One of the paradigms of democracy is the idealism that goes along with that institution, specifically that when everyone has the opportunity to vote it somehow translates to a freer society. We know this isn’t really the truth, which can be provided with evidence from Ukraine, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and practically every other dictatorship that requires mandatory voting in which the choices are limited to either the dictator or specific party choices. Whenever we talk about those kinds of nations, we laugh at them and raise our hands in solidarity, voicing our opinion about how great our democracy is.
But is it?
I started thinking about this question the other day when one of the national politicos started talking about the inevitability of Hillary Clinton running for president. And I started thinking, why is it inevitable? And more importantly, why her? Why not the guy who lives down the street from me who waves to me every time I walk by, even though I think he’s kind of nuts? How about the cute girl that works at Starbucks? I’d vote for her. She really couldn’t do a worse job than anyone currently in government. And at least she gets most of the drink orders correct. That means she can take instructions from the guy standing at the register, create the correct drink and bring it to him without totally screwing it up. Most politicians fail at taking the order, and from there you go from ordering a carmel espresso and end up getting an F-35 that crashes because it goes so fast that its pilots pass out when flying the thing.
But back to democracy. Who decides what people are on the ballots? If you read the propaganda that gets put out, we do. But who are we? Most people don’t think about that, yet they will go and vote for one of the names of people they don’t really want. Very few, and I mean VERY few, choose someone that is not from one of the two main parties, even if they don’t who any of the people are from either one of those parties. Basically, most of our elections are decided by attack ads that cause cognitive dissonance about one candidate, or you might vote for someone because you saw more yard signs with that person’s name on it. Or you might recognize the name because the person has served in Congress for so many years that it’s impossible not to mention the name, even though you haven’t heard a single thing about what that person has ever done in the 40 years he or she has been in office. Yet, you’ll vote for him or her because, well, they’re on our team, or some bizarre reason makes you think that somehow this person who has always had the job will somehow change things for the better, even though he or she has never tried doing that in the past.
It’s enough to drive one batty.
The problem with elections is that they serve people who have strong name recognition, which in most cases means someone who already has political clout or a lot of money and economic connections. That means that most of us are unimportant and insignificant. Seriously, we’re insignificant and basically unwanted by those who are in power because talking to us is a waste of time when there are so many important people with power and money they could be talking to.
Part of the problem is that our country is so big that in order to have any influence, you already have to be part of the power structure to even be heard by anyone who might make a difference. Yet, we’re also in a country where more and more people are graduating from college and universities, which means there are more and more people who have the brains and intelligence to possibly change the world for the better but are compartmentalized by those in power instead. So, the only places they have to make a name for themselves are in business or the arts, which for the most part means an alternative route to a place that politicians ignore or condemn as unimportant again.
The real problem isn’t just that so many people have so little voice in government. Well, actually that is the problem, and as in most iterative scenarios, if you crunch those numbers, you end up with a lot of people growing more and more dissatisfied with government, which means people start protesting, and when those protesters are marginalized, like the Occupy Wall Street protests were, people start to look for other avenues to participate in political empowerment, which if you follow the logic, means that it may lead to very dangerous outcomes, because once people give up on the given institutions and look for their own places to have their voices heard, pretty much anything can happen. That’s basically the menu that led to the French Revolution and practically every other overthrow of a social institution in the 20th century. With this much anger festering, I can imagine that when things do happen, those with money and power aren’t going to be the royals trying to find a new position in the new paradigm, but possibly the victims of such anger.
We’re already starting to see this sort of thing in race relations. Sure, we like to pretend that those are just circumstances that got out of control, that everything is really fine, but in reality when you have powder kegs all across the country, and world, ready to explode at the first ignition of trouble, it shouldn’t be all that surprising when you see that sort of thing happening on a regular basis. Which then leads to people in larger cities feeling completely unsafe in their cities because whenever these things happen, the police are completely taken by surprise and overwhelmed. People power has a tendency to do that. But when people no longer trust their government to be the instrument that keeps things safe, they start looking to protect themselves, which makes the next powder keg that much more of a demonstrative explosion.
