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the country of other

I don’t feel the most comfortable publicly offering up my opinions on politics, because there’s a lot I don’t know.

But since that doesn’t seem to stop anyone else, like, literally ever … Here is my completely non-expert view of the current situation in the United States:

How would you feel, if we were talking about this election from an outside perspective? Let’s say instead of the U.S., we’re talking about North Korea, or some non-Western nation that we imagine as being similar. Someone we look at and clearly identify as not-us. Other.

The people of Other are having an election, and the only candidates on the ballot are the current evil dictator, and the current dictator’s even evil-er but better articulated cousin.

Now imagine Other houses a quarter of all the world’s prisoners, spies on their entire population, classifies anyone who stockpiles food to be a potential terrorist threat, and has laws enabling regular citizens to be imprisoned indefinitely without trial. Imagine there is a rising tide of police murdering the citizens they’re meant to protect, that much of the middle class lives in some level of poverty, that their money is on the brink of becoming worthless …

·   Should the people of Other spend all of their time arguing about which of the dictators is going to fix everything?
·   Should they obsess over how important it is to vote for one guy because it’s NOT the other guy?
·   Should they look to which of their not-in-any-position-of-power peers to blame for all of their problems? Or
·   Should they be trying to overturn that system of government?

Wanting to vote for a third party, or overhaul the means by which we elect someone is not ‘throwing away a vote.’ It’s having the sense to understand that freedom is maintained by activism, and somebody needs to do something.

Historically speaking, progress doesn’t just spring up out of nowhere, or by the approval of the government. It comes from enough people being willing to look weird or crazy, to spend time and energy attempting to challenge the status quo in the name of what seems right. People who believed in women’s lib, or gay rights, or who opposed slavery, existed before their respective popular movements picked up, and those lesser heard voices weren’t ‘throwing away’ their unpopular opinions – they were on the right side of history.

Politicians are supposed to represent us. We should get to know in the most straightforward way what they are up to, yet we accept it as a matter of fact that they are dishonest and out for themselves, that legislation is passed all the time without our consent, and that we will have to mentally filter through a certain amount of media ‘spin’ to figure out what’s really happening to us.

To me, this seems incongruous to the ideas we were founded on. As I recall, we were pretty pissed off about our lack of representation in British Parliament – like, enough to embrace anarchy, kill people and stop drinking tea.

Maybe we ought to consider something like it again. What policies or practices could we afford to throw in the proverbial harbor?

#bwargh2024

—bwargh von modnar