I have lived with enough trauma, unexpected guttings, beatings, and various universal FUCK YOUs handed out by what we loosely refer to as reality that the current world situation is achingly familiar.
Honestly, it sucks really really hard. Right now I am in the throes of trying to reconcile the entire arch of human history with the last week. That is why my heart is so broken and grim.
I am, in fact, an informed consumer when it comes to forms of government and the promise of Democracy and self rule.
I feel a very close kinship these last few days with the labor movement foot soldiers of the 1920s’. You know the ones…. The people who fought and died for social justice and freedom only to have their lives and work ostracized, demonized, categorized, and cauterized by HUAC. (House Unamerican Activities Committee.) My teeth and bones hurt me this morning, thinking about what the next one of those will do to us…. to me…. to the people I love.
Sure, we are not yet at 25% unemployment rate… there are not roving bands of disenfranchised Okies roaming the plains looking for work and food and discarded newspapers to stuff around their children’s prams so they don’t freeze in the night, but I know how we get there. I know intimately the drum beat of history. I know that, in ignorance and self delusion, my neighbors and nation have chosen the same path.
I think for me, this all, as always, boils down to the abject, wonton, and purposeful manipulation and disenfranchisement of the common idiotic worker. But unlike the struggle that brought us the new deal, we have chosen informed intellectual and spiritual castration. YOU chose this, my friends. In spite of everything… in spite of the accumulated blood soaked knowledge that gave us the modern world… the path that leads to the continuation of our species….
Instead of that, YOU have chosen the filthy, soiled, cast-off uniform of social-opiate-addicted fascists.
And now, we must all pay the price for your act of either; 1. Direct and conscious betrayal of the Constitution of the United States. or 2. Your moral and mental atrophy that you have embraced, wrapping what you think is “plausible deniability”. You couldn’t be bothered to do the hard work, look at yourself in the mirror, and understand just how pathetic you are, so you have gone along with the rest of the fair-weather fascists.
You know the type….. They are the ones that claims the heavy fat-laden soot they have to wipe from their houses’ windows every morning has nothing to do with the rumors of the “labor camp” down the road.
I find myself and my heart reaching out for warmth from the long-stoked hatred and love that you can still hear when Woody Guthrie sings. I find an anger and a sorrow growing ever larger in my heart, knowing with certainty how hard it is to walk the road of Integrity and Union. My feet and my heart and my hands ache with the thought of the labor ahead.
I mourne all those stupid altruistic fuckers like myself who can no longer believe that they have escaped the clinging evil that is willful religious ignorance.
“train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it.”
This is the insidious key to the propagation and the control of our species that outdated and ignorant thought modalities continue to impose on us.
But like good ole Woody sang…. “all you fascist bound to lose.”
Yes, we will not go quietly into that dark goodnight. Yes, you can shove us into boxes and boxcars but eventually, based on the arch of history, you will fail, and I, or my sons and daughters, will piss upon your grave and do everything we can to make sure your names live on in history as an enemy of freedom, an enemy of the RIGHT and the GOOD.
Children who were distorted and malformed by your “Training” and your “Way” will reject it; armed with the tools and the techniques of MY generation. Some day, the religion you are too ignorant and malformed as a moral human being to question will be catalogued along with all the other dead and false gods; in a comparative religions textbook at some university cataloguing the various flavors of mass hallucinations our species have survived.
We SHALL overcome. And we SHALL live in peace….. one day…. Amen, Mr. Seeger.
I know what MY kind are willing to do for the sake of freedom. I also know what YOUR kind are willing to do to keep their swastika flying.
We WILL win. I may not live to see the top of the mountain, but WE will. I’ll see you on the last train to Nuremberg. We shall face judgment together and know the right of it.