The real problem (think I’ve said that a few times now) is that people keep thinking that “it can’t happen here” which is usually the last cry you hear before something happens and then you hear “I never thought that could happen here”. Our institutions are being stretched to the limit, and while the solution would have been to stop educating people so they wouldn’t realize they were being marginalized and disenfranchised (and believe it or not, you can vote and still be disenfranchised), but we’re way beyond that, and no one these days could ever justify the idea of saving the state by not educating people, unless you’re Stalin, or a politician in Iran.
But then, no one really cares. There are too many interesting things on television to pay attention to this sort of thing.
Here’s a confession. I read the newspaper every day. And some days are more informative than others. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the news over the last couple of months has been really crappy, almost to the point of where I sometimes suspect that today’s newspaper might have been recycled from a few weeks ago and sold to me as brand new. I’ve been feeling this a lot lately. It’s like there’s no interesting news any more, and that worries me because I’m a newshound, constantly in need of news gratification. So, here’s a quick rehash of what I’ve found to be the “significant” news stories for the immediate past (and present).
1. Justin Beiber did something. Don’t know what it was, but for some reason when he does something, the news wants to tell me about it. I get it. Teen girls like him, mainly because teen girls haven’t matured to a point where their brains actually generate understandable logic. So this “heart throb” did something that may or may not have been controversial, and as a result the media is in a frenzy making sure that we know all about it. I don’t care. Please stop telling me about it. It’s taking up space where I could be reading about…well, honestly, I don’t have anything else I’m following, which is a part of this whole post in the first place. As a corollary, please don’t tell me about Selena Gomez either. The only reason I know who she is is because she’s often mentioned in the same sentence as Justin Bieber, which makes her even less significant than someone I find of absolutely no significance.
2. Congress voted to not vote on anything. That’s about the length of the summary of the latest stories involving Congress. They’ve spent the last two years arguing over how they don’t agree with each other, with the president, with the people, and with the color of the sky. I get it. They don’t get along, and they believe that they need to get rid of the people they don’t get along with in order to get anything done. As a result, they’re going to have to justify their ridiculous salaries and excellent health benefits ( that are not upto the standards found in Forest Hills urgent care clinic and also they are the not the same as anyone they vote to approve health benefits for, such as the poor, the military or, well, anyone else), so they need to pretend to be doing something. And because the media can’t just report: TODAY, CONGRESS PROVED IT’S USELESS AND DID NOTHING, they report all of the horse race crap, and we end up with stories that tell us absolutely nothing.
3. School shootings are on the increase. I’m not happy about this, and at the same time I kind of want to stop hearing about it because statistically, they’re not actually increasing. We’re just hearing more about them because they fit the “if it’s on fire, then it’s a story” paradigm of national news outlets. Most people don’t realize that kids have been stupid for about as long as kids have been around. What is different is that the media is in such a need of stories to fill a 24 hour news cycle that whenever someone shoots someone, pulls out a gun, draws a picture of a gun, bullies someone, thinks about bullying someone, says mean things, or whatever, we’re going to hear a national story about it. And then commentators are going to get on the news and talk about the “tragedy” and how it never used to be that way “back in my day”. Yes, it was. It just didn’t happen in your particular school at the time you’re remembering back on. But it happened in the school down the street, which means that “back in your day” these things were happening but because they didn’t happen in YOUR school, you weren’t paying attention, and because most people didn’t pay attention to news back then (as most of it was from the 3 networks and boring as hell), there’s a belief that it was much different back then. Statistically, the only thing that really changed was we have more access to national information than we had before, which means that something that happens in Colorado when you live in New York gets put in front of your TV screen, making you feel that it’s happening in your neighborhood, when it’s thousands of miles away from where you live.
4. The most important story in the country is gay marriage. Well, you’d get that impression from the amount of rhetoric focused on it. Yes, I agree that it should be an important story, but it’s not really, and it affects so few people in comparison to the grand total of people who think they’re affected. Disclaimer: I’m not gay, which means that the issues involved in this continuously involving “issue” doesn’t actually affect me. Reality: That’s not completely true. It does affect me, but not in the way that seems to be the focus of so much attention. Let me explain.
