speaking up

Instead of doing what I usually do in reaction to big events, like linking to some article or video where someone is articulating my feeling much better than I could, I'm going to speak in my own words. There is a theocratic cancer spreading across the world and it has to be dealt with, by force if necessary, and that seems increasingly necessary, sad to say. Its epicenter is the United States. It's not that bad here in Canada, yet, but I don't like the trends. The right to an abortion is over in the US, red states are passing trigger laws immediately in reaction to the supreme court, and soon republicans will be in total control and pass a federal ban. This is a big deal of course, but it's not that alone compelling me to write. Climate change overshadows everything, and it's related. The religious zealots are moving like a blitzkrieg to end gay rights, abortion rights, women's rights, everybody's rights except those for white male property-owners, the rights of corporations to maximize profit, and the rights of people who demand to own thirty assault rifles. They're part of a fundamentalist death-cult that, literally and without exaggeration, wants to bring about the "end times". This is what they say they believe. In an age of climate change and nuclear weapons, this group of people are an existential threat to life on this planet. They're not only apathetic about the many dire threats to our safety, health, and quality of life, they're actively accelerating those threats, because it fulfills an ancient prophecy they think is cool. Google the recent texas republican convention if you need education on this - it's not an outlier, it's representative.

There's no point mincing words, it's a christian thing. It's not all christians OF COURSE, I'm not anti-christian or anti-religion. My parents are as good exemplars of the worthwhile christian values as you can find. But it's a certain group of christians, unfortunately large, powerful, extremist, and absolutely insane. It's not even the crazy fundies in the jewish or muslim cults, as awful as they are, because they don't have the same level of end-times fanaticism in combination with control of financial, military, and media resources.

I don't know what to say to americans. Vote harder? Yes, vote, but that is a bare minimum, nowhere near sufficient to even begin to address the emergency, because the only viable opposition party is useless. Democrats control the senate, house, and executive branch. There's things they can do, laws they can pass. They can abolish the filibuster. They could even just do a carve out to abolish it on one issue, like they did about the debt ceiling. I've heard every excuse from establishment dems about why they're powerless, and I'm not buying it. They've demonstrated time and time again through action and omission of action that they don't actually care - they believe they themselves will be insulated and it will be others who suffer. If they wanted to fight this there's many things they could at least attempt, but they're doing nothing except performative bullshit. Poems, songs, rhetoric, deflecting blame, telling people to just vote more, WHEN THEY'RE IN POWER RIGHT FUCKING NOW! They seem to almost be celebrating it as a fundraising opportunity.

It's so much worse than most people realize. People love to quote MLK, about the moral arc of the universe bending towards justice, but that isn't a given. Things can get worse, it's happening right now, and there's not necessarily a pendulum swing back toward sanity - that notion has been discredited by the last two decades. The republicans attempted a coup last year, they're forcing unpopular policies on the whole country, and they're still going to sweep to power in the mid-terms because they've stacked the supreme court, suppressed voting, circumvented democracy, and.... the weakness of the corporate-captured democratic party has aided this massively. It was not inevitable that there would be a mid-term rout, Biden was popular when he got in, and he could have built on that by passing popular policies and messaging effectively, rather than pissing it away. The leadership is rotten to the core, from Pelosi, Schumer, Clyburn, and Jeffries, through Biden and Harris and the Clintons and Obamas, to their cheerleaders on MSNBC and in the New York Times and Washington Post.

Take over the democratic party? Yes, god bless those americans that are trying, but the gerontocracy running it and their hand-picked successors are resisting the most reasonable and minor change to the bitter end. They'll happily lose elections and burn their own house to the ground if it allows them to keep their power and position within it.

So, electoral reform seems the obvious next step, so a third party can get in, but how do you even get that off the ground from where it's at now? There's not even a seed. There's Andrew Yang's stupid "forward" party that's really just status-quo neoliberalism with better branding. There's the "people's party" which is an obvious grift. There's the green party which has well-demonstrated over the last twenty years they're not serious about power. There's the libertarians, who want to accelerate climate change for different reasons than religious nuts (the free market is their god, and demands human sacrifice) but the result is the same. And there's advocacy groups like "fair vote" I guess, but c'mon. There isn't time for multi-generational projects. Do it, try it, sure, if there's nothing better to do, but can you chew gum and triage at the same time?

I have some respect for those members of older generations who are hanging on to notions of pacifism, even institutionalism. I get the sentiment, but that's all it is any more, a sentiment, born of a time when things actually were getting better and it was rational to keep such hopes alive. I think they just don't or can't understand where the world is now. It's regrettable, to put it mildly, that we've come to this. I don't want to have to fight, I'm 5'3, 120lbs, and I only like shooting guns in video games. I'm not a tough guy, I don't even like to fight verbally. But I do think a soul can be remolded quickly under duress. And I suspect that bullies often discover the people they enjoyed pushing around are not so fun to mess with after they flip and fight back. That's what these christofascists are, bullies. They love collecting guns and making threats and intimidating normies, because they think they'll never have to actually get bloodied. And hell, I don't want to bleed, or shed blood, but it's looking like that ship sailed. These times call for a kind of citizen participation that is lost to the popular imagination in the western world these days, a WWII-style mobilization. I'm not a doomer and I'm not against hope, I just don't see any hope in clinging to ideas of decency and bipartisanship when they've become irrelevant. The only hope I see is in finally meeting force with force.

What kind of force am I talking about? Well, religious-right fanatics are going on killing sprees and forming militias and trying to overthrow governments. There is nothing like this on the left, don't anyone give me any bullshit about antifa. Anti-fascists were killing nazis back in 1939-1945, for good reason, but that was a long time ago. I don't think terrorism is moral or strategic, that's not what I want. What I do want is, maybe what you'd call militancy, a deterrent to terrorism, some alternative to just sitting around and taking it. At some point, the defenders of democracy and human rights need to become militant when they're under sufficient threat.

I guess what I'm saying is, people need to understand the stakes, and be willing to think clearly about what is necessary and what we're up against: a small minority of fanatics who are holding the world hostage to their schizophrenic delusions. There's a larger group (still minority) of people, mostly white and male, who fall for the anti-woke propaganda, and allow the cringey excesses of some college kids to flip their formerly-held common-sense views on racism and economics - but these aren't death-cultists. I don't think they would sign on for doing the book of revelations. I don't know exactly what the situation calls for, maybe not violence, yet, but I keep amending that opinion the more history happens in front of me, I keep revising it a little more toward, to quote JFK: Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent revolution necessary.

I don't know what I hope to achieve with this post. I have maybe five followers, and they're not here for my politics I don't think, so if you think I'm being hysterical or irresponsible, fine, unfollow. Maybe I'm just venting. There are plenty of people who say this better, my voice I think comes off sounding a bit unhinged, unnuanced, and trite, but I just wanted to add my voice, damn the awkwardness and emotion. I'm glad I spoke up, in my own little way, anyway.