How Did We Get Here? I Simply Drove Mindlessly Forward
Photo by Samuele Errico Piccarini
Sometimes when you drive in a certain direction for long enough, something amazing happens. You arrive in just the place that you were heading. It is quite an ability to be able to deny the consequences of straight lines, movement and time. Those who speak of such unavoidable destinations earn names like Cassandra and are very unpopular at parties. This seems to be just such a time in history.
Now this will be the last time I give any lengthy discussion as to how I consider we had multiple waypoints to diverge from this path; at some point this becomes navel-gazing. Looking above your own abdomen is now a quite necessary thing, but I do think a quick glance in the rear-view mirror is necessary to avoid repetitive mistakes. This one last time I’m gonna air it out.
We are dealing with the fruition of so many toxic decisions– so many steps along the way that could have been averted. An accumulation of terrible concessions and outright ignoring of evil. If we don’t like where we are at, we do need to consider how long this has all taken and how many times mitigation might have been possible.
There is a lot of liberal level hatred going on right now towards those they feel are to their left—they consider the current administration to be the fault of those individuals due to their perceived inelasticity in regard to issues such as……. genocide. But this has been going on much longer than recent atrocities—there’s been a very long history of reality being pointed out by leftists and being ignored by liberals.
Many on the left were pointing out that the Democratic Party was dangerous, due to their mendacity and hollow promises. The voicing of this concern was not to enhance the reactionary right but to save any shreds that could keep fascism at bay. The concern was that we would land exactly where we are, whether in this election cycle or the next. It could have happened after any neo-liberal administration, and the left was warning of this very salient fact. And it’s not like the left were magically prescient, no—this is what always happens when a party like the Democrats offer no significant push-back to the rhetoric of the right or any improvement in quality-of-life issues for the masses. It’s almost worse that they dangle improvement, but do not deliver. A portion of the masses will accept and embrace darker, ill-advised options when this occurs. For the left to have been pointing this out was like........
