People believe what the hell they want to.
Sure do.
Shouldn’t be any skin off your back, it’s not off mine. But when people act on those beliefs and they affect the rest of our lives, it becomes an entirely different matter.
And that is where we are at.
The economic and political minority that controls the Republican Party and is attempting to manage the continually evolving clusterfuck that is our national politics — and that is now threatening the rudimentary societal safety net the overwhelming majority of Americans want and deserve — have decided that, instead, Austerity and Charity are a better path forward and into the future.
Let’s talk about false equivalency in the context of national politics. When you have two sides of the political spectrum offering two different visions of America and one of those visions is demonstrably based upon lies you cannot in any way state that it is morally or materially equivalent to the other in its outcomes.
I can’t tell you, for instance, that I’m going to take away your shoes and give you boots and then give you a toe ring and say I’ve done what I said I was going to do. Furthermore, I can’t offer to give you boots and not give you boots, instead giving you a toe ring, and then argue that the toe ring is better than the boots while you’re hiking through the desert when my political opponent actually does give you boots or, at least, a pair of old shoes with a few holes in them.
It is a false equivalency to state or imply that the path forward that the Republicans and their President are offering is as beneficial to all of the American people as the general Democrat platform is. And all of the Republicans know it. They know that they are supporting a status quo that does not represent the American polity in any real way.
While both parties have their corporate and monied interests they are beholden to, the Democrats literally represent the face of modern America much more accurately than do the Republicans. They attract many people from downtrodden minority groups. The Republicans attract the opposite. Which means, white and other people of means, who are interested in consolidating and protecting their personal wealth. Or getting some, someday, if they pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, I guess.
The Republicans represent those monied personal and corporate interests overtly, with only nominal or token interest in providing for the welfare of any other group in this country. In fact, they seek to inure themselves from the perceptive perils of taxation and faux-socialism by actively engaging in false equivalency tactics that muddy the issues and confuse the electorate.
And I’m not even a Democrat.
But it seems very clear that any person or group who is concerned with the status and wellbeing of their neighbors would actually do something to help those neighbors by being neighborly. In Europe, many nations that have adopted liberal socialist policies that provide healthcare or free education actually say that when their populations are queried in regards to why they are willing to be taxed to support such programs. They feel an actual “duty” to be good neighbors and citizens.
Not in America. Guess why.
It’s because of legalized, race-based Slavery, the Black Codes, Jim Crow, de facto economic and residential segregation and the Prison/industrial Complex in the modern day that we can’t have nice things here even now. Because of the hatred and disdain that the peculiar institution inculcated in generations following. Because of everything that followed that institutionalized hatred and inequality. Because of the ignorance cultivated unto this day in the educational system that keeps this centuries-old strategy designed to consolidate power and privilege in a racialized minority beneath the surface as part of its structural meta-narrative.
People believe what the hell they want to.
Bu have no idea that — while they’re thinking they’re being an individual — they sound like individual parrots, thinking that they are singular and freeform initiators of original thought processes and actions. They have no idea that their very thoughts are formed in the subconscious crucible of the American cultural milieu; that has been meticulously and pathologically shaped over the course of centuries to protect people like them and that their thoughts are, literally, not their own. They have no idea that they are acting like robots fulfilling specific and limited roles.
It is a program based upon fear and a scarcity mentality: “There is not enough for all, so we must protect what we have and keep the Other out.”
This exacerbates the political divide as the monied interests coalesce on the side of privilege with everybody else on the other. Everybody’s got skin in the game, but one side has more in than the other. And by skin, I literally mean, skin. Our last protective covering before innards are exposed, flayed and naked to the elements, disease and deprivation.
Those on the Republican side who are monied and fearful of losing their economic dominance or, at least, relative stability, have no idea what it is like to be marginalized. So their conception of affront is naturally skewed by their experience, or lack thereof. Which allows them to take on a very real sense of aggrievement, despite their overall better position compared to the Other.
Despite the fact that their skin is much better protected at the getgo. The increasingly conscious whispering of that insistent, fear-mongering inner voice that berates and coddles, urging them to protect themselves and their interests, telling them that this should be the direction this nation should go in. Protecting their skin. Their wealth. Their position. Their privilege. Their dominance.
And the fact that this is occurring in America, the most dominant nation in the world culturally and politically, actually means that the entire rest of the world is protecting the core of white supremacy as a global force.
Because so much of the world’s goods funnel into this nation. So many of the world’s resources come here. Representatives of all of the world’s people migrate here. Literally buying into an American dream that, really, is an American Ponzi scheme. Feeding the privilege, the wealth, the benefits to those who inhabit the upper realms of this nation’s social strata nigh oblivious to how they and their families got there, how their position is maintained or what that unnatural elevation is costing the rest of the nation and the world.
So yeh. False equivalency. The two sides ain’t the same. Far from it. How the political parties morphed into such an inequitable and grotesque mirror-like rictus of parity is a subject for another day. Or, you can do your own research and challenge my statements yourself. Try not to just go googling merely to find out how deeply the Democrat party is mired in corruption and corporate money. Don’t bring info about Hillary or Obama to my comments either, please. We all know about that stuff. It is beside my overall point and a logical fallacy to boot. Which, if you want to engage in such in your own personal space, is really fine with me.
People believe what the hell they want to.
