Do you really care?

[Odelay]

Of course you still care enough to come onto the political board of a porn promotion site, but really, are you still invested in what happens politically in the world?

In watching what's happening in Gaza and Ferguson, and a little further back in Newtown, CT, I have realized that I'm becoming more and more detached from the larger world, and specifically anything that smacks of politics. I would never refer to myself as an activist in any phase of my life, but I have engaged in a little activism at various times. I also campaigned hard for John Kerry and some local congressional candidates back in 2004 and 2006 because I thought it was do or die for the country. But I largely sat out the 2008 and 2012 elections, attending one Obama rally in each year. The last political campaign donation I made was in 2008, other than some funding for a friend who ran for state legislature and another who ran and won in a City Attorney race.

I do care about stuff at the local community level. I'm sure I'd care a lot if I was a resident of Ferguson, Missouri. I do a little local volunteer stuff, but as soon as anything starts moving toward politics, I disengage. I guess the main reason I've disengaged from world and national politics is that it pretty much seems hopeless. People used to not vote against their own interests. Raising the minimum wage made sense to most people. Making the rich pay a little higher in taxes made sense to most people. Funding your local schools made sense. Although white people had to be drug kicking and screaming into the civil rights era, by the 70's, when I was growing into adulthood, it started making sense to most people.

Another contributing factor for me is the absolutely appalling treatment of working people within just about every industry. Big business is politics, and vice versa. It's just a huge monolith and they get sheer idiots to work for them in Congress, the Supreme Court, and yes, even the White House. The media is absolutely useless.

There are no solutions anymore. Only problems. When Al Gore wrote Earth in the Balance in 1992, I figured that would be a huge wake up call for planet earth and it's supposedly most intelligent species. It was anything, but. I simply can't spend psychological energy on working for a better world, because I'm not sure we deserve a better world anymore. Across the world, in 200 or so nations, people keep voting idiots and charlatans into power. Who was the last decent leader in the world? Mandela? He retired after one term in office. Is there anyone else?

In the end, if I can't take anymore of the b.s. in this country, I'm moving south to Latin America. Not that it's a paradise there or anything, but my retirement dollars will stretch further. I've done alright in saving and stashing money in a 401k (no pension for me!). But I've also not had a raise in 7 years. And I work in a very profitable industry for a profitable company.

Anyway, this rant is over. I'm curious what other participants here think. I give a fuck about individuals and their opinions. I don't give a fuck about big institutions or the people who run them.

[trish]

That was quite a bleak and depressing post, Odelay. You’re bringin’ me down.

Do I really care?
I think of myself as a reactionary. There was a time I would’ve said I was apolitical. 9/11 and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq pretty much ended that era of my politically isolated existence. In my classrooms I’ve met and still meet returning soldiers who are severely traumatized, soldiers without limbs and young husbands and wives who lost their significant others. What seems like a decade ago, I stood on street corners in the heat of summer and in the cold of wet winters protesting those fucking wars. Though I no longer weather the elements, the wars still go on.

Generally speaking, I’m still not much of a political animal. For a few weekends in Chicago I protested with Occupy. In my town I support the LGBT. I carried signs for a few politicians and against a few. I’m a member of the ACLU. I’m a registered Democrat and a bleeding heart liberal, but I don’t contribute to the party. I prefer to donate to specific candidates.

The origins of my own political interests fall into three categories.

One. Those which affect me or affected me directly. Specifically, gender issues, racial issues and guns.

Two. Issues into which I believe I may have a modicum professional insight.

Three. Issues having to do with social and economic injustice. I wouldn’t want to try to draw a line between being disgusted with the injustices perpetrated upon people and really caring about them. I don’t know if there is such a line. Most of us can do more than we do. My excuse for not doing more involves mumbo jumbo concerning cost (to myself) versus benefit (to others) and refrains like, “I have my own life to live and life is way too short.”

[Prospero]

Of course I care. Passionately. But I do share Odeley's sense of helplessness. Like Tricia I take part in various smaller scale activities and I also hope that, through my work, I have some impact on people's attitudes (journalist turned documentary film maker). But one of the challenges - and it is true internationally - is to face-up to the power of the multinationals to impact on the lives of everyone. The power of capital today is greater than it has ever been and the ability of national governments to challenge it is weakening. Rank inequality is growing. The market seems to be triumphant. In the US it seems that you stand on the brink of the collapse of true democracy - with large corporations now burrowing into the GOP via their fake grassroots movement, the tea party and both parties buying the notion of the Market almighty. Neo-liberaism seems to be irresistable. This is true in the UK too - though we have our own particular challenges.On the wider scale we have the growth of a poisonous form of islam which now presents us with a global challenge. (As anyone who has read my contributions here before I believe that islam per se is just another religious faith and most Muslims are just folk. But the global growth of a violent perversion of the faith has to be confronted - not least by Muslims themselves0. Climate change. Yes it is real. Yes it is a threat. But again the multinationals via their proxys and political muscle are undermining all efforts to confront this. Across Europe we are seeing the rise of Fascism again. And LGBT rights? The suns may be shining in some places but in many others the storm clouds of prejudice and hate are dense and darkening. Across Africa, in Russia.....

