We Gave a Riot and Nobody Showed

I reject outright the idea that every single Republican politician knows or understands that their agenda is immoral, just as I reject the idea that the Democrats understand the consequences of implementing more neoliberal  economic strategies is a perilous pursuit. My reason for rejecting that government and media are conspiring, each for their own reasons, to force conflict between the far right and opposing groups is that Republicans intentionally commit evil acts and by implication and Democrats do not; is inherently false. The real issue is not memorials and statutes, or when a few hundred people show up in random cities proclaiming themselves members of far right groups. Energy is wasted and opportunities for real change is missed when people show up to counter protest the far right and in doing so encourage engagement. The far right wing have numbers that are relatively smaller, but the media treats their activities as a sexy story, by featuring their violent bias. They focus on any violence by people that a majority of the right ring viewing audience believes are causing the right wing’s discontent. Counter protests often draw larger crowds and only minimal coverage. And who can blame the media, the center’s only purpose is usually to tell people that the far right sucks. Instead they need to focus on ideas such as we can guarantee jobs for everyone, have health care available to all, that public college can be free and that all past debts to public colleges and for medical care can be fully discharged. Tell people that ancestral slavery victims and indigenous Americans whose lands were stolen should receive reparations.  All this is not a pipe dream. It is economically feasible and socially desirable. It does little to solve all problems, but simultaneously insisting on truth and refusing to let lady liberty to even peek beneath her blindfold will move the needle closer to true justice.

Our problem is not that any of our Presidents are incompetent assholes, or and that by Congress firing a President will change anything other than demonstrating that justice is an American goal.  Nor will punching a far right group member in the nose. Instead, that would only escalate the anger and confusion seething through the country and the world. Our problem is that we have an economic crises, where unemployment is artificially deflated by not including those that have been discarded by our Capitalistic job market. Young people across the country are destroying themselves sometimes to death through opioid and meth addictions. Just a bit the desperation to survive is subsumed by the high. Another problem is that we have a nation that claims democracy and forgets that democracy requires justice. The two parties that rule do a little dance with one party stopping people from voting and the other singing quietly from the sidelines at the other “ooooo, you bad, and you naughty” but they don’t do a damn thing about it.

I don’t care if the far right march. And you will not find me endorsing using their tactics against them. It is their tactics of violence and repression that make them strong, using those tactics yourself only strengthens the far right. I want to snuff them out by refusing to feed them the attention and blood they crave. Destroy the far right with the light of ideas that bring positive changes to our individual lives, opportunity to our economic system, justice to all our systems, and peace to our international positions.