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

Flom­mist Bwargh von Mod­nar is. Copy­right © 2016 Bwargh von Mod­nar. Pic­tured: Adri­ano Ce­len­tano in Prisen­co­l­i­nensi­nain­ciu­sol (1972), watch here.‬

PLEASE   SUPPORT   FLOMM
TIPS  +  DONATIONS  DISCREETLY  ACCEPTED

FLOMM
promotes learning  +  education worldwide
drawing attention to works by nü  +  upcoming artists,
designers, writers, musicians  +  MOR

OUR INVOLVEMENT
– however –
is mostly paid for out of pocket or in trade

IF YOU ENJOY
wat  FLOMM  is doing here, please consider


1.   LEAVE US A TIP  :
use our tip jar whenever the mood hits



2.   BUY OUR SWAG  :
our approach is semi-green —
                all our  FLOMMHAUS  merch is made to order



3.   HELP US OUT  :
use our hashtags  #flomm  #flommus  #whereisflomm  #nüflommart  #flommist
when posting on ur socials —
or drop us a note and offer to help in some way
everything we do is on a volunteer basis —
             when we say  YOU CAN BE A FLOMMIST TOO  this is wat we mean

THANK YOU
your support helps our continued efforts
to create content across numerous platforms

clic 「 HIER   」 to return to the DER TUNG front page