And racial hatred/ I despair when I see the news from Ferguson - and red that the Klan are on their way there to pur petrol on the fames. The whole of Obama's presidency seems to have been underpinned by a deep hatred for him because of his face. Change you can believe in? Hmmmmm

Any hope for optimism overall? I'm always an optimist. But it is getting hard.

[buttslinger]

Republicans say they are carrying blacks and poor people who want "free stuff" from Obama. Unions say they are carrying fat cats who want "free money" off the backs of their workers. Social Security, Disability, Retirement, and now Obamacare ...all that stuff is not free, in fact it's quite expensive.
This is actually a fantastic time to live, pneumonia killed my Grandfather when he was young, I had it last Christmas and hardly blinked. I can get just about any song or book in existence downloaded in 5 minutes. I can get a SuperBigGulp at 3AM. If I asserted myself, I could be almost anything I wanted, a Civil War expert, a SuperStud for fifty year old bags, a Scholar, I could own three Corvettes or six motorcycles. Americans are spoiled. Of course we're bored. Of course we don't care.
My brother's friend swung by, he's been digging wells in Costa Rica, I asked him about retiring there, he said yeah, lots of people dig it down there, no murderous personal property taxes for bratty schoolkids. There's a park on top of the mountains where the air mass from the ocean meets the air mass from the land, resulting in a fine mist over the jungle, with hundreds of species of tropical birds and wild orchids. But while we were outside talking, a squirrel feel out of a tree right beside all of us, none of us in our collective hundreds of years of life had ever seen that. Since then, I've had a string of bad luck. Why bother caring when life is going to throw a falling squirrel your way fucking up your entire life forever. Life and it's mysteries, still alive in Costa Rica. In the US, not so much. Everything has a price tag.

[Stavros]

I have been interested in politics most of my life, and even when I felt in the darkest days of Margaret Thatcher that it was all hopeless, I never lost my interest even if I did give up being an activist. I left the Labour Party for numerous reasons at the time, mostly because I had given all my free time to what turned out to be a permanent internal squabble with other party members, which I suspect is what most political parties at the local level is like. But I also have to accept that our policies were rejected time and time again by the people, and that Thatcher along with Reagan in the US and Helmut Kohl in Germany did change the paradigm of liberal democratic politics, and that many of the values which shaped Britain after 1945 and attempted to create a fairer society were replaced by a model in which collective good has been replaced by individual benefit, and yet I wonder how many individuals have benefited in the way in which Thatcher believed they would. Consider Prospero's observation:
The power of capital today is greater than it has ever been and the ability of national governments to challenge it is weakening. Rank inequality is growing. The market seems to be triumphant.
Margaret Thatcher wanted to turn the UK into a share-owing democracy, yet today in The Guardian it was pointed out that Before Thatcher came to power, almost 40% of the shares in British companies were held by individuals. By 1981, it was less than 30%. By the time she died in 2013, it had slumped to under 12%.
(http://www.theguardian.com/politics/...atisation-scam)
Mrs Thatcher's government sold off the utility firms, road and rail, coal and steel, and now most of our water gas and electricity is owned by foreign firms while some of our rail companies are not only foreign owned but by foreign state-owned corporations, surely the opposite of what Thatcher intended?
I can understand that many people look back on the mistakes that were made in the 1960s and 1970s and argue that Thatcher and Reagan swept away the worst aspects of state intervention, chaotic interest rates and inflation, and that the coincident decline of communism and the spread of globalisation has lifted millions out of poverty.
What I think has perplexed people is that the same apostles of capitalism were unable to prevent the financial crisis of 2008, and have not really produced a long-term solution to it either.

