Faced with what they perceived as the crisis of a failure to establish their ideology as dominant in American politics, the radical conservatives of the 1970’s took to a new strategy. Rather than appeal to the people directly, which wasn’t quite working, they chose to use their money to create a middle man who would influence the people in a more subtle, indirect way. They began to buy up media outlets and established think tanks that employed bright young minds with the sole task of creating strategies and policies, plus the language that would effectively promote their ideology through those same media outlets. A wise and effective plan.
Why do I bring this up at a time when there are plenty of things that are devastating our democracy to think about. It’s because there are so many things threatening to destroy our democracy we must do something about. We on the left need to do a similar thing as was done by the far right nearly 50 years ago. We need a new strategy. We need to create positions for bright young minds to concentrate solely on finding a synthesis of viable solutions to the myriad existential problems we face. We need to point ourselves to a better use of persuasive language. And we need to facilitate the infrastructure and resources needed to pull this off.
Now, unlike the conservatives of the Nixon era, we don’t have the financial resources to both do this and purchase those means of distributing our ideas to the public. Besides, the conservative owners of major media in America aren’t about to hand over their powerful tool of communication to any “Libtards”. So to establish a majority will of the nation to force government into embracing workable solutions we must find a more organic means of persuasion. This organism can only be formed by the people, who, as in many times past, will use their true, pure power to gently help enough people reconnect with the values that have AMAG (Always Made America Great).
The resources, both financial and human, have always been there. We just need to quit being whiny egoistic babies and agree that no one issue is greater than any other. We must accept that the many critical issues that face us, when looked at collectively as they must, can only be addressed by working on them synthetically, as parts of a whole, rather than analytically, as just parts.
I ask if the actual rather than imagined demise of life on the planet is worth, metaphorically, having 100 people speaking with one voice rather than 100 people speaking in a Babelesque hundred voices. Frankly, I have had it up to beyond here. As you know, I am not immune to this behavior. Far from it. I am one of it’s most virulent practioners. To succeed, what I need to do is sequester myself away with some coffee, Laphroaig, and pizza (and more Laphroaig) until I am able to take a course of action. (Action is a type of actually doing something instead of just talking about it for those of you unfamiliar with the concept).
If I can’t be the point of the spear, for which I have never been hard enough, I will enter the crucible of surrender to truth, and temper myself into a functioning part of the strong shaft.
I owe it to you all out of respect for the divine gift of conscious occupation of this, my form that I lease from the universe.
None of us can afford to break the terms of our lease on life.