You see, there are people in the world who are not heterosexual. I’m not one of them, yet because I’m heterosexual, if I was a total dweeb and rude person, I could say that how someone lives his or her own life somehow has an impact on my life. Reality: It doesn’t. If two men want to marry each other, and they live next door to me, the total effect after doing all of the mathematics is…um, zero. What does affect me is how much noise they make playing their stereo, or in what seems to be my personal experience, how much of a complaint they have about the fact that I sometimes play mine too loud. You might notice that how loud their stereo is has absolutely NO connection to whether or not they happen to be gay or straight. So, their impact AS A RESULT OF THEM BEING GAY, is none.
Then the argument comes in about how gay marriage somehow diminishes the status of marriage in general. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I believe that divorce has a much larger impact on the status of marriage. I feel that if NO ONE ever got divorced, then marriage would be sanctified and never in fear of danger. Not only that, I think that if spouses NEVER cheated on each other, then marriage would be strengthened that much better. So, from now on, I think that anytime someone talks about a divorce, that person should be shunned, thrown out of the country and declared a heathen of all good thinking Americans. Come to think of it, if people didn’t get married in the first place, then perhaps the fear of divorce would never happen, which would strengthen the very value of partnership. Or perhaps partnership is the problem, and that it’s kind of unnatural, as God originally intended for every person to be alone, which is why He didn’t create people as partners but designed each person to be capable of functioning without another person. I’m sure there’s a verse somewhere in one of the many different interpretations of religious texts out there that says exactly that, although it might say it in different words that need to be translated by some priest who has spent too much time reading the book and pretty much nothing else.
The point: How does the way someone else lives affect me when it doesn’t have an effect on me? I can have all sorts of bad feelings about how someone else lives, but I guarantee that someone else is probably having bad feelings about the way I live for some random reason, no matter how wonderful I live my life in the constant vigilance to the ideals put forward by the Shania (if my religion happens to be the worship of all things Shania Twain). Unfortunately, no matter what you do, someone else is going to disagree with how you live your life and think that he or she knows better than you do, and then for bizarre reasons DEMAND you live another way. I like the old George Carlin belief system that people need to just leave people alone (to paraphrase several great speeches he’s given over the years).
5. Which brings me to the story lines of national politics. As I read stories on national news, I find absolutely nothing in the way of interest for any story because none of them make a single difference to me whatsoever. The stories that do are glossed over and treated as afterthoughts, meaning no one seems to care about things we should care about. So, what kinds of subjects should we hear about. Well, I have a few:
A. Health care. I’m not talking about Obamacare or how badly the health care exchanges were implemented. Although I will say that those stories COULD have started off a conversation about things that NEED to be discussed, but never will. What needs to be discussed then? Cost. Health insurance is expensive, and it shouldn’t be. Because our government has taken a hands off approach for so long, we have the worst health care system in the world, aside from dictatorships that use firing squads as a health care remedy. For the first and second world, our health care is abysmal because we allowed the whole system to evolve from a really bad premise to begin with. Government has been playing catch up with our system since day one, and that means that any solutions aren’t going to happen from half measures; the whole system needs a restart and the old money profiteers need to be put out of the system so that we can put together something that shows we are, in fact, the one first world nation in all ways. What does that mean? Everyone gets health care covering pretty much everything they need. We start to create a system that is proactive rather than reactive, meaning that you don’t seek health care for the first time AFTER you’re already starting to get sick. One of our largest problems in this country is diabetes, which if you understand the disease, all of our efforts to combat it are to alleviate the symptoms, and that’s it. We do the same thing for cancer. Instead of massive money being spent on “curing” cancer, most of our procedures are designed around helping people “live with cancer” instead. I don’t advocate stopping the reactive measures, but I’d really like to see us work on the proactive measures. This would mean a completely change to our health care mentality, and that’s never going to happen as long as these decisions are being made by people who are so indoctrinated by this payment system plan, because they are completely incapable of seeing any other alternative. And a personal belief of mine is that pharmaceutical companies might be a huge part of the problem as well, although there’s lots of room for debate in that one. An example: I was dealing with some depression issues a few years back and went to a therapist, who I immediately discontinued seeing because her “solution” to practically everything was medication. I didn’t need medication to stop being depressed. I needed to feel better about my situation by finding solutions to my situation. Medication was a stupid solution, but this therapist saw no other alternative. A friend of mine was diagnosed with “stress” and prescribed lots of medication. She started on it for a few months before she dumped it and took an alternative route NOT condoned by her prescriber. Her “new” route consisted of paying for massages, and she’s doing a lot better these days. The interesting side bar to that is that her health coverage didn’t cover massage therapy but did cover medication. Again, the eye is on the wrong ball, and as long as we’re a part of this system, it’s never going to change. Additionally, for those struggling with severe issues and looking for alternative approaches, seeking help from a private rehab centre might be a viable option to consider.
