Trey Smith
Today's posts will feature parsed sections of an excellent editorial, The Silent Death of the American Left, by CounterPunch editor Jeffery St. Clair.
The environment is unraveling, thread by thread, right before our eyes. Each day brings more dire news. Amphibians are in stark decline across North America. Storms of unimaginable ferocity are strafing the Great Plains week after week. The Arctic will soon be ice-free. The water table is plummeting in the world’s greatest aquifer. The air is carcinogenic in dozens of California cities. The spotted owl is still going extinct. Wolves are beginning gunned down by the hundreds across the Rocky Mountains. Bees, the great pollinators, are disappearing coast-to-coast, wiped out by chemical agriculture. Hurricane season now lasts from May to December. And about all the environmental movement can offer in resistance are a few designer protests against a pipeline which is already a fait accompli.
Our politics has gone sociopathic and liberals in America have been pliant to every abuse, marinated in the toxic silt of Obama’s mordant rhetoric. They eagerly swallow every placebo policy Obama serves them, dutifully defending every incursion against fundamental rights. And each betrayal only serves to make his adoring retinue crave his smile; his occasional glance and nod all the more urgently. Still others on the dogmatic Left circle endlessly, like characters consigned to their eternal roles by Dante, in the ideological cul-de-sac of identity politics.
How much will we stomach before rising up? A fabricated war, a looted economy, a scalded atmosphere, a despoiled gulf, the loss of habeas corpus, the assassination of American citizens…
One looks in vain across this vast landscape of despair for even the dimmest flickers of real rebellion and popular mutiny, as if surveying a nation of somnambulists.
We remain strangely impassive in the face of our own extinction.
Of course, I already addressed this part of the equation earlier. ;-)
Just let me end this series of posts with the observation that liberals seem to have devolved into a blob intent on nothing more than profane hero worship. Whatever the first black President does, they applaud. It doesn't matter if what he does is much the same as his reviled predecessor. When Bush did x or y, the minions howled in indignation. They stood on their soapboxes to give stirring oratories. They declared that his actions were ruining the nation and the world.
But now that their hero is following the same course and, in many cases, one upping Dubya himself, they are ecstatic. The same strategies that they said only a few short years ago were a threat to freedom and democracy are now lauded as ideal virtues. And these people scream at those of us who simply beg for a modicum of consistency in perspective.
In so many ways, we are heading in the wrong direction. It certainly doesn't help when liberals lay down palms in the road as their hero passes by.
My High School History teacher always taught us a trend in history. People won't always rise up against politics, however, take away their food, and mass uprisings will ALWAYS occur. This is particularly evident in Ancient China. Whenever there was a great famine, a Dynasty came to an end.
ReplyDeleteThis is because when fundamental human needs are neglected (such as food or water), people have no choice but to fight or die. Once global warming begins to threaten the food and water supply, people will have no choice but to rise up. Of course, by then it will be much too late.