What are you trying to get back to?
I'm really trying to understand this.
It's been clear for quite some time what the conservatives want to get back to. They want to get back to a point where rich white men didn't have to answer to anyone. They're running that playbook now with a petulant man-child running the world while we watch others go scot-free for sexually assaulting children.
We're watching white men cosplay Call of Duty while taking out innocent people in broad daylight because some girl denied their advances back in middle school.
We've exported our white supremacy to other countries to colonize and ehtnically cleanse a native population under the name of God and country.
But we've been doing this for decades. This country is about to turn 250 years old and we've been doing it well before it was founded.
So, if you aren't conservative, what country are you trying to get back to? What is the normal you want to see return?
Is it that you want to return to the willful ignorance of the pain and suffering happening overseas? Or you want to tune out the suffering here at home?
I get it. It shatters your world view. America was the good guys spreading "peace and democracy". We set the example that the world follows. We have the freedoms that even Europe wishes they had.
Well, let me be the guy to tell you...you've been lied to. It's all a facade. The America. you're yearning to return to has never existed for you or anyone else.
Now, for some people, an argument could be made that they had been "brainwashed." But I'm not going to insult your intelligence nor your agency. What's happened to a lot of us have been exploitation, trauma, and gaslighting.
The folks at the top have exploited us for so long that we don't even notice it anymore. They work us as much as they can and give us just enough time to rest for the next exhaustive shift. And that's by design.If we're too tired, we won't notice the vicious cycle we're in until its too late. I'm still guilty of getting sucked in and I've seen how the system operated from the outside.
That brings in the trauma. When you get so far down the hole you don't know what to do without it. When you take a vacation and all you can think about is work. You're afraid to take a sick day because that's gonna result in lost productivity. You can't imagine life without work because how will you survive. You become so reliant on the system, you don't know how to function without it. It's like you've developed Stockholm Syndrome to Capitalism!
Then there are the lies being fed to you. You aren't where you want to be because its some other person's fault. Did the immigrants take your job? Did someone not vote the way you voted? This person is focused on this issue and not my issue? There are tactics that are employed by the ruling class to keep us, the working class, divided. They feed on your insecurities and fears to either enrage or numb you. They want you to fight only for yourself to make sure you will never depend on others in your class and always on them.
And, again, they've been doing this for centuries. Pitting men against women, working class white people and people of color, straight and queer, cis and trans, global north and south.
So, I ask, what are you trying to go back to? The past of the US is not something that should be celebrated. It needs to die. Fade away into the sunset.
We need to be fighting for something new, sustainable, and equitable! And that future is very much possible!
But first, we have to stop! Stop fighting each other! Stop eating and feeding the lies! Stop contributing to a system that is actively killing us!
We don't need to save this country! We need to save us! And one way we can do this is to starve the beast! For us to collectively strike and withhold everything we have and bring this monster down to its knees!
And we must act soon before it is too late!
WE HAVE THE POWER!