Change We Can Believe In… And the Beat Goes On

Crossposted from MY LEFT WING

A front page contributor on My Left Wing named Konopelli used this picture in a post the race baiting going on in right wing talk radio right now — specifically, on Rush “Douchebag of the Decade” Limbaugh’s right wing hatefest:

The people in that picture…

Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

The President will not be turning his full attention to the plight of BLACK PEOPLE because he is a BLACK PERSON. He will be turning his attention to the plight of ALL PEOPLE because he is the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

YES, a greater percentage of black people are fucked right now as a demographic. Guess what — in sheer NUMBERS, if you want to go down THAT road, a greater NUMBER of WHITE people are fucked. You want to start playing THAT game? Jesus motherfucking christ. Do we REALLY want to keep playing the goddamned RACE game?

Unbelievable. This is sociology. This is economics. This is education, healthcare, infrastructure, energy… This is not demographics. This is not race.

Holy fucking shit. After all these years, we’re still stuck here. Still mired in the goddamned ditch.

And it’s going to take more decades and decades, because douchebags like Rush Limbaugh (and his black COUNTERPARTS, I imagine, though as someone who’s sociologically and geographically, for the most part, segregated, I am utterly ignorant of their identities), constantly perpetuate it AND incite not only the ignorant WHITES, but the ignorant BLACKS, as well, to perpetuate this horrendous state of affairs in their daily lives as well as in the nation’s political goings-on.

Christ, I feel so fucking helpless. I used to feel that, maybe if I had a talk radio show, or could anchor one of those cable news op-ed shows, like The Ed Show or Countdown, maybe I might be able to affect change.

But I’ve been watching them for years, listening to them for years. And I helped, in my small way, to get Obama elected. And while he’s made some pretty great changes on the one hand… on the other, he’s perpetuating the greatest fraud in American capitalist history with these motherfucking bailouts; he and his “Justice” Department have denied Habeas Corpus to prisoners at the base at Bagram — something he vehemently denounced as a Presidential candidate — might as well have just said, “We’re closing Guantanamo and moving it to Bagram“; and I could write another entire essay about the war crimes that won’t be prosecuted, but for the fact that it would send me into a death spiral of depression from which I’m afraid I would never recover; well, the list goes on, and as the months and years go by, it will doubtless increase and my disillusionment grow.

So that idea that any sort of wider platform for my outraged and articulate, impassioned voice might truly affect powerful and quicker change? A childish idealist’s fantasy. Change on the vast political stage comes at a glacial pace; thus it has ever been and thus it will ever be — unless, of course, that change is of the stuff of nightmares. Genocide can happen overnight. That, we’ve all witnessed. That kind of change can happen in the blink of an eye.

But the overturning of centuries of deeply embedded, well-loved but wrong-headed belief systems? That, unfortunately, takes years and years — sometimes centuries in itself. Witness the reluctance of a powerful church to finally codify in their record books that a scientific visionary was right all those years ago in his insistence that the earth revolved around the sun and not, as was for so long the overwhelming consensus of the mass of men, the reverse.

Change: we can believe in it, it is out there and we can hope for it, work for it… Maybe the man who promised it to us and led us to the very edge of it might seem to — and might actually — betray us… I don’t know, I think we place too much expectation on someone who merely articulated our hopes and dreams. He isn’t Moses. WE’RE Moses. We’re ALL Moses. We must take responsibility for ourselves, for being unable to fulfill our own promise. We may make it to the edge of the Promised Land, and our children may enter it — but I don’t think we’ll be allowed in. Our sins are too great: including elevating the men who give us hope and show us what needs to be changed — and then casting them down when THEY fail to make all those changes, as if one man or a few can do it all for us.

We have to remember, to keep reminding ourselves about the grim reality of any positive change: it creeps up on humanity, it does not charge. To crucify the men who gave us hope in that change for being unable to significantly alter the reality of how it all works is to stand on the beach and order the tides to stop — and shriek with rage when they do not.