Reading some journals, some communities, can be really depressing.
I am a dissident in my own country.
I know it’s a common belief of those who place themselves outside what’s accepted as the political spectrum, particularly Chomsky, that the average American cares more and is smarter than we are led to believe. His example given is in listening to sports radio one night, and hearing the callers go into such great detail about statistics and history. His point was that people are willing to devote themselves to the things they care about and pursue them passionately, and that the majority of people have been led to believe that politics and world affairs are too complicated for them to understand, so they should leave these matters up to their leaders.
I have tried, for years, to hold fast to that belief. That people are not stupid. That they simply have been marginalized for so long that they’ve come to believe they are exactly what their government thinks of them, what Alexander Hamilton called “the dirty rabble.”
But when something so blatant, so obvious is happening, and you watch the debate form around it in the most asinine, most limited and most ill-informed ways, it’s hard to maintain that faith.
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“When I was a kid, I wanted to be in the parade so bad, man. It took me years to get up the nerve but I finally did. I got some crepe paper — tied it all over my bike and rode along side all the fire trucks and everything. And do you know what happened?”
“Everybody laughed.”
“No. Nobody gave a fuck at all.”
—Hutch Owen’s Working Hard – Tom Hart
Go back to bed, America, your government is in control.