Maybe, today, on a holiday where the president is spending millions to clothe himself in meaningless militarism, would be a good day to imagine what the world would be like if we hadn't spent all our money on endless weapons and directed our brightest minds on destruction.
But don't take my word on it, here's Republican war hero president Dwight Eisenhower: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies...a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed."
Also, Eisenhower said the theft of militarism included "the sweat of...laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hope of its children."
Imagine what scientific advancements we could have had. What kind of humane economy we could have had. What diseases we could've cured.
We speak of our wars and our military endeavors as if they were destined, as if they succeeded simply because the world didn't end. But we never stop and talk about what the world COULD have looked like, how much better society could have been.
We don't speak of the consequences of an entire country dedicated to war. We don't speak of all the endless trauma, what it's done to us as a people, to our lives, to our minds and spirits. It's time to imagine the world that could have been so we can start to make it real.
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We’re in the middle of a full blown crisis and being forced to have conversations about power and abuse and aging and trauma and the past and the future that we were never taught to have.
In fact, capitalism actively incentivizes not having those conversations.
This isn’t just a political crisis. It’s a mental health crisis. The issues we have with ourselves and our families are scaled to the society level, and capitalism and history in general has burdened us with so much trauma that it keeps us from recognizing what’s happening.
For things to get to the point they’re at it was necessary to live in abusive environments until we got to the point where communicating about what’s happening in our lives and society at large was nearly impossible.
Just a reminder that every single time the Center will warn about the dangers of the Right and the Left and then immediately form coalitions with the Right because their differences are aesthetic and rhetorical, not material. The shared, main principle is service of capital.
This is what keeps getting misunderstood in America.
The Center is fine with liberal democracy as long as it serves their purposes. But when things get dicey, they will soft-wash authoritarianism until they full embrace it.
That's what's happening now.
Everyone gets so confused when the leaders they support pass Right Wing legislation or criticize causes or ideas they support, but the truth is that the Center pays rhetorical lipservice to things until the rubber meets the road. Then, it rushes to the Right.
Alito’s extremism and Thomas’ corruption expose a larger threat: a long term plan by the wealthy to capture the Court and dismantle our rights and protections in order to cement control has come to fruition.
They aren’t outliers. They are perfect representations.
People shouldn’t trust the Court. Since its founding it’s worked as a protector and tool of the wealthy. What progress we have had has been the aberration.
The time to push back and demand reform that serves democracy is here and it is fleeting.
The wealthy have always attacked information and tried to control education and access to information about what they have done, but this new era gives them incredible tools to complete what they have always tried to do: control reality itself.
Right now, we are losing this war.
People are familiar with Steve Bannon's "flood the zone with shit" strategy, but the wealthy have been attacking information for forever.
In America we have been inundated with attacks on empirical reality for all of our lives. This has been a concentrated effort.
Trump’s conviction should be the end of his political career.
The Right rallying violently around him should be a moment for some to realize we’re in a severe crisis and leave behind the comforting lies they’ve been sold.
For years people have been making so much money and gaining influence assuring followers the system would solve the Trump problem. That he would be held accountable and the spell would break.
These are false prophecies. The date of the apocalypse came and went. We’re still here.
The truth is that Trump is a symptom of a larger disease. We’re facing a full-blown authoritarian tilt with complicated factors.
It’s cathartic to see these convictions, but focusing on the joy hides a deeper truth that we must face if we’re going to survive.
Persecution is essential to the Right’s worldview.
They can become wealthy and influential for no reason whatsoever, get treated seriously despite never earning a shred of it, and still it’s never enough to fill the emptiness that defines them.
The Right is defined by undiagnosed and repressed trauma, a self-hatred that has to be projected onto the rest of the world.
There’s not enough money or fame or power to fix it and any measure of it just feeds their self-hate, making them more and more miserable.
We should be grateful to Musk and Trump and all the people in their orbits. They tutor us everyday in the true nature of wealth and power and what fuels the need to hurt others.
It’s an ideology that follows self-hate masked by narcissistic persecution complexes.