WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS
Not the Ogre with Two Heads
My rather unpopular opinion is that fundamentally we have disempowered ourselves and desire a Hero Champion, if you wish a Messiah in the end, who can save us as we go about our business. Voting forces this choice of Hero figures. Rather binary. Trump bad Kamala good. Kamala bad, Trump good. The triumph of Technique in our heads is let some fix it expert do their job. Too complicated for the man in the street to tackle problems seems to be the idea. I push back recalling once upon a time during Contra Aid working the phones and ringing Coast to Coast I spoke to hundreds of impassioned people about pushing back on Contra Aid. Sadly my political organization was a Democratic party oriented entity aiming to lobby swing state Congress critters to simply STOP. The Congress did so in it’s usual Bi-Partisan fashion betraying the base. To kill open aid to the Contras the Congress chose HUMANITARIAN aid instead. Clothing, food, and gear deemed non-military. For the Nicaraguan people-NOTHING. Did the base revolt? No. Why? Good people agreed. Humanitarian Aid is not specific military aid. Guns kill, not starvation or lack of medicine. And the organization quietly dismissed all and thus I turn to Alexis de Tocqueville.
Men living in democratic ages have many passions but most of their passions either end in the love of riches or proceed from it. The cause of this is, not that their souls are narrower, but that the importance of money is really greater at such times. When all the members of a community are independent of or indifferent to each other, the co-operation of each of them can only be obtained by paying for it: this infinitely multiplies the purposes to which wealth may be applied and increases its value. When the reverence that belonged to what is old has vanished, birth, condition, and profession no longer distinguish men, or scarcely distinguish them at all: hardly anything but money remains to create strongly marked differences between them, and to raise some of them above the common level. The distinction originating in wealth is increased by the disappearance and diminution of all other distinctions.”
Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, Volume 2, trans.
Wow. And as the value of the money decreases, the distinction of having it melts away, slowly at first, then all at once. This will be very interesting, and quite ugly. I can hardly wait.