It ain’t easy being liberal in America.
Put simply, liberals appeal to peoples sense of humanity, which Conservatives appeal to our inhumanity and selfishness. Liberals can see a problem or injustice and understand it as such, even if it does not affect them personally. It’s increasingly clear that “Republican” is really just a clinical term for “person completely lacking empathy”. When they call for a small government, they mean “small enough to cover my every need, but no one else’s”.
Empathy lets us care about the well being of others. Empathy allows us to look beyond our own individual and group needs, work towards the common good and is the foundation of Civil Society. I’m a big fan of Civilization and I don’t think you can have a successful civilization without empathy. Empathy makes us fully human and it is is the essential thing that most conservatives apparently lack. I’ve been told there are these people – “good people” – who are also right-wing conservatives. People who really do seem to want good things for other people, not wish anyone ill, but just cannot see beyond what touches them personally, and even then, it’s kind of sketchy. It’s as if they just lack a calculable ability to empathize with others – they cannot seem to get that other people’s experiences aren’t the same as theirs, nor can they imagine that what has benefitted them may have hurt others. I know if they were able to walk even half a mile in the shoes of a black person, a gay person, a poor white family who relies on government to eat, or a non-Christian, they’d understand…but they really do seem blank-eyed in the face of this – incapable of that kind of imagination or empathy. And they are so willing to buy into this reflexive, vindictive meanness that infects their party. I can tolerate differences of opinion, but I hate bullies.
Margaret Thatcher said, famously, “There is no such thing as Society”. She was wrong and she had no empathy. Empathy is the foundation of Civil Society and the only thing that sustains us when people with no empathy act. The purpose of society is to pool our resources and help one another live better lives.
Its hard being a liberal when half the country is made up of blood thirsty gun fetishists and you never know when someone is going to shoot you. It’s hard being a dignified person who solemnly condemns America’s obsession with rapid-fire exploding projectiles instead of pointing fingers and name-calling, screaming about lawlessness and anarchy.
It’s hard being a liberal because we are not motivated solely by greed. And since we aren’t driven solely by greed, we don’t have a big problem with leaving all the rubes cash in their pockets, for To those who are members of “favored” groups and have limited imagination, conservativism appeals because they feel it’s important to hold onto those things they, themselves value or that have benefitted them. I have no argument with retaining things of value – my argument is with most conservatives’ inagbility to see that the “good old days” were not good for everyone, or to acknowledge their own perspective is not the only “real” one, and to adjust their views accordingly.
Remember the last election cycle when you literally had people shouting “let them die” at the republican convention? Like what Jesus would have wanted? Because someone who does not qualify for insurance (like myself, my boyfriend and every single one of my friends), is a LAZY TAKER, although of course we are NOT, and the plans on the ACA are through private, for-profit insurers, and even folks with subsidized plans are generally working people who are paying a healthy chunk of their premiums. You know, WELFARE SCUM WHO ARE TOO LAZY TO WORK. I work and I work to pay the social security checks the people who want you to die of lack of healthcare are cashing every week.
It’s being a liberal because it is hard being smarter than people who are not liberal. You know damn well you could go sell the conservative asshole some snake oil, and religious bullshit 365 days a year, and make a tidy profit doing it. But we don’t. Because we have a conscience. Maybe we are not that smart after all.
It is hard being a liberal because we don’t fetishize some mythical time but look forward to the future. These strange conservative creatures don’t seem to understand that the “good old days” were not good for everyone, and that what made them “good” for some people were precisely the things that made them bad for others – the “goodness” of the old days derived from or rested on or was paid for by some deprivation or exclusion or suppression of someone else, and that yearning for those good old days comes across as a yearning for someone else’s bad old days.
It shard being a liberal who has to walk amongst people who want to inflict pain on other people. Liberal ideals require you to be a better person, which is hard. Conservative ones encourage you to be a worse one, and consistently invent new depths to which one can sink. It’s a deep-bone selfishness. It’s not always a nasty or inhumane selfishness…but it’s selfishness nonetheless. Sometimes it’s not selfishness at all. Sometimes it’s bloodlust. At one point, more than half the country thought torturing people was a good idea. Torturing. People. At one point, if you questioned W’s budget priorities or silly things like not reporting the war costs as part of the general budget process, you were told you were either with the terrorists or a terrorist yourself. Then… Iraqistan’s reality started to sink in, the media stopped pretending “Shock and Awe” was a video game, and things got real. Then the gravity-defying economy fueled by riskier and riskier property loans and investors buying into funds snapping up high-return derivatives rediscovered gravity. And boy did it find gravity. The “masters of the universe” stared deeply into the void and had a group “Oh shit!” moment. Then things got real. Then we got Obama. Then folks got mad about TARP, and we started spinning out of control again.
And here we are. There is no global warming; it’s a Chinese hoax; we don’t win anymore; make america great again like it never was for much of the population in the first place; half the population has no idea how to retire or any hope their kids can get an education without finding themselves under a crap load of debt and just to get a job that will probably be outsourced in 10 years if they’re lucky. People who don’t want you to have access to affordable healthcare. Anti-vaxxers, climate deniers, every crazy conspiracy theory you can think of because there is not a model that works for people. There is no such thing as job security, and folks cling to any crazy idea to make their lives make sense… and blame the Mexicans is pretty simple when you really think about it. Diabolical fiends out to crush the late hopes or real Americans. It’s always that paradox in attitude that amuses me. The enemy that is too weak to handle the tough decisions yet destroys the country with his overwhelming power.
