We don’t all get along. Hell, I rather proved spectacularly that ther eare several stripes of people that just plain don’t see eye to eye even though we agree that in general America has Problems.
As the title suggests. We are all angry, disappointed, disgusted, and a whole host of other things.
What can we do as a community to make the suck a little less of a thing? Y’know instead of the arguing and bickering amongst ourselves or laughing at the clown that’s funny to laugh at because he’s a fucking buffoon wearing a bad toupee.
I ask because this seems to be a thing. Outrage is shown. Rabble rabble. Not a lot is done. The system won’t allow it. Hell, people sat and camped out in cities across the east coast to try raising awareness of the fact we don’t like to be fucked in the ass by those in power… and it got swept under the rug.
This shows the direct route will not work until we organize into lynch mobs, which to be honest I don’t want to do. That’s how the french revolution happened and frankly a lot of people died that shouldn’t have.
I don’t know specifically what you are referring to, but this is what I do
Online
Thank people, and acknowledge their impact.
80% of the time respond to outrage, especially the kind you mentioned, with fish puns or bad jokes.
Offer constructive criticism when asked (kinda like now! :D).
Unplug and take time for simple things (photography, pet baths, stirring compost).
Advocate for causes that shape my life (technology for underprivileged, education, healthy food).
Offline
Use opportunities to connect with people that don’t agree with you.
Perpetuate optimism, cause this really is an amazing time to be alive
Get to know and appreciate your neighbors.
Tell more awkward fish puns.
And grow plants. If there is one thing that brings everyone together and gives a powerful bond, it is raising something.
The proper way to direct one’s rage, is to do everything you can to get Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn elected, even if you’re not a yank or a pom.
These guys, if enough folks get behind them, will be the ones creating the most justice in the world, by a long shot. We could be on the cusp of a new era in politics and business, since so many of us are so fed up with this obsolete bullshit, tired of waiting for progress that never arrives.
We got a glimmer of hope with OWS, a glimpse of the simmering discontent… I just hope there are enough folks with their eyes open. Fucking telly, I wish more folks knew that shit’s obsolete.
Anyway, it looks like the left is back, thank fuck. Don’t let it fizzle.
Furthermore, although folks are correct when they point out that it’s a rather one-dimensional metric, I think perhaps they’re also unhelpfully muddying the waters somewhat.
Despite all the nuance, IMO there’s a pretty stark dichotomy in people’s political stances, between being more or less individualist or collectivist. Perhaps obscuring this works to the right’s advantage, given its ascendancy.
I mean, the situation’s basically pretty simple: you have a few people in a position to fuck everyone else over, and they’re mostly inclined to do just that; you have a whole lot of folks who are pretty pissed off with that deal and would like to do something about it; and perhaps the biggest group is too uninformed to give a shit, or even so misinformed that they actually identify with the scumbags who are shitting on them. That’s left/right in a nutshell, in my book.
Trawl internet discussions looking for people stating the names of logical fallacies as a substitute for actually saying what they disagree with and then clubbing those people with logic until they go away.
I believe community is important. It is through these connections that we get to know people as a whole, beyond stereotypes of left, right, up, and down.
Cultivate community by committing yourself to spaces where you feel welcome and there is an atmosphere of openness. A place you’d like to be a bigger part of, even if it will take time to make real relationships.
The biggest factor is to show up, and show up regularly. Eventually you will be sucked in.
Then you will find the lady who everyone thinks is so annoying and tone deaf is active in charity work and genuinely kind. The person who you like will grow to become one of your dearest friends, almost a family member. The man who seems so conservative and overly patriotic will open up one day about his childhood of abuse with touching vulnerability. And you will be there to witness it. You will know their whole stories.
Conversely, when you think you want to run away your new friends will come running after you, email you, call you, and make you aware that you matter. And you’ll appreciate that it was those people that showed up for you that were the most important, whether their political beliefs align with yours or not.
Do this and you will know people beyond the trite and simple boxes.
Can you think of anyone who could be more or less accurately placed in the trite and simple box marked 'right wing’or ‘authoritarian’ who you’d like to see running anything bigger than a hot dog stand?
It’s oh so fashionable to pooh-pooh those labels these days, but I’m completely mystified as to why they supposedly no longer apply. Sure, they leave a lot out, but the whole point of such labels is they distil stuff down to salient features, such that I can wholeheartedly say, fuck the right.
Yes, many of them. My husband is definitely to the right, as are many of his friends.
Let’s take, for example, the best man at our wedding. He’s an assistant DA. He almost exclusively works on cases of severe child abuse. I’m not a fan of his politics but I’m definitely a fan of his work and I think there is something about his particular way of looking at the world that makes him effective at what he does.
Or let’s take another friend who took his family business up from a struggling company to a very profitable one. The company employs a lot of people at good skilled jobs. Funnily enough, one of the big reasons his product has had a huge bump in growth is because of the legalization of pot in several states - which has increased the demand for custom glassware - which has positively affected his business. So I have had the amusing experience of listening to this die-hard Republican Texan who sends us pictures of the hunts he goes on with his kid also talking about his brushes, as a businessman, with some of the premiere custom bong artists and those in the weed trade.
People are complicated and it’s not fair to just look at what they talk about over dinner but you also have to look at their actions.
Its handy sure, but not useful when sitting down to do the complicated tasks required of politics. And renders discussion meaningless when each persons position is already predefined as left or right because then you can only discuss the merits of being left or right but not the actual thing that needs discussion.
The biggest danger of course is in defining your own position by opposing the things with which you disagree, like a teenager attempting to define himself by opposing what he perceives to be his parent’s values only to find later on in life that his parents were right about many (not necessarily all) things and that somehow he’s much more like them than he cared to admit back then.