But I would invert Odelay's observation and suggest that we must continue to believe that we, the people, are more important than politicians, and also that it may look as if we are in a situation in which There are no solutions anymore. Only problems -but it always looks like that.
If we woke up tomorrow and it was the 1st of January 1989, the major fracture in politics would be between the 'Free West' and the 'Evil Empire', aka the Cold War. If I asked you to look at the career of Yitzhak Rabin, what he said about and did to the Palestinians and then at Yasir Arafat and what he said about and did to the Israelis and the Jews, and then said that within five years they would be shaking hands over a peace treaty on the White House lawn it would be dismissed as politically inconceivable and in practical terms impossible. The same would be the response if I said that within 10 years Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness would be sharing power in Northern Ireland with Peter Robinson and the 'Rev' Ian Paisley. And if I said the Berlin Wall will cease to exist by Christmas. And yet changes that were inconceivable then did happen.
I don't think any of us would like to wake up tomorrow and find it is the 24th of August 1914, certainly not if we are young and fit -but even if we were not slaughtered or wounded in the war, between 1918-20 between 50-100 million died in two pandemics of influenza. Even when I was born it was still common for children to die from measles, to fall victim to smallpox and polio. In the last 100 years the advances that have been made in medicine, science and engineering have transformed our lives; in the second decade of the 21st century fewer people lose their lives in war, or to disease than was true of the 20th century, and yes there are severe problems with water, soil erosion, deforestation, pollution on land, at sea and in the air and the other components of global warming, yet we cannot despair, because the evidence suggests that we can solve problems no matter how vile the enemy is and how impossible it all seems.
Here are some words from Helen Bamber, who died this week, and who devoted her life to helping the victims of torture and atrocity:
“I’ve discovered that people can overcome the most appalling tragedies,” she said. “They have their strengths, coping mechanisms and humour. But they need recognition and compassion from others if they are to survive and overcome their pasts. I’m not without my desolation and despair from time to time because it’s pretty rotten out there. But mostly I find listening so rewarding and humbling. In the end, I’m always inspired by the beauty of the human spirit.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/ob...e-9686815.html

[Odelay]

I wouldn’t want to try to draw a line between being disgusted with the injustices perpetrated upon people and really caring about them.

But I would invert Odelay's observation and suggest that we must continue to believe that we, the people, are more important than politicians, and also that it may look as if we are in a situation in which There are no solutions anymore. Only problems -but it always looks like that.

To be clear, I very much believe in and care about individuals, and the injustices they experience. And I also believe that families and small communities of people can be amazing. Where I'm at today is that I am pessimistic that collective action can effect change as it did in the past.

One consideration that I have is that it might be possible, one day, that big business/politics might reach a point where crapping on the individual even more, by shredding safety nets, lowering wages, etc., might actually be counterproductive and less profitable. At which point, they might change course. (Forget about reversing course... that's not gonna happen.) However, it would appear that we're not near that point, yet.

Stavros, you make some very good points and I really don't have any direct arguments. And one can even go further by remarking that war and violence is actually down today compared to yesteryear. And there are more nations that are nominally democratic than ever before. But that just means the world is more target rich for neoliberalism. Any peace dividend resulting from less war/violence has seemed to result in a financial dividend going right into the pockets of big multinational institutions.

Anyway, as Trish states, life is short. And I, likewise, am focused in on the few and myself, rather than the many.

[Stavros]

To be clear, I very much believe in and care about individuals, and the injustices they experience. And I also believe that families and small communities of people can be amazing. Where I'm at today is that I am pessimistic that collective action can effect change as it did in the past.

One consideration that I have is that it might be possible, one day, that big business/politics might reach a point where crapping on the individual even more, by shredding safety nets, lowering wages, etc., might actually be counterproductive and less profitable. At which point, they might change course. (Forget about reversing course... that's not gonna happen.) However, it would appear that we're not near that point, yet.

Stavros, you make some very good points and I really don't have any direct arguments. And one can even go further by remarking that war and violence is actually down today compared to yesteryear. And there are more nations that are nominally democratic than ever before. But that just means the world is more target rich for neoliberalism. Any peace dividend resulting from less war/violence has seemed to result in a financial dividend going right into the pockets of big multinational institutions.

Anyway, as Trish states, life is short. And I, likewise, am focused in on the few and myself, rather than the many.

I can understand why you are focused on what is best for you, I gave up political activism in the Labour Party because the policies we offered were rejected by the people, but mostly because I lost faith in the local party officials for whom I gave most of my free time seven days a week. I could go on for hours about the corruption in the local party, and though it was a well-known constituency party to Londoners in the 1980s it is of no real interest to anyone else.

What I think is important is that positive change does happen, so that I cannot accept the conservative view that change only takes place, if at all, 'at the margins', a view which reflects a tendency for politics to try and resist change. I think on balance politics tends to lag behind economic and social change, and that may be why politicians often seem to be out of touch with what people, particularly young people think and desire, not least because most politicians are the same age as their parents and grandparents.