B. Elections and Representation. Every election you hear people start complaining about how so few people participate int eh voting process. There’s a reason for that. It’s not because they’re apathetic, happy with the system as is, or lazy. Many people don’t participate because they don’t feel they have a voice, no matter how hard political parties try to convince them otherwise. This was seen during the whole Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. In case you weren’t completely following what was happening, people were dissatisfied with government and their lack of influence on it, so they tried mobilizing outside of the power structure that already exists. What they discovered was that the entrenched power system gave them no voice, and when they made a stink about it, the powers that be ridiculed the protesters and treated them as crazy people. Occupy Wall Street was defeated early in its infancy as the media treated it as a joke, constantly ridiculing its members by pointing out that they had no better ideas, were disorganized and weren’t making any headway in their protests. Having watched the back and forth, I came away with a different perspective, albeit a more economic one. The media responded as the powerful business interests they were, seeing Occupy Wall Street as a financial threat, which caused the media to treat them as outliers and a humorous joke. Wall Street itself, responded in kind, as they were the financial target of these people who were upset with how there has been little oversight over economic impact issues from this part of the political system, and because of such a response, there never will be.
The Tea Party has been an even more interesting animal, mainly because this was a protest from an actual economic power base that couldn’t be ignored in the same way. Remember, Occupy Wall Street was coming from the poor, disenfranchised side of the political spectrum, much easier to knock its wind out right from the beginning. But the Tea Party was a disorganized response to dissatisfaction from the political right, which is inhabited by those with financial clout, meaning the people Occupy Wall Street were actually protesting against. As they were now organized against OWS, they came about immediately after with a power base that demanded the Republican Party (its main level of constituency) to respond. As a result, they’ve entrenched themselves as a part of that party. What we’re starting to discover is that they only represent an elite economic power base, which has its own representation mainly because it can afford to make its message known through financial clout during elections. We’re starting to see this with their attacks on Obamacare, and specifically the members of the Senate who supported it. We’re going to see a lot more of this in the months to come.
But what it means is that the average person has less and less touching of the strings of government. And this means that as we move closer to the next election, people have come away from these previous two movements convinced that nothing is going to change because when they did try to become organized, nothing happened, unless they were already rich and powerful. To participate in that environment is a lesson in futility, and nothing that either political party says is going to change that. The Republicans don’t have any intentions of representing the disenfranchised, having sold their souls to the very franchised economic elite, and the Democratic Party is counting on these disenfranchised souls to somehow embolden them with the ability to maintain power in a system that still rewards the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and disenfranchised. Basically, the Democrats have to convince people who bought into “hope and change” that more years of their control will somehow bring about “hope and change” when the originator of that message did very little for them other than try and fail. The alternative is to opt out of participation, and sadly enough the expectation is that rhetoric can somehow make this different. Good luck on that.
