Since the inauguration I’ve watched as hysteria spews forth about the incoming administration with zero reflection as to their own “side” and its sins. It’s nothing more than the same divide and conquer, partisan bs. We dealt with four years of constant panic last time Trump was in office, and it’s already at a fever pitch once again.
<Please note this is neither an endorsement of Republicans nor a demonization of only Democrats; I’m an anarchist and would prefer to see both parties completely destroyed forever; I simply want the truth to be told and known. Oh, and people having a little consistency in principles would be nice>
If you don’t want a bunch of billionaire close to the White House, did you also have a problem with all the billionaires that worked with various levels of government during several previous administrations? I hope so, because I firmly believe in a separation of business and state and think the collusion between the two is the source of many of our troubles, and has been for quite some time. It’s also a tenet of literal old-school, OG Italian fascism. If you defend the apparently illegal (and in some cases, quite sickening) actions documented on Hunter Biden’s laptop by saying that he isn’t an elected official and shouldn’t be under such scrutiny, will you extend that same grace to any of the Trump-adjacent scumbags? What crimes that involve so-called “private citizens” colluding with government officials in order to enrich themselves (and their government patrons) should we pay attention to? What are the standards? Are there any other than team “bad guy” versus team “good guy”? If you’re not worried about Biden’s pre-emptive pardons, is it because you’re afraid Trump would have initiated witch hunts? If you believe that’s true, can you also accept that a lot of people believe that Trump and most, if not all of the J6 defendants were subject to witch hunts, or is that something only Republicans are depraved and evil enough to initiate? Why?
An old friend of mine, in an online discussion with a Trump voter, said that he wanted to talk more with him to understand why he would “ally himself with hate”, because that wasn’t in keeping with what he thought of his friend’s character. If that doesn’t explain that we live in different realities then I don’t know what does! It is also an incredibly disingenuous rhetorical trick akin to the classic “when did you stop beating your wife?”, creating a false reality that one has to deal with before tackling the real issue. He can’t see how his friend could be so hateful and everything-phobic; the simplest answer is that he isn’t, and that my friend’s been manipulated by assholes to assume otherwise, but so much of his identity is tied up with his politics that he can’t let go of the divide. He HAS to feel like he’s a fundamentally better person. It would never even occur to him that his friend of many decades simply has a different perspective as to who the good and bad guys are (both bad, but I digress), acts accordingly, and MAY just be as good and moral a person as he. And it’s the same story in reverse; I know that a number of my Republican friends think all Democrats are just useful idiots to communists and buy into Marxist propaganda because they’re lazy parasites that don’t understand economic (or biological) reality and think that declaring something makes that thing true, or that you can override economic realities with the stroke of a pen. Many of these things may indeed be true (on both sides) but making an assumption about what’s in the heart and mind of someone without checking with them is the height of folly.
I prefer to think that people don’t actually do all that much thinking of their own and that it’s a lot easier and cheaper in intellectual labor cost to outsource to someone who you believe aligns with your worldview and isn’t lying to you. Unfortunately, if you consume most of the media that’s out there, that is certainly not the case. You are lied to about everything, constantly. And even if they’re not outright lying, they may choose to run with an incomplete story just to be the first to publish, or tell a highly edited version, which has consequences quite similar to simply having lied. An untrue story is published, and thus believed, and no amount of corrections or follow-ups will ever convince everyone that the initial report was untrue, incomplete, or otherwise missing context.
To help bridge the divide, I propose that we start talking to each other as the actual humans we are; imperfect, complex, often contradictory. If you then find that someone’s world view is incompatible and you choose to become enemies, at least it’s because of something real rather than a strawman that you let a third (belligerent) party build up in your mind.
-nK9