I think the key issues now are in resource management, and the way we interact with the planet on which we live. A gloomy view suggests that we will continue to lose forests at an alarming rate in the Amazon Basin, in Indonesia and Russia, increasing the rate of global warming with devastating effect on 'the south'; that indigenous people in those areas will like tigers, the rhino and elephants in the wild, be extinct by 2050 (which may be good news for zoos). In addition, the pressure on soil and water management is crucial for the production of food, but it seems to me that major producing areas like California are no longer sustainable. I don't know if it is a positive but I think between now and the end of the century there will be a shift in the population with the south moving north -in the USA as California and Nevada run out of water, more people will move to Oregon, Washington and Montana, possibly raising the stakes with immigration into Canada; a drastic measure but conceivable could result in a significant increase in immigration to Greenland, in the longer term, if it thaws out, Antarctica. Europe is already under intense pressure from African migrants fleeing a life of destitution and despair. Yet over time the Gaia thesis may be right and that the growth of world population will plateau in 2050 and decline thereafter, that currently poor and large families will go nuclear, that the balancing out of population and resources will enable the planet to re-assert its equilibrium, and the world in which we live be looked back on without much nostalgia, except perhaps for its culture, its music and its words...this prophecy Merlin shall make, for I come before his time.

[Ben]

Of course you still care enough to come onto the political board of a porn promotion site, but really, are you still invested in what happens politically in the world?

In watching what's happening in Gaza and Ferguson, and a little further back in Newtown, CT, I have realized that I'm becoming more and more detached from the larger world, and specifically anything that smacks of politics. I would never refer to myself as an activist in any phase of my life, but I have engaged in a little activism at various times. I also campaigned hard for John Kerry and some local congressional candidates back in 2004 and 2006 because I thought it was do or die for the country. But I largely sat out the 2008 and 2012 elections, attending one Obama rally in each year. The last political campaign donation I made was in 2008, other than some funding for a friend who ran for state legislature and another who ran and won in a City Attorney race.

I do care about stuff at the local community level. I'm sure I'd care a lot if I was a resident of Ferguson, Missouri. I do a little local volunteer stuff, but as soon as anything starts moving toward politics, I disengage. I guess the main reason I've disengaged from world and national politics is that it pretty much seems hopeless. People used to not vote against their own interests. Raising the minimum wage made sense to most people. Making the rich pay a little higher in taxes made sense to most people. Funding your local schools made sense. Although white people had to be drug kicking and screaming into the civil rights era, by the 70's, when I was growing into adulthood, it started making sense to most people.

Another contributing factor for me is the absolutely appalling treatment of working people within just about every industry. Big business is politics, and vice versa. It's just a huge monolith and they get sheer idiots to work for them in Congress, the Supreme Court, and yes, even the White House. The media is absolutely useless.

There are no solutions anymore. Only problems. When Al Gore wrote Earth in the Balance in 1992, I figured that would be a huge wake up call for planet earth and it's supposedly most intelligent species. It was anything, but. I simply can't spend psychological energy on working for a better world, because I'm not sure we deserve a better world anymore. Across the world, in 200 or so nations, people keep voting idiots and charlatans into power. Who was the last decent leader in the world? Mandela? He retired after one term in office. Is there anyone else?

In the end, if I can't take anymore of the b.s. in this country, I'm moving south to Latin America. Not that it's a paradise there or anything, but my retirement dollars will stretch further. I've done alright in saving and stashing money in a 401k (no pension for me!). But I've also not had a raise in 7 years. And I work in a very profitable industry for a profitable company.

Anyway, this rant is over. I'm curious what other participants here think. I give a fuck about individuals and their opinions. I don't give a fuck about big institutions or the people who run them.

Everyone is political. Everyone has their own ideas about how the world should work, how the world should be run, should be governed.
So, the political sphere, as it were, extends to all of us... and not limited to the likes of Obama, McCain, Kerry, Boehner etc., etc.
But, of course, politics, political power is very concentrated. And that's the problem.
Power resides with the military, the business class, the political class. That's why people become disillusioned and tune out.
In a meaningful democratic system, well, you'd have the same power as Obama. Will true democracy ever flourish? I'm pessimistic about that.
But, again, we're all political!

[trish]

Some people are not political, in the sense that they just want to be left alone. They're happy enough to pay their taxes and obey the laws (if they're reasonably fair and no great hassle). They may or may not take the time to vote, but by large they don't want to think about politics, power, legalities etc. I might venture to say most people are like that. Others just have a natural curiosity about politics, perhaps owing to a religious or philosophical sense or morality; or simply a sort of scientific/anthropological/historical inclination to understand the world they live in. Others cultivate an exploitative interest in politics to satiate their greed and influence (E.g. the Koch brothers come to mind). Still others have an interest that is born of being exploited and disadvantaged.

In no democracy of three hundred million people will every person have the same influence as everyone else. However, in a democracy, that influence should end at speech and never amount to coercion or bribery. If people can't resist political marketing, then they deserve what they get. In a democracy one does hope and expect that everyone (of age) should be able to vote (for their representatives, and perhaps a modicum of propositions), that every vote counts the same as any other and that the count is accurate and decisive.

[omnifarious]

"Just because you do not take an interest in politics
doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you." - Pericles