C. The economic future. This is really what should be the main focus right now. There is no lack of books on the concept of low-hanging fruit that has disappeared from the process, meaning that all of our advantages we used to have available (like continued open spaces for colonizing land, economic opportunities for business growth, and access to untapped natural resources) are practically gone. We no longer produce new things but seem to have fallen into a rut of continuous reinvention of old things, like the consumer electronics show that instead of showing us new technologies on the horizon continues to show us new variations of television sets that keep reinventing the old technology. When every house in America that needs a television has pretty much already bought one, we’re forcing a false need on people that they’re no longer responding to with checkbooks. The last few major advancements in technology that drove need have been around for some time (televisions, microwave ovens, computers and cellphones), meaning that we’re not producing anything that’s changing the paradigm to move us towards new need. Sure, you can argue the iPad was a new invention of this nature, but it just gathered a number of different products and combined them into one, which, if you think about it, actually is a step back on the production of new things list. As long as our future consists of combinations and reinventions of old things, we don’t have a lot of progress to take advantage of, which would explain why industry innovation has focused a lot more on consolidation than progress, meaning the idea of expansion by robotizing a labor force and outsourcing to countries where its cheaper to produce something.
Anyway, this has gotten much longer than I originally intended to write, so I’ll stop there for now. I would hope, by now, the basic idea has been relayed.
There’s been a lot of conjecture from the mainstream media about how the Occupy Wall Street Movement is the liberal flip side to the Tea Party Movement. Unfortunately, they couldn’t be more wrong. It’s not like the mainstream media isn’t known for completely missing the boat even after it runs over them, but perhaps we need to explore what’s really going on to understand, perhaps, what’s really going on.
Let’s go back in time a bit with Duane’s special little time machine to, say, the middle of 2007. At this time, H. Clinton was the front runner for the Democratic Party, and Barack Obama was mainly known as a superstar senator from Chicago. A few people were talking about him as a possible political challenge to Clinton, but at the time there was little more going on with him other than the introduction of his book, The Audacity of Hope (released in 2006). During this time, I was focusing on Clinton, although not a real fan of her but figuring she had to be better than the crappy presidential administrations we were getting from the Republicans. I was probably wrong, but that’s another story.
Anyway, during this time, one of my fellow grad student colleagues started reading the book, and let’s just say he was overly enamored with Obama at this time, trying to get EVERYONE he knew to read the book because he had somehow found the new messiah. It was like you couldn’t hold a conversation with him without it turning to how great of a messiah Barack Obama was. And then, out of nowhere, it was like living in the world of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where rational people had been replaced by strange, pod people who didn’t become robotic but became Kool Aid drinkers of this new messiah of politics.
For months, it was nothing but a series of encounters with people that felt a lot like I experienced when I stopped drinking alcohol and started to notice that all of the drunks in bars were extremely stupid, but they couldn’t see it themselves because they were all drunk. That’s the kind of sensation I was getting on a daily basis as I dealt with people who I had normally discussed politics with. It was like all rationalization had been thrown out through the window.
What I started to suspect was something that took several years to occur, but I began to believe that we were being sold a messiah of politics, which meant one of two things was bound to happen: He was either going to fulfill that mission and everyone would feel wonderful (kind of as if we had a brand new John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan), or a lot of previously apathetic people who bought into the whole dream were going to emerge very, very pissed off at everything involving politics.
Well, the former didn’t happen. Sure, he got the Nobel Peace Prize for showing up for work on time and not actually doing anything that caused peace, but that’s about it. People had hopes and dreams with the guy, but the faith they had in him has diminished, and like waking up after a bender with a hangover, a lot of people have started to realize that four more years of the same would not really result in better circumstances, kind of like the Einsteinian definition of insanity (“continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting different results”). So, we’re left with a lot of freshly enfranchised citizens who bought into the hope and change mantra hook and sinker, but didn’t get any positive results. So, where do we go from here?
If you listen to the mainstream media, they haven’t learned anything from what has happened, kind of expecting to go on autopilot like they have for the last four decades. Well, chances are pretty good that they are missing the boat yet again.
If you look at the Tea Party movement, you have a bunch of people who come from the right side of the fence, so it’s pretty obvious why they’d protest against a left sided president. Face it. No matter what he did, or does, they would never be satisfied. However, it’s pretty weak analysis if the belief is that the Occupy Wall Street movement is just the polar opposite of the Tea Party. If you think about it, you have a lot of people who didn’t care about politics before who are suddenly much more aware of current events and pissed that they didn’t get the messiah or religious experience they desired. So, of course, they’re going to be pissed.
