I have dealt with a torrent of insane juveniles over the past few days.. spending valuable leftist time typing away at insults I did not even read.
Instead of organizing and working to rid the world of the Clown In Chief, they have spent DAYS typing insults at a 60-year-old leftist who has been doing this stuff for 46 years.
Thankfully, they can’t drive me out of the Left -- but think of how many others they drive away every time they open their mouths or type their evil bullshit. (this is why I often wonder if some of the particularly-obsessive ones are getting paid)
When you are at the North Pole, everything, absolutely everything, is South.
Likewise, if you live your life here in fantasyland-tumblr, The Left Pole, then everything, absolutely everything, is Right. (even old hippies who were sitting in boring-ass Frantz Fanon study groups before you were even born.) Some of you seem to be constantly on patrol, monitoring for any tiny little deviation from leftist orthodoxy, so you can ruin someone’s reputation and get all your friends to send them mean messages and unfriend/unfollow them (tumblr equivalent of the gulag). Grigory Zinoviev wept.
This is how I know you don’t do any real political work--if you went out in your actual communities and verbally policed comrades the vicious way you talk to me and others here whom you disagree with? You’d get it upside the head.
At the very least, you wouldn’t be tolerated for long, labeled a disruption and told to leave.
You are destroying the Left. Stop.
Go look up all the local folks in your community who have meetings and actually do political things: candidates, demonstrations, petitions, voter registration, workshops for kids, passing out leaflets (make some yourself! You can all WRITE very well!!!), teaching old people about social media, networking... etc etc etc. And report back to me: When someone differs from you while you are passing out leaflets door-to-door or driving the candidate here or there... what do you do? Scream and holler? call them names for disagreeing? Or do you politely and respectfully find out the reasons for your comradely disagreement and learn something new in the process?, i.e. that a decent person does not have to agree with you 100%? That in fact, there is an excellent chance your own position will change within the next few years, since everyone’s does? Being an asshole about it will just make you feel foolish later; I made fun of vegetarians for years... YEARS! And now, I have bad-vegetarian karma for that. [I became a vegetarian 20 yrs ago--after spending the first 30 years of my life making fun of them and the next 10 thinking, hm, I think they might be right and finally quit eating meat at age 40.]
I am used to the tumblr Inquisitions--so used to them, I hardly notice them anymore. But what are the reasons for these constant call-outs?
I have decided they are pernicious and a symptom of a much larger problem: politics being practiced in a vacuum. People all alone in their basements and bedrooms, ruminating about radical politics, fighting with phantoms. You will never understand what the democratic process is until you actually participate in it, and that is not possible in a vacuum, all by your lonesome.
Politics requires constant real-life feedback to work.
None of you are doing this.... so it ain’t working.
The Right wing IS doing this, so they have won.
Our demos get religiously followed by the Right, often more than even the Left does.
Where are the demonstrations in your town against Trump and when was the last time you participated? (I never see any of these on tumblr; am I the only person who posts them?) If you think carrying signs or leafleting is BS, what child care/meal prep/car rides/other work have you done for those who would like to participate in various ways but feel they can’t afford to?
In short... you know what to do. Get to work. Not typing in an echo chamber to people who already agree with you. (However, typing to the opposition and trying to convince them, certainly qualifies.) Real work, removing this person from the most powerful position in the world. This is primary.
If you are not doing this, you are helping keep him there. Those are the choices.
Flash from the past: note how this song starts out all nice and bucolic.... and then suddenly it isn’t, just that fast.
Please don’t waste your time. I’m not wasting mine. So if I don’t reply to the torrent of abject nastiness and cruelty, sorry about that.
You should be too busy to write that stuff, as I am too busy to read it.
