Obviously, there was some right on right violence recently that took center stage and immediately, some people were asking for the rhetoric from “bOtH SiDeS” to tone down. I just want to write out my thoughts on why some people were rubbed the wrong way by that and hope to shed some light on at least how some people are thinking, if anyone is unfortunate enough to have an ADHD riddled brain and is taking a tolerance break at the wrong time like myself.
Being terminally online in spurts, especially recently, I was absorbing a lot of hot-takes and I saw a several mixed signals from people – especially on the left as it seems there are individual struggling with these thoughts and I hope maybe this can help shine some light on the perspective and someone who’s actually good at writing and feels this way might even be able to run further with it. I promise I will even end on what we could do to shift some things (could do, not how to do – Jesus, if I knew how I’d be screaming it in the streets).
So, what’s a similar energy to try to sum up the point? Imagine you’re playing with a sibling, and they break something. If a parent punishes both of you without seeing who’s at fault, it feels unjust. This is similar to what happens when calls for ‘both sides’ to tone down rhetoric ignore who is actually inciting violence.
But why? I had to think about it. The phrase ‘violence has no place in American politics’ ignores the reality of our history. The U.S. was founded on revolution, survived a civil war, and has engaged in numerous wars since. State-sanctioned violence and political assassinations have marked our history (four presidents killed, along with eight who had one or multiple attempts on their life). Shout out to the ol’ Bull Moose for objectively the coolest response to an assassination attempt. This context makes it disingenuous to pretend that current political violence is an anomaly. Let’s touch on more:
- Our entertainment is like, 90% violence and 5% sex. That should totally be the other way around. (‘Boobs not bullets’ as a campaign slogan??)
- We have enough guns for every mosquito in the nation
- Just… just look at what twitter’s up to. Eww. The right wingers are calling for all kinds of violence almost immediately after several sources were corroborating the shooter’s right wing leanings.
- We make a ton of money SELLING WEAPONS OF WAR
- This one might be a little gray, so I saved it for the last bullet point. Social policies, or the lack thereof, can be forms of indirect violence. For instance, the failure to address homelessness or child hunger, or allowing insurers to deny claims through loopholes, perpetuates suffering and inequality. These policies disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, reflecting systemic violence.
So, yeah, this why it feels so wrong to hear people say there’s no place for it, because it seems to be living here, rent free. These platitudes fall incredibly flat without acknowledgement that hollow words is all they are. We’re just not in a world where that’s reality and it’s foolish to not acknowledge pragmatically what we’re all dealing with.
The problem is the gun was pointed at a useful tool and not wielders. President Business Deals (so called by another local Ohioan writing at https://www.rooster.info/ – this dude’s doing the lord’s work, for sure) is a weird mix of narcissism, insecurity, and a strangely unique inability to form a coherent sentence. What needs to happen is the cult needs to deprogram and understand that they are correct in being angry, but the gutting of the education system has lead us to see what a democracy looks like when people don’t know how to connect dots and know who to be angry at. The left, on the other hand, need to let go of purity tests and divisive subdivisions* and focus on the same thing the right needs to: the fucking parasite class.
Class consciousness died when the New Deal stepped in to create what I would (mis)label as a form of social democracy. I don’t know if that’s technically correct, but it kind of fits the ideals, right? But, anyway, unions were strong and slowly there was complacency and also the quiet eroding of the New Deal from the day it was enacted. So class consciousness disappeared, but is only just starting to be talked about more and more as it’s slowly starting to reawaken. We need to understand that we’re all the proletariat. If we’re not able to get money out of politics through legislation, maybe we should start to set our sights on those who have more than enough for several lifetimes. The saying that’s made its rounds online comes to mind – if researchers saw a monkey hoarding bananas in the wild while other monkeys had little to nothing, they would be studying the hoarder monkey to see what the actual fuck was wrong with it.
*What I mean by divisive subdivisions is that we have to be pragmatic now. Unfortunately, the dems ostensibly represent all leftists in the nation and will until we can enact ranked choice voting while standing up parties that align with different views. However, the dem party also needs to realize that and be more open to inviting more leftists who want to end neoliberalism to the table. So, I didn’t want to derail the point above so put this down here. =)
