let us cultivate our laundry
May. 13th, 2005 01:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eiriasSomething I really despise about modern American political culture: It's time-consuming. It's no longer enough to hold a political opinion and vote or spend money accordingly: now one must also attempt to hold it loudly, where congresspeople and corporations can hear. The chief problem with this is that it's difficult to be heard when everyone else is also yelling. It's an arms race of loud opinions and letter campaigns. Meanwhile, the laundry piles up.
Unfortunately, I am a stakeholder in this overhyped culture war, and so as appealing as sitting it out all Candide-style might be, I feel guilty and nervous if I do that, because next thing you know it'll be no birth control and no evolution in schools and church for everyone and "First they came for the Communists" and blah blah blah.
Really, it's about a sense of perspective, i.e., not having one. How creeped out should I be by the Dominionists? by prisoner abuse in Iraq? by the demise of the filibuster? by North Korea and their nukes? by fuckin' Dan LeMahieu and his crusade against university contraception? Well, I don't know, and guess what? I bet you don't, either. Y'all have a mean age somewhere near 30; and while a small handful have been more careful observers of politics than I and for longer, that's still not enough time to get a feel for, say, how to tell signs of a warning democratic apocalypse from signs that the leadership is too big for its britches and is going to get its ass whupped sometime within the next ten years. You don't get a lot of datapoints on "fascist takeovers of Western countries" these days. As for "fascist takeovers in Western countries in the Information Age and [fill in some other details of modern life I can't think of that might be salient factors in how the political landscape plays out]," yeah, I'm not seeing any datapoints there.
Everyone I know is pissed off and scared these days, when it comes to politics. Don't get me wrong; I'm feeling it too, believe me. But every so often I wonder, isn't this just a huge waste of time, in the end? Don't we have problems to solve and art to create and new countries to visit and music to listen to and things to learn? Isn't that going to give more satisfaction in the end than a whole bunch of inchoate yelling at people who only give a shit if you're giving them money, which you might not have anyway, having already given it away to the eleventh lobby group to come canvassing this week?
Unfortunately, I am a stakeholder in this overhyped culture war, and so as appealing as sitting it out all Candide-style might be, I feel guilty and nervous if I do that, because next thing you know it'll be no birth control and no evolution in schools and church for everyone and "First they came for the Communists" and blah blah blah.
Really, it's about a sense of perspective, i.e., not having one. How creeped out should I be by the Dominionists? by prisoner abuse in Iraq? by the demise of the filibuster? by North Korea and their nukes? by fuckin' Dan LeMahieu and his crusade against university contraception? Well, I don't know, and guess what? I bet you don't, either. Y'all have a mean age somewhere near 30; and while a small handful have been more careful observers of politics than I and for longer, that's still not enough time to get a feel for, say, how to tell signs of a warning democratic apocalypse from signs that the leadership is too big for its britches and is going to get its ass whupped sometime within the next ten years. You don't get a lot of datapoints on "fascist takeovers of Western countries" these days. As for "fascist takeovers in Western countries in the Information Age and [fill in some other details of modern life I can't think of that might be salient factors in how the political landscape plays out]," yeah, I'm not seeing any datapoints there.
Everyone I know is pissed off and scared these days, when it comes to politics. Don't get me wrong; I'm feeling it too, believe me. But every so often I wonder, isn't this just a huge waste of time, in the end? Don't we have problems to solve and art to create and new countries to visit and music to listen to and things to learn? Isn't that going to give more satisfaction in the end than a whole bunch of inchoate yelling at people who only give a shit if you're giving them money, which you might not have anyway, having already given it away to the eleventh lobby group to come canvassing this week?
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Date: 2005-05-13 10:14 pm (UTC)On some level, obviously, the activists who push for more more more involvement more calls more letters more everything are right: like I said, in some ways, the loudest political constituency wins. And if the loudest people are ultraconservative Christians who think the only good agnostic is a dead and hellbound agnostic, well, I'm kind of fucked. I get that, I really do.
But the thing is, we do not operate in a vacuum. Louder voices on our side beget louder voices on their side; the louder we yell, the louder we are forced to yell later to drown out all the people who we have freaked the hell out of with our own voices. At some point, your voice just gives out.
It's not that there isn't merit in "bite off what you can chew and not more." That's an okay way to compromise, I guess, as far as it goes. It gives you peace and gets some small things done, so it's practical. But long range, it doesn't work. If you play the game, the game escalates. That's why I called it an arms race. There is no winning this game.
Which is why I wonder whether there is a way to avoid playing it without giving up the things I value. Shouldn't there be a way to substitute "smarter" for "louder"? I haven't thought of one yet, alas.