give a much scarier message: no one can solve the problems we write/talk about except us. IMO, we bloggers still haven’t formulated much in the way of effective responses to these wide-ranging and overwhelming problems. I mean, what can one person do in the face of devastating ice cap collapse? Except deny it. Or economic collapse? Except deny it.
What options do we have? Who’s in charge? Who’s got the list? How do individuals come together to fight back? What are we willing to lose? What are we willing to believe?
And what if the busy busy people are right? That this will all work out in the wash? And there really is GOD?
I’ll say it again. We need a new cadence in our words. We need to find a backdoor into our psyches to pitch our premise… that we are capable of fighting the monolithic powers. We are capable of defining the terms of engagement. We CAN understand global corporate weakness. We can find net- and grass-root candidates to send to Congress who will stand on the steps of the Capitol and call for justice and repair of our Constitution.
Can we walk away from the old infrastructures of our lives and build new ones? Hell yes… of course we can. We’ve been doing just that for 1000s of years.
Will the emerging global climate threats be met with a surge in creative thinking and innovation? Will the emerging establishment of global corporate dominance be met by a new age of enlightenment and revolution? Will we emerge from the ashes more confident and connected to the natural world? Hell yes. We’ve been doing just that for 1000s of years.
These are the opportunities we have in front of us. We have much more than bad news. We are agitating for a more equitable, sustainable, and habitable life.
We’re the harbingers alright. Not of bad news… but of the seismic shifts coming our way. Our message? We have the chance of a lifetime::: to define what going forward will look like. Now all we have to do is come up with a concise, convincing credo on how to do it.
Yeah.
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…was the way we want it to be, then maybe it will become like that. “But that’s the way things are” thinking is what keeps our lives and the world the way they are. So we resist and try to eradicate that mode of thought, try to keep flicking some switches hoping that more lights will illuminate, searching for a trigger to ignite the cascade effect that will bring that change we desire.
It starts inside each of us, with the things we can really control.
…for your opinions, pf? Their loss!
I happen to believe in God, but most certainly do not believe He will step in to punish the wicked and free the righteous on America’s behalf, any more than He sends a tornado to destroy one house while sparing the one next to it.
The problem with progressives is our common sense and realistic view of current events. And our longer attention spans. Maybe that’s why blogs are so much more popular among progressives. We take the time to think, read, write, and discuss. The right prefers to listen to Rush and rent his opinions rather then develop their own.
shit going down these days it’s really hard to settle on any
one issue. But IMHO it’s critical to find one thing, something
that even repubs can agree with, and use that as
the primary issue. Maybe the economy might be something to
consider… it sure as hell is affecting both the left and the
right!
The first blogger.
I was watching KO last night relive so many great Bushie communication (or lack there of) moments. I had to laugh out loud at what I was thinking, heh.
Two years hence when we have a Democratic President and we are being schooled daily on the real problems and real solutions, I might want to watch those clips I saw again for some ‘comic relief’. It’s hard to be smart.
I like your hopeful conclusion. Let us work on this together.
And if you are willing please cross-post at EENRblog. We have overlapping readership but some may not see the essay and it is really good food for thought.
For What It’s Worth is that list. There are perhaps many various roads and several viable courses of action to arrive at these stated milestones, but IMHO, these milestones must be achieved in order to attain “a new age of enlightenment.”
The keystone piece in solving this is the energy issue. Renewables, in a sense, are free as we rely upon our ability to capture and harvest light (solar), molecular movement (wind, hydroelctric, tidal), and heat (geothermal) that continually exist.
While the conventional sources of energy are centrally controlled by a corporate hegemony, renewables are disbursed and spread out. By shifting to renewables and forming an energy grid with multiple incremental inputs, a synergy will be formed, where the sum of the whole, (in terms of reliability and security) will be greater than the sum of each individual. This will remove the corporate hegemony’s clout, by depriving them of revenue. It will go towards solving global warming and the environment, and it will stimulte the economy by providing lower cost energy.
I kept waking up in the morning wondering why the splitting headache. I finally went to the doctor and he was stumped for quite a while. He finally asked me if I try and reason with Bush supporters or Fundamentalists, and Bingo!
The thing is, it’s no use going after Joe Blow idiot looking to convert him. It starts with the media. If the 4th estate simply asked the critical questions and maybe even framed things in logic, then it would very unfashionable to be an idiot in no time. As it is now, the media shapes so much of their content specifically for the idiots.
Cheney could walk on Russert’s show unannounced, stab the current guest in the stomach and throw him out of the chair, and then sit down and tell Russert that he has it on reliable info that Jesus is coming back within 2 weeks but Iran is plotting to blow him up. 50% of his “base”, and 80% of the “pundits” would be debating if we should only use a few nukes on Iran and try to minimize the fallout on our troops, or just let em’ fly and mourn the sacrifices.
people also find it hard to admit that they have been bamboozled. They are stuck in a false dream, a myth. It does not jibe with reality and they reject the reality in favor of the false myth.
My mailman a great guy, made my jaw drop the other day when he proclaimed I shouldn’t believe the environmentalist literature he delivers. “It’s just the politician’s trying to scare you “. I was literally speechless, what to say to this guy? I still don’t know.
This Christmas my sister in law, a Democrat in name asked me not to be unpleasant at Christmas dinner. She doesn’t want to hear about it. I didn’t go. I felt cowardly.
On a positive side those that for years in my off line community thought I was wasting my time on the net, now call and ask for information. They ask what are the blogs saying? Another break through my right wing son has gone from asking me if I dropped his ‘lefty’ brother on his head to telling me that if Obama was president it would be interesting.
I have also changed although still a hot head I have learned that head on confrontation just entrenches disbelief and justification. Nobody wants to be the bad guy, or admit they were duped. They are not stupid. They just prefer to live in a dream. Reality is now confronting this dream, in the form of ice selves falling, wars raging, and their castles being foreclosed.
I will agree CO2 might have a slight influence when the High Altitude Auroral Research Project is as common in pop American culture as the color of Britney Spears underware.
I want every American to realize all of the consumer goods they buy are crappier by design, outsourcing (and it’s resulting technology gap) or because products are deliberately engineered to fail.
Last but not least the inscription and message of the Georgia Guidestones along with it’s plausible explanation are as commonly known in this country as the Ten Comandments.
Happy Trails.