Apologies for the Nihilism
I am so so so so so SO tired of Obama’s bizarre insistence that the people in charge on the other side of the aisle are even remotely sane. The people who already know there’s nothing to be gained (and SO much to be lost) from ongoing capitulation to Republican demands are just utterly sick of watching it happen over and over again, and he’s not going to win over anyone else by keeping it up.
The Republicans in government don’t give a flying fuck about jobs, or poor people, or old people, or the sick, or the hungry, or the young, or the underprivileged, or the disenfranchised. They haven’t passed a single jobs bill since the election. Instead, they live in a fantasy reality where everyone could afford gold-plated health insurance if they weren’t so damn lazy, scary immigrants have taken every job in the country, gay people are destroying families and the military, the unemployed are (again) lazy, mooching slobs, and a secret Muslim socialist fascist nazi foreigner lives in the white house. They believe we can solve the debt crisis they’ve manufactured by dismantling Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, S-CHIP, WIC food stamps, children’s literacy programs, the national parks, NASA, the FAA, the EPA, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Education… but NEVER by taking ONE FUCKING CENT from our IMPOSSIBLY MASSIVE war machine, or asking the 1% of people with more wealth than the other 90% of us COMBINED to do anything with all that money but SIT ON IT (ideally in offshore accounts so it can’t be taxed at all, of course).
The Republican party is about one thing, and one thing only: power. The power to control who you can marry. The power to force you to have your rapist’s child, to prevent you from voting, to keep you under the crushing thumb of your corporate employer, to stop you from getting an education, to bar you from getting health care because you’re poor. They sell a vision of success by rugged individualism, where everything would be fine if the government just stopped doing its job. But the cold, hard truth of the matter is that they don’t care about you. They want to be in charge, and anyone else’s success puts that in jeopardy. So the rugged, freedom-loving patriots in the Republican party pass laws banning abortion, banning gay marriage, barring gays from serving their country, requiring a photo ID to vote, making it harder to unionize in the workplace. They rail against immigrants heeding the call of Lady Liberty. They argue against giving you a decent minimum wage for your work. They decry the common decency of caring for the old, the sick, and the young when they cannot care for themselves. They demonize peaceful religions to feed their engine of fear and bloodlust. They mock the idea of sharing anything with anyone.
You can’t build a functioning society with 300 million rugged individuals all just looking out for themselves with an attitude of “I got mine, jack”. It’s a lie. That’s all it is: a lie. Because it’s the only way they can hold onto their power: by promising over and over again something they know they will never deliver, all the while distracting us from their broken promises with fear and division.
And the truly, truly maddening part of this whole nonsensical charade we call a government is that the Democrats have decided to buy into the Republican lie and follow it all the way down the rabbit hole. There is so much moral high ground being abandoned in the name of bipartisanship with a party that wants to do nothing but drive this country into the ground so that they can be heralded as its saviors come election time. The Republicans have been allowed to frame the debate in our corrupted “marketplace of ideas” for years now, where multinational companies interested in nothing but profit drown out the voices of the actual human beings who live and work here.
All of the brilliant accomplishments of this country, past and future, now stand utterly beyond our reach, because as a nation, we’ve stopped caring about each other and the rest of the world. We are reduced to arguing over how many lives we have to destroy so that the rich can swim in their oceans of money, and the military can destroy even more lives abroad. Is it any wonder nobody cares what happens in government anymore?