But if the belief is that they’re pissed at Wall Street, one isn’t really paying attention to what’s going on. Wall Street serves as a great masthead for the corruption and problems going on, but if people are pissed off about the fact that “hope” didn’t result in positive “change”, the protests aren’t going to stop at Wall Street. Recently, President Obama has been trying to act like he “understands” the movement and “understands” the frustration. But if someone is part of the problem, then the chances are pretty slim that he actually understands enough to make a difference. It’s great if you’re trying to gain political capital, but if you’re trying to appease an angry population, that kind of patronizing is only going to piss them off more.
You see, the people are pissed at Wall Street, BOTH political parties, all politicians, corporations, lock-step police forces that defend everything they’re angry about (quite often with hostile approaches to everything without any desire to understand why the people around them are angry…police have never been very good at that sort of thing, and while it’s not exactly their fault, it’s not exactly their best attribute either), and a docile population that tends to side with the forces that are their own worst enemies. It was recently reported that the US has the worst CEO to worker pay disparity of any democracy (the numbers reported this year were 475 to 1, meaning for every $1 a worker makes, a CEO makes 475 dollars; that’s just absurd when you see countries like Great Britain at 35 to 1). But if no one seems to care, then obviously people are going to be pissed.
But what’s more important is where do we go from here? Do the protests start to turn to riots? Are leaders going to emerge that steer those riots/protests in any one direction? Or will they fizzle and people will go back to being sheep, like they’ve always been? One thing that probably won’t happen is that the people are never going to rally behind a passionate promise maker like Obama (or a group that makes promises in his name), which means that we’ll end up with even more apathy, which historically leads to either revolution or civil war. The only positive of those outcomes is that the population may become so apathetic that a revolution or civil war might occur and no one will show up.
We keep hearing stories of how governments are being toppled by people armed with Twitter and Facebook accounts. While these accounts keep forgetting to point out that you need more than Twitter or Facebook to topple an oppressive government, what we should take from these examples (like Egypt, Tunisia, currently Libya and possibly a future Iran) is that revolutionary movements have been assisted by these social networking technologies. And that’s no small deal.
What doesn’t get addressed is something I find even scarier, but seems to be completely off the radar (or gps) of everyone involving this issue. What these technologies definitely do is provide immediate access to higher up entities than have ever been experienced before. What do I mean? In the olden days, a king communicated with his people by throwing up broadsheets that people would read by wandering out into the village square where they were posted. If they were lucky, a town crier would yell out the messages to people as well, which mainly assisted a population that was generally illiterate. As education has emerged and moved from the upper class to the middle class and now finally to all of the classes, people are capable of reading their own messages, so that town cryer is no longer necessary. And because technology has emerged alongside this development, people are now able to receive instanteous communication from higher-ups. This was the paradigm that brought us up and through the 19th and 20th centuries
But Facebook and Twitter also do something else that 19th and 20th century technology did not allow. Instead of just reading messages from leaders, we now have the innate ability to communicate BACK to our leaders. Add email to the mix, and our ability to actually speak to a previously untouchable leader has completely evolved into something kings and queens never imagined (and certainly never wanted). Today, we are moving from a receptive community to a community that is able to push rather than just receive.
What are the implications of this? Well, for one, it means that our need to rely on government is quickly diminishing. In the old days, we had government developed for us because basically we weren’t smart enough to maintain affairs on our own. That’s not the case today. In an enlightened society, or one that may soon be one, the need for government is minimized, which means that those people who have gained access to the halls of power are now seen as oppressive entities rather than those who serve the public good. Right now, we have a debate going on between Congress and the President of the United States as to whether or not government is even necessary (they’re thinking of shutting it down because they can’t pay their bills). What no one is addressing is the reason why this is happening. Those who advocate big government are pretty much behind the idea of needing government to take care of every need and desire, and I’d argue they’re not wrong in that a lot of people DO need government, but there is another segment of society that is slowly divorcing itself from the constraints of government, and unknown to a lot of average people, a whole bunch of them were actually elected to national office. We call them the “Tea Party”, and even though progressives use them as the butts of their jokes. a real movement is taking place right now in this country that should be seen as very dangerous to the natural order. If you want to understand why a lot of Republicans believe that government should be shut down, perhaps people should actually listen to the Tea Party instead of just making up jokes about them and figure no one takes them seriously.
