We live in a culture where saying is doing, and the people who are actually doing are told to shut the fuck up and keep doing or else.
What’s really fucked up about that is how so many of us are conditioned to accept that as just the way things are, as if nothing can be changed, as if it’s inherent in our nature to listen to the rich assholes who placed themselves at the top of the human food chain.
As if it’s natural evolution.
Or apocalyptic climate change, natch.
I think I am drawn to social economic systems (but I repeat myself) like anarchism and communism is because they start from the position that no one has the right to command me based merely on their existence.
In essence, the chain of authority between a doctor, a nurse, and a patient is not the same as a chain of authority between a king, his officers, and their vassals.
In our culture, especially US culture, these are seen as comparable. A president can tell me to do something, and if I don’t do it, I can be imprisoned or shot. Why? What gives that president the right to tell me what to do? Their office? Fuck that shit. I didn’t vote for them. How were they even qualified for that office? They bribed enough people? They lied more than the average human being? That’s not a qualification, that’s a flaw.
It’s why I get so upset with white supremacy and the baked in “law and order” positions so many people here hold. “Law and order” is not the reasonable position that laws are made to protect people, and thus order and obedience to those laws protect lives, but rather that the law is used to keep people in line, and more obedient to their oppression.
Laws in the United States don’t exist to protect lives, or to help people improve their lot in our society. They exist to keep people in line and quiet while those who control the authorities who carry the gun rob the banks and leave us to fight over the loose change, and they encourage that system.
Oh, and when I say “they,” I don’t mean some shadowy government cabal, I mean corporations, their CEOs, and the politicians who willingly take compensation from them to enforce their corporate policy.
You don’t have to pretend there’s some secret shadow government that controls the world, because the people who control the direction in which the world moves can be found in the Fortune 500 and Forbes Magazine. They’re listed right there.
It’s also why I’m not a Christian. I don’t do well with “do as I say or burn in hell for eternity but also I love you.” That’s abusive. That is an abusive relationship, and I will have no part in my own abuse. You know who knows where I’m coming from? People who have been abused and have pushed back, angering their abusers and the people who benefited from your abuse.
They know, just like I know, and they won’t accept it any more, either.
I think we’re seeing that here in the US, too. Not so much regarding Christianity (although there is a core component of fundamentalist Christianity involved in this), but people who have been abused by politicians long enough, who have been abused by authority long enough, and are pushing back.
This is making people on the fence angry, because they benefit from the status quo of your abuse, and will harangue you for not cowing and choosing their preferred abuser.
I’ve made mistakes in my life, many mistakes, but I have always worked to minimize harm to others, to reduce my negative effect on people, on animals, on the environment itself. Unfortunately, we do live in a society that inflicts harm, and I am a part of that (there is no ethical consumption under capitalism), and the end goal should be to eliminate that system and replace it with a life affirming one.
Those do exist! Anarchism, communism, socialism, whatever you want to call it, there are social/political/economic (but I repeat myself) systems that seek to not only halt the level of harm committed against our world and its living beings, but also to take back as much of that harm as possible while improving the outlook of humanity.
It is not utopian to believe that. No, it is utopian to believe that capitalism is a force for good and that its ultimate endless expansion will somehow work out for everyone even as it ravages every system on this earth and looks to the stars for more to devour.
Those of us who look at it from the outside see it as the dystopia, as the cancer, it is.
We don’t have to settle for dystopia. It is not inevitable. This isn’t happening by some nameless, cosmic force, it’s happening because a handful of greedy fucking human beings have paid a larger subset of greedy fucking human beings to lie to the rest of us and convince us that everything is going to be fine, even as the flames start licking at our doorstep.
We don’t have to settle for death, folks. We don’t have to settle for genocidal profit. We deserve better than that.
.Red
