I sat across from a 30-year-old “millennial,” recently. She had been mourning the primary loss of her first political love; senator Bernie Sanders. It was too early, for her emotional state of lost political love, to debate with her the merits of continued liberalism as it has been in recent years, as it has been moving, gaining ground rapidly since I’ve followed our political progress, and not be engaging with her, in her grandiose considerations of a socialist revolution at this time.
But the debate ensued, with I defending a woman with more qualifications to be the president than anyone in recent history.
Recent history seemed to be a point of difference. She stated that she had majored in political science.
I did not ask her if she had ever questioned whether or not it was indeed a science, I let that one slide. I did not ask her how her knowledge of America’s political history, learned to her in those years pursuing that major had helped her thus far this year, I let that one slide. I suspected, but did not ask her how vital in that curriculum was psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, evolution, communication, volunteering for elected representatives, voter registration, or investigating and reporting on one social ill within a community was to her degree, I let all that slide.
She had no idea of my history with American politics. My activism. My volunteering for my congressman, my registering voters, my radio and internet streaming broadcasting experience, my time as the child of a feminist (hippie) growing up in Washington, D.C. She didn’t know of my having 17 years to learn and study and ready the political opinions of hundreds of so-called experts in political science. She did not know I’ve published dozens of editorials in newspapers in 6 cities, 6 states. She has never seen my weblog that dates to 2006. She didn’t know me, big period. I let it all slide. She actually told me I need to look at polls and statistics. Me. That’s okay, she’ll learn one day what I knew when she assumed my ignorance because long ago I had been a hard working, dirt filled, master plumber, going from one job another.
I think the entire context of our debate about the structure of democracies became soured after I asked to clarify (for my mind) if she had just stated: “Hillary Clinton is not a liberal and not a progressive.”
“That’s foolish.” Was my impulsive and simple reply.
I knew where she had gotten that diatribe from. I had seen many of the outrageously ignorant memes produced by her generation, proliferated onto the easy internet. Easy to be emotional without reasoning - the internet. They were no better than any dishonest, name calling, ignorant candidates who are taking advantage of the youth of their constituents with very inconsistent, with statistics and legislative history of candidates’ statements about the opposition. Learned from the baseless statements of others.
Bernie Sander rally; UW, 2016
I did not feel a need to rattle-off the secretary’s history. I wanted her to learn in the coming weeks; but that was over-optimistically hopeful of me because it’s been 2 months and I doubt she has taken the uncomfortable initiative to investigate the truth for herself.
A few weeks later Green party candidate Jill Stein puts-out a television commercial, in which she states: “She has been working to tear down the social safety net.” I am sure those Bernie or Bust millennials soaked it up. They don’t know that millions of people all working within the democratic party, including the democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton, have been on the frontline of protecting the social safety net for decades before those millennials were conceived. I was aghast. But minutes later, not surprised. That position is where they want to be. They’re likely going to cast a protest vote for Jill Stein, a candidate who went there on national television. Went where no reality exists. Where diatribe sinks in to validate to losers of their first political love.
That protest vote will not be heard. If cast it may be destructive simultaneously. It will be a wasted vote.
Democracy (with a small d) has made its choice among tens of millions of interested early voters and that’s how we play until a brand new Articles of Confederation are written. Those parties we tend to blame it all on, are creations by sociological inevitability. Two kinds of parties eventually exist in all confined spaces of millions of voices all experiencing new changes. Two is what happens. Division is natural. Categorizing is easier for large populations.
Not tangentially, here’s the point: she wanted to disagree, I wanted to impart knowledge of decades of being out-there to her, with a learned appreciation for the entire political game of moderation in a democracy. That debate went nowhere.
Excuses were made why the evenings’ newly heated after dinner discussion should end. Sound bites were made by each other, trying to get in a final jab but the discussion that could have lasted all night long ended too quickly. With hard feelings toward one and others general philosophy of the state of the world.
The last statement I made (she immediately disagreed with) was something to the affect of:
“In the study of history, as a predictor of our future behaviors, as nations and of the people within them, we need to keep in mind that all events are happening faster now (more frequently). Change is more rapid because we are many more, now, in the same confined space. Complexities are arising that are new and more frequently occurring. Just see how many different the world and national news outlets cannot possibly cover each important event of each day.”
“Oh no.” She quickly replied as if I was completely wrong about an entire world view.
“People are having all the same problems at the same pace they always have. It’s the same.”
This difference of opinion is where a study of the sociology, psychology and cultural anthropology on the whole would (possibly) have caused her to agree.
Learning how populations react to changes is the key - no longer what Douglas said to Lincoln, or how Bacon felt about the colony of Virginia.
Learning that greater complexities await a population trapped in a confined space and moving faster with more energy and having collisions with one and other far more frequently - with that greater force of impact and so further spreading greater and more different change is what should be primary to anyone studying the human condition and the important method of organized communication called politics.
The graduate of a political science major should find that aspect of predictive analysis far more important today, than the dry facts of a people faced with far simpler times and far more visible (yet simplistic) causalities in their lives.
~~~~~
Ahh, those were the days. It was simpler times. When getting enough water from the well into the house was the greatest worry at the end of the day. When a war was rumored for decades and not weeks to months prior to actions of war. When getting one new school in your community took decades, but it seemed a reasonable time for that quest. When rumor of equality and independence of any subset of any population, oppressed, discriminated against and held as unequal to the status quo, was a slow rising of agreement that spread slow and took many decades to achieve - those were the days.
The illustration below is a crowded canvas. The analogy is that we are the many multi-colored dots that crowd together on our limited planets’ landscape for the living and interacting with each other.
A huge canvas with allot of empty space for those dots to exist would be reminiscent of those “simpler times.” That cliche statement that times were easier back then, has the merit of truth. They were, for the individual, far more simple. Less interaction with less frequency and fewer changes to be created by that infrequency of interaction. Complex, we have become as we bounce off of each other’s problems with greater impact and create new complexities we likely could not have imagined.
The times; they are blowin in the wind.
© James Gray Mason / End All Suffering, 2016.
Update: Donald J. Trump has been our president for 120 days. It's been (like) 15 years in liberal hell.
I had told the two young people, in the conversation above, that "We do not have a safe margin for her to win the electoral college. Not a stay at home safety margin."
Below is a screenshot from political statisticians and pollsters Fivethirtyeight. Notice the 11% chance of Hillary winning the popular vote and losing the election.
If you stayed home on election day, or voted for a third party candidate (with little chance of winning) based on an 11% chance you'd be wrong and an authoritarian ignoramus would take over the White House, and possibly bring this country backwards in progress by decades and take us into multiple wars and possibly WW3, then you need to reconsider the state of the world and the fragility of democracies worldwide.
November 6, 2016:
James.
5.17.2017
http://endallsuffering.blogspot.com/
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