20140704.0800

I tried to write this earlier. It came out as the leavings of a seething ball of hate. It was not what I wanted it to be, for if it was my leavings, then it was shit and I shitty for leaving it around. What I had meant for it to be was another musing on the US Independence Day holiday, as I have done once or twice in the past. And I admit that, given the US Supreme Court decision on Burwell v Hobby Lobby, upon which a friend comments here and here, and the abundantly expected slickening of the slippery slope that is already begun, I had the thought that there is not much to celebrate about the country.

Worry not. I am not about to rattle off jingoistic platitudes averring uncritical adulation (much to the chagrin of some members of my family). Things are fucked up in many, many different ways in the US, and however much "better" things are here than elsewhere, they are not as they ought to be, and I am not wrong to be vexed that they are not. This is despite my efforts to the contrary, as well as those of many people I know. We do what we can to encourage people to pull their heads out of their asses and think, to recognize their complicity in structures of oppression and to try to minimize that complicity, to actually improve things for themselves and the world in the long term. But it is all too little, and the social inertia is not blunted or turned aside by such efforts as we can muster. And I hold out scant hope that others will rally. Why would they? Most do not recognize that there are problems, or if they do, they have been convinced--bludgeoned into believing, really--that the problems are entirely other than they are.

We have not done well enough to reach out to people. And I am not sure that the attempt is worth making anymore. I am not at all sure that there is any reason to think that there are enough people willing to do what would actually be necessary to make things better in the long term and for the most people. In all honesty, I am not. Doing so would imperil those for whom I am accountable and hold affection, and whatever I may owe to the world, I have trouble putting it above my family. I suppose I am not alone in the notion, and I suppose that that is part of the problem; the concrete short-term benefits to ourselves and our loved ones as complicit parts of the mainstream US culture, as well as the fears of what will almost immediately happen as a result of non-complicity, outweigh the more abstract benefits to the world. What happens to us is more visible and therefore more "real," and it is difficult to put the imagined before the "real." The few who do are lauded as messianic figures or derided as mad--or worse. Their ends are remarkably similar, however, and not the kind that encourage emulation.