One of the things that Trump supporters have said they want most fervently, most desperately, is something they are absolutely not going to get so long as we refuse to give it to them. He promised them something that he will never be able to deliver on without our consent — and that is the ability to say and do racist, homophobic, bigoted, sexist, deplorable things without fear of being judged. we’re going to stand up for the vulnerable members of society, no matter what this asshole says or does. They need societal and governmental validation of their belief systems in a way we never have, and that is what makes us strong enough to still take them down without the government having our backs. They lost their minds, we’re not going to do the same. This shit happens in every society and every civilization when the power base is threatened. The power brokers fight back tooth and nail and fight back dirty. It’s hard being a liberal and having to play by the rules when the other side cheats all the time.
It is never pretty, and sometimes they win a round. We are fighting a war here, folks, and we lost this battle. But it wasn’t Waterloo, it was more like the Nazi capture of Paris. We didn’t lose the war. And we liberated Paris, by the way. If we did it once, we can do it again. And again, if necessary.The rats are out of the woodwork and the worst scum have risen like spoilt cream to the top. They are no longer hunkered down in their homes in Schenectady and , clutching their remotes and salivating over Fox News anonymously. They are visible and easily-identifiable targets. We now know EXACTLY who the enemy is. That makes them weak, and us strong.
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If you’re a sad white lady, like I am, our kind are responsible for Donald Trump being elected. I’m done punching pillow and watching Law & Order Criminal Intent marathons and and thinking of all the ways I wanted to punch his face off his face and then take his skin face and tan it and then put that on a dart board and use it and then attach that to a missile and blow it up and then take the ashes of that and pee on them and then take that and put it under the part of my yard where my dog pees and poops and then yell at that spot for the rest of my life.
Read about all the people who died during the labor movement, and the women who fought for and won the vote when men had all the power in government, black people who fought for civil rights and won when white people had all the power in government, LBBTQ people who won when straight people had all the power in government. We need to stop noting that we or other people “lived” through these times, because a lot of people didn’t — but we should remember that people fought through them and were still able to make progress without having anyone in power backing them. Nobody will EVER hand you your rights on a silver platter, you will always have to go out and fight for them.
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GOP is only planning on screwing people under 55. They won’t fuck over their own base of very hard working Americans who don’t have actual jobs, but are able to eat because the rest of us redistribute our wealth to them through FICA taxes (AKA as “the folks who hate socialism”). In short, Republicans will fuck over everyone EXCEPT the elderly and the wealthy. Or maybe they don’t care about their supposed base, either, because they know their base is stupid, and can be fooled into blaming browns and blahs for everything. They’re going to privatize Medicare, which WILL fuck over the elderly. And what’s hilarious is the elderly will still find a way to blame Obama for it. It’s over, for me. the great experiment failed because humans are terrible when you get right down to it. I am frankly sick and tired of fighting. I am tired of the cycle of “good” presidents (Democratic ones), only to have the bad ones come along and fuck everything up every 4 to 8 years. I am exhausted. I am terrified. And I resent the fact that these people who walk among us keep forcing me to keep fighting for my friends’ marriages, my livelihood, and my very existence. I am too old and too tired to fight this all over again. It would be different if all the things we know were known by the general population…but we know they do not care about the facts. All the stuff they’ve been doing for decades now.
Dumbing down the electorate by gutting education, purging voter rolls, busting unions, closing down polling places (this election was rigged), buying up and destroying news sources who are supposed to have our backs, gerrymandering, changing campaign finance rules, setting us against each other with morality plays claiming victimhood, making more of us poor so our attention turns inward and makes us care less about each other. It’s all a systematic plan that has been going on for years and it worked. Now let’s see how they like the world they created. The white male working class underdogs believed that Trump was speaking for them, but it won’t take them long to find out he despises them as much as he despises everyone else, and they will turn on him. Eventually. As soon as their taxes double and their their grandbaby’s leukemia treatments are no longer covers and their pickup trucks are repossessed.
25% of eligible voters voted for Trump. That’s about the usual deplorable vote rate. 47% of eligible voters just cold stayed home, a much larger than usual even more deplorable vote rate. And pretty much nothing short of someone going to every person who didn’t vote individually and asking them how they would have voted will change my mind on that. The popular vote isn’t, for me, a case for optimism; it’s a rallying cry to shove back every self-congratulating, newly-emboldened asshole who thinks his racist king has a mandate. I will never forget they voted for Donald Trump or just as bad – neglected to vote against him. People so stupefied by the dull horror of their lives that they were sucked in the media feedback loop of Hillary Clinton’s manufactured core perfidity, while overlooking Trump’s vulgarity. Not only did you make more work for other people that you claim to agree with, you made that work a hell of a lot harder, by joining forces with and legitimizing hate groups, men’s rights groups, the alt-right, and, indeed, Donald Fucking Trump. I’m willing to forgive such people – we live in a forgiving society – but I will never, ever forget them.
The good angel on my shoulder is gradually being throttled by the bug-eyed, unhinged one on the other shoulder. I have to keep shushing the bug-eyed, unhinged imp on my shoulder because I’d hurt anyone’s feelings (another burden the liberal has to bear), if I let him rip…so I bribe him with internet access and candy. My urge to engage in open eye-rolling gets more and more intense around them as their party gets more and more batshit crazy.