Personally, I think the message that is being put out by the Tea Party is premature, in that I don’t believe the country has moved to that level of sophistication yet. Yes, believe it or not, I actually see their arguments as highly sophisticated; unfortunately, the ones receiving the majority of attention are the most unsophisticated ones imaginable, which is ironic just on that level alone. Only about 70 of them are in power right now, and that’s nowhere near enough of them to make the impact they want to make, so all they’re capable of doing right now is disrupting government, rather than shutting it down.
But what should be seen is the longer term implications from ideas that they do espouse. Our Twitter and Facebook technologies have actually developed movements that coincide with this attitude of the people believing themselves to be superior to government. Granted, another irony is present as well, as most of the Tea Party thinkers are usually way behind the learning curve when it comes to emerging technology, but that’s really for criticism and derision more than an argument. What we should be focused on is that that these types of movements (the usage of technology in its ability to supplant government rather than supplement it) tend to grow, not go away.
My more important question is the one that fronts this entire essay: What is the future of government in a Twitter/Facebook world? In other words, if we finally reach a point where people feel they are on the same level as government, rather than recipients of messages from government only, do we present a new paradigm for the future? Essentially, does this equal status present a situation where people can finally rise above government, believing themselves to be superior, and thus, believe government should be eliminated, or at least changed drastically to reflect the submission of government to the people, as was originally intended by the Founding Fathers? Or do we end up becoming the enemy of government, which will hold onto its last grip of power until finally removed by those who have deemed it no longer worthy?
Personally, I don’t think anyone is thinking this way yet. That’s okay. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Although it was destroyed in one.
I don’t know if you’ve been following this recent story, but every now and then a story of racism hits the main story lines, and then suddenly everyone starts acting like they’ve just discovered anything race-related can possibly exist. And then people act horrified, shocked, angry and intellectually assaulted that such a thing could be happening in this day and age. In this case, a woman working for the USDA told a group of people at an NAACP Freedom Fund banquet meeting that she, an African-American government employee, took great pleasure in NOT helping a white man who DARED to come to her for assistance at her government office. So, she went out of her way to make sure that she made his request both painful and impossible for him to gain any success. And she took great pleasure in it.
Well, obviously the people now discovering this You Tube video of her exploit are now going nuts distancing themselves from her, firing her and doing all sorts of posturing about how evil this really is, which is all understandable, but what needs to be acknowledged is that this really isn’t all that surprising. What it tells us is that racism still exists, and it doesn’t matter what side of the coin people hail from, there are still people who treat others with disdain mainly because they can. Instead of dealing with this as an actual issue that needs some kind of resolution, we’ll deal with it as a unique occurrence, as if it doesn’t happen all of the time, and when the next one gets discovered, it gives us room to keep compartmentalizing such incidents and never do anything about fixing them.
Face it. Some people are dicks. It doesn’t matter what color they are, what nationality they are, how much intelligence they have, how much money they have, whether they voted Republican or Democrat, or anything else. People are still dicks. What we need to do is get together as a collective and talk about this type of behavior in a clear-cut fashion so that everyone hears our voices. But we won’t. Instead, we’ll treat it as a one case wonder, and we’ll allow others to continue to hide in the shadows, doing this sort of thing over and over again, until they get found out and we repeat the cycle yet again. We’ve never really been all that good at bringing bad circumstances to light. It would mean discussing difficult topics, and if we can’t act holier than thou, we really don’t want to talk about it.
Racism is all over the place. So is ethnic profiling. So is reverse discrimination. But what should be focused upon is not that these things exist, which is important to know about, but to figure out why. Why are people still treating other people with disdain, placing some people in subcategories of humanity in comparison to others?
