Monday, November 22, 2010
End the Wars or the Wars End Us
The only way the United States can afford to continue the murderous madness of our illegal illogical immoral war adventures abroad is to start killing millions of our vulnerable citizens here at home through forced austerity, the neglect of treatable illnesses, starvation, social instability. The crisis is not behind us, it is ahead of us. Not everyone who is reading these words will survive it. I hope the planet can look back with some warmth on the accomplishment of our tragically failed experiment, learns from our mistakes rather than repeating them, and manages to pick up the pieces in time to save humanity from proliferating arms and WMD, neoliberal precarization and overurbanization, climate change, global pandemics, and resource descent. I am not hopeful.
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10 years ago I began a 4 year stint in Latin America to learn and master Spanish. At the end of that stint I planned to permanently expatriate, after finishing a degree (which would afford me better work opportunities in Mexico City, and which I could do more cheaply with my CA residency).
School shifted things. What I would call the constellation of anti-colonial studies convinced me that my work (whatever the hell that ends up being) would be more needed here in the U.S. The idea was that I'd rather be part of organizing to change the corner of the world that's hell-bent on destroying the world, aka, home. Not expatriating also made me feel more comfortable in that I wouldn't be taking my already ridiculous privilege (as a white, [mostly] straight male) to a place where it would be augmented.
The regression to idiocy that we've witnessed in our "polity" in the last couple of years, which is distinct, to my way of thinking, from the always already present (albeit to varying degrees at different times) American will to subjugate, has me thinking differently. There's a difference between stupidity and evil, but I agree with Arendt (even if I make her seem less graceful than she is) that stupidity enables the greatest evils.
Our national stupidity is not only deep, it's a point of pride, a rallying cry, and it seems to me to have become more of a movement than anything I can remember.
If our species is going to be anything but fucked, it increasingly seems to me that the requisite changes will begin elsewhere, and likely be forced upon our pathetic compatriots.
I don't know yet what all this will lead me to, but like you I am not hopeful about our prospects from here inside the beast.
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