How Does it Feel to be the Republican Now?
The Republicans of my Youth are the Liberals of Today
How does it feel to be the Republican now?
You know, the people who you hated, or pretended to hate, when you were in college?
Remember those guys? The ones who loved war? The ones who used twisted ideologies to fill their pockets? The ones who shamelessly ruined people’s lives in order to advance their own warped agenda?
Remember those guys? You’re those guys now.
Remember how cool you felt marching against them? Hoisting your poster board signs with catchy slogans? Remember when you told your parents they were part of “the system?” Remember telling your friends how “the system” was made up of people so embedded, so mired, so knee-deep in their own bullshit that they actually believed it?
Remember that system? You’re the system now.
Remember how angry you were when they told you what you could and couldn’t do with your body? Remember how mad it made you when a group of people who looked nothing like you, thought nothing like you, had an existence that had almost nothing in common with yours, tried to tell you what to do? Remember how angry that made you?
Remember? Remember that anger?
That’s how I feel about you now. Every revolution eventually becomes the state. Every resistance eventually becomes the #Resistance. You’re a fucking tool of the system you hated, and you still don’t get it.
You still don’t get it, and you’ll burn the whole thing to the ground just to prove you’re right. But the point was never to be right, the point was to make this a better place. A happier place. A kinder place.
Do you remember that? I remember that.
Many of us remember and still hold compassion and hope at our center. I’ve always been an edge dweller, a future seer - in my youth I was mocked as a ‘greenie’ but I held the line. Not all of us have succumbed to the madness. You’re not alone.
It’s such a dance of power, that of human desire, politics and control. Competing for it, vying for it, screaming for it, taking it, thrusting it once you have it in the face of ‘other’ yet some of us have always (and will always, I hope) patterned ourselves to the nonhuman natural world where power is a myth, life rules in dynamic flow, and partnership is everything.
May peace find its way into the hearts of man. I’ll be hanging out with a tree and a crow in the meantime.