I had a fascinating conversation last week about politics. Which is hard to believe, if you know me, because usually I avoid anything having to do with politics like the plague. But as we were discussing how much we like to avoid politics, it was really a good conversation. A lot of the discussion revolved around the danger of treating government as an abstract, for example, how people tend to say things like, “the government did this to me,” as opposed to saying, “this and that person did this to me.” Because in reality the “government” is nothing more than a group of people who we allow to have power over us. The danger is in viewing them as an abstract, an intangible thing we can have no control over. If we viewed the government as a group of people, however, we would realize that there is nothing in particular stopping us from taking the power back for ourselves.
The second part of the conversation had a lot to do with how the far left and the far right seem to find themselves very much on the same page these days. It is curious that this conversation occurred just before Jon Stewart announced his “Rally to Restore Sanity,” which apparently all of my facebook friends will be attending. I agree with him that people are getting way out of hand with the crazed shouting- in fact, most of the conversation last week revolved around how ridiculous it is that you have the “liberal” media spouting all this bias about the Tea Party, and the Tea Party shouting all this nonsense about the liberals. Things have gotten so partisan that absolutely nothing gets accomplished, because people spend more time yelling at each other over their differences than they do making any headway. But I would say the solution is not for everyone to get more moderate. The simple fact that so many people are becoming so overwhelmingly upset about the way things are going is an indicator that something seriously is wrong. And I don’t think moderation is going to solve things any more than the polarizing partisanship going on right now.
I see the political spectrum more as a circle than a line- a circle with four points on it, and people falling somewhere around the edge of the circle, sometimes closer to one point than another. On opposite edges you have the left and the right, and between them on one side you have the moderates. But between them on the other side you have the people who have gone over to the far left or far right and realized they have an awful lot in common, and that they can achieve a lot more if they leave each other alone over some issues and work together to change the things they can agree on. In all of the organizing I do on local foods, some of my best allies call themselves Tea Partiers, and no, they are not rabid fundamentalists like you see on the news. We definitely avoid talking about topics like gay marriage or abortion, and you can bet we’d be at odds if we did bring them up, but we have without once discussing it decided to leave each other alone on these subjects, because the issue of not having access to safe, healthy food is much more dire. We can find common ground because we both believe the people who make laws should stay the hell out of our kitchens, and in general our lives, which at it’s heart is what the Tea Party is all about (smaller government, and less intervention, which is why I am perplexed by the Tea Party people who think gay marriage should be illegal, as this is a most intrusive method of government intervention).
Ultimately I can envision a society where we aren’t trying to “govern” three hundred million people by the same rules. I can imagine small societies that trade and interact with each other, but are perfectly happy to leave well enough alone. Those people over there can practice gay marriage if they want. And those people on the other side can worship their patriarchal white male deity if they want. Just don’t come knocking on our door trying to convert us. The real problem, and this is where I think the moderates have got it wrong, is in trying to get everyone to agree to be the same. It’s not going to happen.
I could go on about this at length but I’ve gotten off the subject I originally intended to write about, which was why I feel the need to hide out from what’s going on in the news. People are often astonished when they try to talk to me about current issues and I stare at them kind of blankly, not even knowing the names of apparently prominent political people in the news. I follow the news enough to get the gist of it: I know when hurricanes are coming, for example, and I usually hear about major events if only because everyone’s facebook status will reflect the change. Otherwise, I don’t particularly care what Obama is up to. I wouldn’t care at all if the people who run the IRS didn’t keep stealing my money. But as there isn’t much I can do about that right at the moment, I don’t pay much more attention than to make sure he hasn’t passed some kind of demented law making it illegal to grow tomatoes.
My concerns are decidedly mundane, and I’m sure there are many people who will say this is insular or that I’m a bad citizen for not paying more attention. I will repeat this many times: I do not want to be a US citizen. I do not want to be an anywhere citizen. I want to be a resident of the place that I live, and I want to live a life where the only decisions I need to pay attention to are the ones that affect me and the people I know. That’s more than enough to occupy my brain, believe me. I used to obsess over national and global issues, and it nearly killed me (literally). Watching the news used to make me so incredibly angry, mostly because I felt powerless to actually affect any of what I was watching, and it left me so frustrated that I would just burst into tears and curl up in a ball on my bed and become completely useless for hours at a time. This, I finally decided, was a waste.
There is nothing I can affect on the national level unless other people also realize that the federal government is nothing more than an abstract concept, and that what’s really going on is that we’ve given over the decisions about what happens in our lives to a very real group of people who we do not know and who absolutely do not have our best interests in mind. They can’t. They don’t know us. This system only works because we believe it does. Money only works because people believe those pieces of paper have value. Government only works if you believe those people have the right to have control over your life. Try believing in something else, for once, and see what happens. It’s pretty amazing to watch it all just melt away, as if it never existed in the first place- because, of course, it didn’t. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you’ll be left with only what’s actually there.
Will 300,000,000 people ever be the same? I hope not! Problem is that the right want you to be their way and the left want you to be their way and I don’t want to be either way. Everyone thinks that we are free in this country and they are so far from the truth that it hurts. They only want you to be free to do what they say is OK. They do not want you to actually be free. They suck! The only difference between the parties/sides/ideologies… is that they have different ideas of the way you should be. They are both dead set on telling you how to be though. I can’t stand the Tea Partiers, the left, the right or anything that Limbaugh, Colter or that little self-agrandizing little shit Beck has to say. These people are anti-american, anti-freedom and really no more than a bunch of arrogant assholes. They, just like the religious freaks, are so full of themselves thinking that they are right, that they fail to see their own hipocracy, arrogance and down-right fascism. Anyone that says they want a smaller government in one breath and then says that they think government should protect the “sanctity” of marriage by disallowing gay marriage in the next is just an ignorant asshole plain and simple. Why don’t these peopel just marry themselves so they can go fuck themselves free of sin?