I waited my 41 years to meet her, heels over head, but nothing I have to barter or trade would help her life, liberty or pursuits of happiness in any way. Money may not be the root of all evil, but the concept that it or any other thing up to and including love is the solution for all, denies the world of problems it is fundamentally powerless before. But I am devastated and grateful all at once that our spheres brush fingertips, even if only once per month, because the world where her life, liberty and pursuits of happiness are endless is the same one I give my everything for. There’s more useful knowledge to be absorbed in a few Milan Kundera books than in any thousands of comic books, and always so many more lessons to be learned that simply do not exist in print at all.
Leftism is putting the needs of others before anything else, and rightwing is asserting one’s fantasies over the needs of everybody else. There is no voice for the true left in DC, because accumulating the money necessary for a campaign is a self-serving thing. Howard Zinn called it populism vs capitalism, hoping to appeal to the binary thinking of a two-party system. But liberals and democrats today prefer to believe in such a thing as a “good” capitalism, so I call it charity vs indulgence. Or good vs evil. It truly is that simple, the problem rests in everybody wanting exceptions for themselves, wanting to mislabel anything else as love. Which implies evil is more natural than good.
Money and violence are the only languages understood by all Americans, by all first world nations. Companies exist only for profit, and it will take more than a dark night of the soul or hashtags to change it. I often joke that free speech only applies to food labeling, but with enough money any message can be amplified or suppressed to any audience. Google’s Eurocentric “right to be forgotten” was literally initiated solely for Theresa May to clean up accounts of her dad’s sins. Our nation’s largest revenue stream comes from selling arms to foreign douche-bags, where over half the annual budget comes from, yet domestically gun-fanatics are kept stupid enough to believe that any governmental agency would ever in a zillion years come for theirs. Stirring domestic sales. Which in turn supplies lobbyists with means to purchase the consciences of always-for-sale elected officials, who then deregulate and award tax incentives to the most selfish groups in the nation at the expense of lives, liberties and pursuits of happiness for everyone else. If we don’t like adverts suggestively destroying people in prime-time, we need to see what enables such an act to begin with. It’s not partisanship, it’s the free market.
When demand gets fabricated for preordained goods instead of supply meeting preexisting demand, there’s no real choice or competition. Boycotts are increasingly illegal. There’s debtors prisons again. I was once evicted by a sheriff in Louisville for not being a customer for the local utility company. I didn’t owe money anywhere, I just wasn’t using their service, and I was punished for doing so. The ACA included federal fines for persons who couldn’t afford to be customers for insurance companies. I’ve said for years Libertarianism is rebranded feudalism, but this democratic government is weaponized at every turn against the masses on behalf of big business. The opposite of socialism. Only right-wingers fail to learn a difference, how you either serve charity or you serve indulgence. It’s good or evil. And communist and socialist leaders alike are just as susceptible to the PR of greed, because Capitalism co-opts everything.
Letting billionaire ego-charities write their own rules enables bullying, a law of the jungle where nothing stops them from getting profit no matter the unsafe working conditions or poisonous products resulting from their unharnessed egos. Their having unregulated say in politics already is what causes our issues. I say that if a healthy government is to exist, it cannot be a for-profit endeavor purposed entirely with profiteering the public’s resources for the enrichment of the most selfish. Government is no weapon to be used against its own citizens for the lucrative dreams of the few. Putting fantasy before the needs of others is the source of problems. The opposite, putting the needs of others first, is problem-solving. Actual leftists can’t afford campaigns because they give their resources away. You don’t hear of it as they don’t afford marketing either. If A is A and a thing is itself, then advertising/promotions are unnecessary. But the USA invented PR and social optics because lies are necessary to believe Capitalism does anything but destroy lives. The best part of Atlas Shrugged was the end, when the heroine goes off to a commune where creation rather than profit is the aim, learning that money is not a means to a happy end, much less an end unto itself. I kind of get off on turning ideologies inside out. It’s more legal than doing it with people. If we love what we do it’s not work. I think the worry over who’d do what is a projection, that nobody does anything unless there’s money, when we do things for other reasons all the time, and there’s other ways to pay. I’ll bake you bread if you cut my grass. Etc.
Not one candidate is far-left. Leftists have no means to advertise because their time, energy and resources are what’s fueling our soup kitchens, food pantries and homeless shelters, all of which have been dramatically defunded over the past decade by the non-leftists of DC. For the umpteenth time, the difference between leftists and liberals/Democrats, is that liberals/Democrats persist in believing that Capitalism might still be manageable. Neither liberals or Democrats are leftists, much less far-left, as leftism is fundamentally anti-Capitalism. If the needs of others come first in all matters, you are leftist. If indulging fantasy is more important than the needs of others, whether trying to become or trying to service the centerpiece to a cult of personality, or imposing your favorite desires or bias across others, you are rightwing. Thus, everybody inhabiting the full political spectrum of DC is rightwing. Indulgence is normalized as status quo throughout our culture, the self-centered are hero-worshiped while self-sacrificing is denigrated. You don’t hear about the real leftists because they are more concerned with others than themselves. They have nothing to sell.
And if giving more time, energy and resources to charity than to indulgence sounds odd, it’s because evil is normalized. It’s the status quo no matter how you rationalize your gaming. If some billionaire trades for a tax write-off 1% of their time, energy or resources, they are really not a philanthropist. And if you do the same, savng most of your means for indulgence while trading only 1% of your time, energy or resources to charitable endeavors, and only for reward or attention, you are not a good person either, not really.
Power corrupts irrefutably. Not sometimes, not under given circumstances. Which means you have to give it all away, and not to those who want an extra foothold to get ahead of others, but to those who need it to stay afloat, to stay abreast. Politicians, CEOs and celebrities are rightwing. They are evil. Yet our culture trains us to judge by mere packaging, by inference, and not by the full content of either characters or experience. A few bad eggs unnaturally condemn entire ethnicities, just as shear lust over the briefest of encounters with a smart and sexy nurse practitioner might by any stretch of the imagination come across as truest love.