I say it has a lot to do with the complex intricacies of identity politics. People like to think of themselves as part of a collective, but at the same time, they’re incapable of indentifying themselves as part of a group without identifying others as outliers from their group. As long as there are people who don’t belong, their justification for all of the things their “group” believes in become all that much stronger. What good is a group of white males if they can’t look at another group of non-white males with some type of ridicule or condemnation? Think about wars we have fought. World War II was all about identifying the “evil Jap” or the “violent Kraut”, or whatever derogatory name one can remember. By doing so, we were able to rally around ourselves and fight against “foreign” aggression. It helped in that situation that those opposing forces ALSO saw themselves with identity that conflicted with us as well. But not always does it happen that way, and that’s where our problems are really starting to emerge.
Look at the War on Terror. It started after 9/11 with condemnations of anyone who was Arabic. And then immediately there was a realization that there were a lot of Arab-Americans who AREN’T our enemies, and that is still pretty hard for a lot of people to grasp. When you are so good at creating identity distinctions and placing people in another camp, it is very hard to realize that your enemy is a lot like Pogo first proclaimed: “We have met the enemy and he is us” or some variation of that phrase.
An interesting example of this problem hails from an unlikely source, and that’s a computer game, the most popular one around, World of Warcraft. In that game, without having to learn much about it, all you have to know is that there are two sides, the Alliance and the Horde. You choose one side or other based on your choice of race you pick for the character you are going to play. From that moment on, everyone who is automatically allied with the other side is your enemy, and you are automatically identified with the races that you were allied with as well. Think of it as living in a country where you were born, and everyone in that country hates the people from another country. You may never have a single dealing with a person from that other country, but one day you’re going to meet one somewhere, and you’re expected to hate him or her, and if possible, kill him or her, or contribute to that person’s personal demise. That is the kind of thinking that the game sets up, and it’s not that much different than how we deal with other countries in the world today.
When I was younger, I was working for a hotel chain as its investigator, and I befriended a young man from Iran (who happened to always refer to his country as “Persia”). He wanted to be an American, and he was as pro-US as you could be, including a fascination for all things Madonna (including a long protracted attempt to get me to buy for him the new “Madonna book” because he was too embarrassed to buy it from a store himself). But whenever her talked about Iran, he would then immediately start drawing sickles and pointing at the US, as if he understood that he had to hate the United States whenever identifying himself as an Iranian. No amount of common sense conversation ever broke him from this thought process, and even though he was good friends with every American he came across, when it came to national identity, I would not have been surprised to see him turn against those same friends and take up arms at a moment’s notice.
This is the kind of mentality we have to deal with whenever we discuss the ideas of ethnicity and race. Some people are locked into their beliefs because of an entire life, or a societal set of lives worth of time, spent thinking one particular way, automatically thinking bad thoughts towards people they know nothing about, nor have they ever had the opportunity to even gain a single negative action that would cause them to feel that way from a logical perspective.
In this country, we really need to discuss race because the only people talking about it right now are race-baiting people who see the world in, for lack of better terms, black and white. I watched an interview the other night with Al Sharpton about his response to the NAACP’s rift with the Tea Party and the NAACP’s allegations of racial tensions stemming from the Tea Party. At first, Sharpton sounded logical, and then he fell into talking points, where he wanted the Tea Party members to automatically have to condemn their own members in order to be taken seriously by Sharpton. Sharpton didn’t like racism from the Tea Party, but he had no problem condemning an entire organization because of their membership, effectively arguing that membership in the Tea Party meant you were a racist unless you were willing to codemn everyone else in the Tea Party as a racist. Use that argument to say that you if you’re a member of the NAACP, you must condemn all racist members of the NAACP, of which they do exist, or you’re a racist yourself, and look at where that might get you.
The problem is people want to equate posturing with logical actions, and no one wants to be baited into a stupid battle of words. And that’s what keeps happening.
Which brings me back to the original point of this post. I don’t think calling this woman a racist solves anything. Sure, she probably is one, but who cares? What is more important is to use her really stupid mistake (whether or not she would do it again is irrelevant to me) and try to open up a dialogue on this whole issue. Otherwise, we miss a great opportunity just so we can make stupid, irrelevant, political points. Unfortunately, that’s all that’s going to come from this moment. That, and that woman being out of a job for doing and saying something really stupid. It’s sad that we can’t get a better result that just that.
