iSuck

i recently read a post on streetsblog stating that apparently the bush administration wants to take money allotted for public transportation and use it for improving auto transit. this really irked me. we are supposedly the richest nation on earth and we have no money to pay for our essentials. then i realized what the problem is, which i stated in an earlier post of mine. it's all the iraq war's fault. it is draining hundreds of millions of dollars from our economy every year and no-one is doing anything about it.

this is what is bizarre to me. we are in a war that nobody wants to be in. it has ruined our country on many levels - credibility, economy, the human toll, etc. no-one does anything.

i went to a few protests before the war. i knew it wouldn't change his mind, but i did it anyway. i could have just as easily stayed home and assumed the contemporary view that my voice doesn't matter, but i didn't. that's a copout. but, again, i knew that it wouldn't change his mind.

so, we are several years and countless disasters into a war that has almost no support from anywhere in the world, i am wondering just what the fuck has happened. any semblance of protest is completely dead. and when there is protest, it is ill-attended and attended only by people on the fringe, even though the vast majority of americans disapprove.

for the longest time, i couldn't understand out what the problem was, then i figured it out. it is simple. protest is simply, unfashionable.

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in the 1950s & 1960s, black americans in the south had grown tired of being treated like 3rd class citizens. they used protest as a tool for social elevation. as we all know, white kids admire and attempt to emulate black kids as white americans have no real culture of their own. what happens in the ghetto eventually winds up in beverly hills. white kids of the era could see black folks engaged in a collective struggle for advancement on the television and in music. watts riots, black panthers, sit-ins, h. rap brown, marvin gaye, martin luther king jr., malcom x. the the imagery and energy was intense. what is important here is that black folks eventually triumphed(or at least it seemed that way, one could argue). these kids saw that protest can be a means to an end. eventually, these white kids joined in the protest and eventually assimilated the concept of collective struggle into their own new culture - hippie culture. the vietnam war became the subject of protest. these kids used protest, borrowed from black folks and put it to work for themselves. after a long struggle, they triumphed and the era ended.

collective protest had a rough time in the 80s, only surfacing with any semblance of momentum in thatcher's england, and even then, only briefly. punk culture's protest was far too sporadic and capricious to have any effect. punks hated hippies and everything that they represented. also, the new leaders and their media conglomerates of the united states and england had successfully alienated the few people who embodied protest, further alienating the alienated. eventually punk became hardcore -- protest without direction. protest without focus is nothing more than anger and rage, which is what kids today associate punk rock with. when they think of punk, they think of black flag. they have no idea who discharge were.

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collective protest is assumed to be a machination of communism and the left. it always makes me laugh when i see cops protesting for more pay or something. are cops leftists? who beats the cops, when it's time for the protest to end? the american revolution was collective protest. was thomas jefferson a leftist? thomas paine? libertarians would be upset to know that our founding fathers were the leftists of their era, even inspiring the french revolution. you could say that every country's emancipation is due to collective protest. was every country's modern birth brought about by the left? kind of arbitrary, isn't it - the left/right identification? anyway, since general protest embodies a collective effort and all collectivism - political, environmental, even the open source model, etc. - is currently viewed as communistic, it is now generally associated with communism and/or the left. and as we all know, the soviet union ceased existing in 1991. due to the limitations of human reason and perception, everything generally associated with communism died with it, including the idea of collectivism though communism never actually practiced it. once power became centralized within various bureaus in the party, collectivization was enforced which isn't collectivization but a dictatorship, but for appearances the name was still used. collectivization had been dead in the soviet union for decades.

protest is not a tool reserved solely for the left, it is used to facilitate a change, regardless of political affiliation. it simply is most often used by people who haven't enough personal power to manufacture gain and the cause of the poor and powerless is considered to be a "left" cause, though through history, the poor have often supported fascists and despots. people in power have no need to protest. they already have the power.

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currently, we live in a world dominated by capitalism. capitalism is an economic/political model based on the idea of individual gain. we are a society of individuals, each working for personal gain.

capitalism promotes this concept in nearly every one of it's facets: through advertising; the current trend in advertising is to pit an individual against a group. the individual, having freed themselves from the confines of the group is now free to fulfill his/her desires, unfettered. collective activity is taught to be regressive and oppressive. purchasing product offers freedom. we see this especially in automotive and technology ads. the car pulls away from the pack and finds it's own road. the car drives freely through the countryside, possibly never seeing another human, but when a human is seen, all attention is focused on the automobile, glorifying the individual, while in the real world the owner of the newly purchased automobile gets stuck in the same traffic jam as everyone else, never admitting to being a piece of the collective puzzle of choking traffic and smog and global warming and wasted tax dollars spent on freeways and everything else.

as i had stated earlier regarding black culture and it's influence on white kids, contemporary black culture has increasingly become a tool for corporations to increase profit margins. in the 1980s, there was a resurgence of political black culture and music which then led to the major labels promoting gangster rap, gangster rap having essentially instilled alienation in black culture and eventually white culture. eventually, talk of killing led to the worship of money, which worked it's way into white culture.

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so, the problem is that we are a nation of alienated individuals. we are forced to engage in collective behavior, only when it benefits the companies we work for, but outside them we are not encouraged to work together.

this is why, after almost 8 years of george bush and concurrent data explaining how incredibly fucked we are due to our degradation of our environment, we do nothing. this is why we have been involved in iraq for as long as we have and do nothing. this is why we sit and let our elected officials rob us of our constitutional rights and do nothing.

link | rss | share | posted: 2008-02-24 07:59:16