Everybody hates extremism in theory, even while rationalizing their own (or lack thereof). But seeing it in action, putting names and faces to atrocity, I think that is where denial really comes in at the personal level. In the USA, those self-serving are hero-worshiped while those self-sacrificing are vilified. Hero-worship is ALWAYS a one-way street though; it’s inevitable to need a turnaround somewhere down the way.
As a white individual I cannot wait for demographics to shift. Change is natural and inevitable, for individuals and societies both, and resisting it is as futile as explaining that fighting fire with fire only burns more shit. Combating racism with racism or sexism with sexism only perpetuates those divides, abiding by purposeful designs to keep all parties from looking to where the food chain truly ends. If it’s not class war the tools of oppression still exist. Don’t re-appropriate the whip; burn it.
If power corrupts, then none should have it.
Trying to spread that message is what got Martin Luther King Jr murdered by his own government. The current head of that same government, his antithesis in every conceivable way, is a racist and a sexist. Saying he’s a cracker or a talking penis isn’t going to shame him, not when the system has his back. It will only fuel him. Dropping him off buck-naked in the middle of the desert on the other hand, could effectively learn him a valuable lesson. He is by no means a vacuum of course. The diverse problems of the world have always boiled down to those who put the needs of others before their own desires vs those who put their own desires before the needs of others. It’s 23000% the unfettered greed that’s destroying any chance of hope in this world. But scapegoats are lucrative when everyone wants to get rich.
Wiser voices are seeing the damage wrought by how this nation treats immigrants and refugees, while acknowledging it’s neither a Democrat or Republican thing, as history proves. But not enough make the obvious conclusion, blaming Capitalism itself. What Uncle Sam does to other nations, we the people do unto each other every day: lying, cheating and stealing while assuring ourselves it’s only for survival and that we really are “good”. Remembering Vegas, more Americans have been murdered by millionaires than by the Middle East’s equivalent of Alex Jones fan-boys.
And yea, it’s easier to pin all blame on the Conservative ideology, because they’ve always self-identified with Christian politics and Christians take sinful pride in how they help the poors. Organized religions, Christianity especially, love to claim the trademark of empathy the same as they do with meditation, while themselves being the most lacking in putting their money where their mouths are. Along with the divide among the Roman-Catholics today, religious fault is due wholly to the infection of Prosperity Doctrine. Idea being that if someone struggles in this life, then their faith is incomplete or illegitimate; they’re still sinners and something is wrong with them. And so deserve whatever hard ride society offers up on a silver platter. Whether the homeless are foreign or domestic.
Yet Christ famously said to pick up your cross and follow him. This world is a dress-rehearsal for whichever afterlife. Rewards do not happen here; that is not at all what the dogmatics of faith represent. I’m not even religious and I get that. And I see how Capitalism, money-worship itself, is the cult that supersedes all other modern theology. The Catholics dissing on Francis are in abject denial over which faith takes precedent for them.
The fucking Nazis of all people, saw how strong Christianity was throughout Europe and knew they couldn’t take it on head to head, no matter treaties signed with the crooked as sin Pope of the time. So they made their own denomination, with aims of converting the flocks of sheep rightward. So their new Positive Christianity was purposed with downplaying the mystical and divine of sacrifice, whether spiritual or physical. Instead it embraced worldly success, recasting Jesus from (purported) savior to teacher and leader of men. Less self-sacrificing hero, and more self-serving entrepreneur.
So, these self-professed Christians we see on the boob-tube today droning like buzzing flies to their self-professed Christian nation, rationalizing away what those poor kids are going through on behalf of the economy and nationalistic dominance or whatever the fuck, they are spiritually aligned with a Nazi experiment in theology. Fundamentally and non-metaphorically. Meaning that the official narrative they sell, in defense of USA policies both foreign and domestic, is in keeping with what’s widely-regarded as the most extremist body politick of the modern era.
This is unarguable fact.
By all rights it should be a given in this day and age, that the ‘rags to riches’ American pipe-dream is incontrovertible hogwash. The peoples of these United States of America desperately need to have their heads shrunk. In every connotation fathomable.