Around the election, I found myself needing a break from some of the many podcasts and YouTube channels I had previously been fortifying myself with against Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in particular. I became specifically disenchanted with the effectively single-issue podcasts that endorsed third party presidential candidates and that had become combative toward those who expressed a difference of opinion about the wisdom of voting your conscience and essentially letting whoever was going to win win rather than acknowledging that there might be value for Gazans in harm mitigation given the two most likely (read: only possible) outcomes for this most intrusively relevant office. Recently as the cold light of day has only gotten colder, I've felt myself warming a bit toward my favorite of those podcasts and have lately given it a somewhat wary second chance. It was bound to happen-- on a third try, one of the co-hosts prefacing what promised to be a rant about Trump's designs on the real estate of Gaza, and his resumption of channeling 2000 lb bombs to Israel to abet in the deed (breaking Biden's too-late prohibition on transfer of the weapons after months of administrating a dutiful supply), confessed that he was much more comfortable criticizing Democrats than Republicans and this critique of Donald Trump was new territory for himself. I suppose I could have held on to see his fledgling critique in action, but I confess, hearing out loud what sounded like the very confession I'd unconsciously sought of the hate-blindness of intelligent people to the vastly greater danger of a second Trump term over the prospect of a missed opportunity to punish Democrats for being Democrats consumed all of my emotion and I closed the video almost reflexively. Truthfully, I share the hatred of the assholes who stole the Democratic party in the 80s and 90s and refuse to give it back. But, the outburst that commanded my mouse clicking finger to close the video aside, for my own sanity in the face of a daily deluge of confirmation of just what I had feared, I have been trying to foster in myself a zen-like calm about the hysteria of the so, so many who urged whoever would listen away from voting for Kamala Harris now that they face Trump Part II with the rest of us.
How could there be so much contention within the small sliver of the American electorate that otherwise knows best; how could there be such division within the same group of passionate deep-thinking people who would otherwise mutually want the same thing-- what the planet wants: an end to capitalism and a political system that is not controlled by money but by the native wisdom of the people? How could this one dumb day in November have made so many of them so stupid?
I made a chart:
I don't make resolutions, but last year I resolved to use fewer plastic bags. Just in time, the county I live in outlawed plastic bags as of January 1, forcing me to keep my resolution. Riding on that success, this year I made not a resolution, but a promise to myself following a year in which I could not shut up about the presidential election to write less about politics. I felt good about its chances. But I woke up yesterday morning with a pretty bleak notion about what we’re in store for and a sinking feeling that it's partly because so many people did not understand the choice that made our present predicament possible.
I am almost afraid to infect another mind with my ominous horrific vision. It had to do with who controls the food supply chain and who goes to jail if it suddenly becomes so scantily meted out that people begin starving in large numbers and only “the fittest” can manage to get their hands on it. Some of those fittest might actually become a slave class in return for their fitness. I had been thinking recently about AI replacing most jobs—the bullshit jobs in particular, like mine for instance. AI would do the jobs that are such bullshit that they can stand being done by inert brains who will be replaced by AI in its present underwhelming state in which it's not so much good at knowing what it's talking about as it is good at sounding like it knows what it's talking about, which will be deemed good enough for most of the crap it will be needed for, like most of the bullshit jobs already are today. That’s really as good as they need AI to be. Thus, the workforce will be rendered into a pretty undifferentiated mass-- and a soon to be unemployed one.
What if the ICE raids that have begun ravaging so many lives are designed to create a famine? No one to pick the crops—only the very wealthy are assured meals. The rest of us have to duke it out for whatever scraps make it at inflated prices to our grocery shelves. What do they care? It’s so much easier and faster starving people than rounding them up and destroying them. Many years ago, a former colleague of mine actually accidentally starved a couple dozen feral cats that had been living with her. It took only a handful of days. She didn’t mean to. She lived alone except for the cats that she had a weakness for-- much of her salary went to veterinary care. What happened was that her elderly parents who lived an hour away both got sick at the same time and needed her, their only child, to live with them; meanwhile, work made her travel for days on end. She just couldn’t return home to take care of the cats and felt she had no one to turn to for help. My colleague had to face legal and social consequences for the misfortune on top of her misery, but the oligarchs and their minions never do and who do you hold accountable for my starvation when those in charge are the ones who let (wanted) it to happen? If you are following my drift, when the population gets down to a manageable number, starvation continues to be used as both a motivator for the hard labor that needs to be done to maintain the owner class (the military and constabulary are well fed for instance) and a way to keep maintenance of the hard labor force cheap. Like the Europeans did with the slaves.
Anyhoo, these are my pleasant thoughts about what we’re in for. This is a bit where my feeling of urgency about things comes from. When inert minds across the country spread worry about the contrived hypothetical perils of “socialism” and not about the very real horrors that are already manifesting in the service of techno feudalism you get the sense that we might be too late. But we mustn’t act that way. I think we need to keep people conscious of who the enemy is. Social media (and the news it spreads of the economy / bad news / ravaging of the environment / scarcity) is designed to keep us thinking that the enemy is the person who could starve you reaching for the last loaf of bread in front of your face at the supermarket. We’re not included in the plans of the owners, obviously. We need to get rid of them or at a minimum to neuter and neutralize them, but in order for that to happen we need solidarity down here. No more right left. Just down up. But we have to foster solidarity here to get us through the hard times to come without letting them get away with murder of the masses and enslavement of the survivors. That’s why I think unplugged is the way to go—unplugged from the traps of social media. I think some sort of mass movement of magazines and music and entertainment could do it. It would have to be fun, to make solidarity fun too. To make it a much more attractive alternative to the dog-eat-dog chaos they want it to be.
Getting rid of any and every benefit of the government; getting rid of any progress in peacemaking, “affordable health care” and any initiative to address global warming— I know they’re evil idiots and not evil geniuses—that’s their one saving grace. But I think they are going to make the most of Trump’s term (or terms if they can swing extending it) to make things as safe for them and as chaotic for the rest of us as they can. I don’t think they’ve thought through what happens when people catch onto them. I think they’re planning to keep that from happening, but they’re not geniuses. They’re extremely powerful, but they’re not infallible.
