On Telling and Being Told

It is too easy of late to comment on the bizarre shifts in our reality. I haven’t commented as much on politics (some but not as much as, say, last year) because by the time I compose anything cogent, the landscape has changed again and what I have to say seems beside the point.

But. What I’d like to remark on is my own rather conservative assessment of what would happen.

I have few conservative friends anymore. They fell away over time as our view diverged more and more. Some points of view I simply could not regard as supportable, but I tried for a time to steer a course through the Scylla and Charybdis of our differences so that the relationship might survive. For the most part, it was not we who ended the interactions. We were let go, as it were. Invitations to parties stopped coming. Phone calls ceased. Even holiday cards stopped. We were, it seems, written off.

Part of the so-called liberal mindset is, I think, to be tolerant to a fault, depending on the circumstances. Maybe we shouldn’t be, but at least for myself I try to treat divergent viewpoints more as aesthetic differences, even when the ideology is the real thing. Minds change. Benefit of the doubt is seldom misplaced. What I and those similar to me fail to recognize until it’s too late is that for certain people, this stuff is religion. It’s not arguable. If you disagree with them, you’re essentially an apostate, a blasphemer. The reactions can be sudden and startling and we are often caught off guard.

I’ve long developed a set of retorts to certain statements of position which are designed primarily to let my opponent (because by this point that is what they have made themselves, opponents) know that I have confidence in my opinions and that I find certain things non-negotiable. This may sound like I’m no different from them, but I disagree. My non-negotiables are all concerned with human and civil rights and it is the foundation of those questions I defend. If you tell me that you believe people who do not work should be cut off from all material aid, we have little in the way of common ground. You have shown me you understand little or nothing about economics, social systems, capitalism, or even the religion such claims usually come paired with. You’re telling me you do not wish to be troubled by the problems the system you live within and benefit from manifest. I have to believe you don’t want those problems addressed because you believe such solutions will cost you personally and take something from you.

I’m willing to concede it may be more complicated than that, but on its face it is the definition of selfishness and privilege.

And to no purpose.

This is what marks this present period as unique. We live in a country with unprecedented wealth and productive capacity. The impediments to solving many if not all our social problems are self-made, borne of greed, fear, and prejudice. If we were a poor country, a debtor nation in the sense of what we call the Third World, maybe there would be some justification for the austerity measures certain people call for, but we are not. It can be argued that the Third World’s current problems are in many ways the result of our policies, which are accommodationist to powers that have no moral brief.

In short, we do not have universal healthcare because the private health care industry opposes it because it will eat into their profits. It has nothing to do with whether we can afford it. And to then make the argument that some people do not deserve healthcare is frankly inhuman. Deserve by what metric? Because they lack the resources to feed what little they might have into the coffers of the rich?

It’s not a question of afford but a question of will. And class. And bigotry. And greed.

Now we have an administration that is unapologetically embracing this destructive ideology and many who voted for it are dismayed. Why?

I had a couple of conversations in the aftermath of last year’s election. They were concerned that I was afraid. For no reason, they said. It’ll be fine. When I pointed out what I thought would happen, I was laughed at. If I heard “it won’t be that bad” once, I heard it a dozen times. Which, if you think about it, was a tacit admission that it would be bad. But I explained my reasoning, I laid out what I expected to happen, and why I had zero respect for their choice. I hate being prescient like that. I was wrong only in how far I thought it would go.

Masked men in the garb of law enforcement are arresting public officials for showing up to do their jobs. You can’t spin this any other way. These are Brown Shirt tactics. Kristi Noem did not want to hear the question Senator Padilla wanted to ask. He was hauled away and handcuffed. If you do not find that obscene, then you should turn in your patriot credentials. You have turned your back on what it means to be an American. I wonder if you ever knew what it meant in the first place.

You who are now shocked…you were told. You voted for it anyway. Because you’re afraid, angry, frustrated. You wanted him to just make the world the way you think it should be.

You must be twelve.

We may get out of this with most of our skin intact, but the repairs will take years if not decades. It is just possible we may have damaged things so badly that it will never recover. Frankly, you broke things that were on their way to being fixed and things that already worked just fine. It’s hard to believe that you really didn’t want them fixed, you just wanted to be angry.

I told people this guy is a clown. Perhaps they thought I meant Ronald or Bozo. I was thinking of Pennywise.