Socialism, Society, and America

I'm angry, I'm always angry unless there is something distracting happening to mask the anger. Today, the anger is about everyone's apparent glee about a Florida millionaire adopting a neighborhood with his riches and helping it out. I don't want to rain on the parade, but more than that, I've learned that raining on the parade subjects me to all kinds of anger from those who have yet to grasp the things I find to be self evident.

1. We are social beings and the only solution to our problems will be to work together.
2. America has been poisoned by decades of anti-Communist propaganda into thinking that any collective effort will lead to totalitarianism.
3. Individual efforts, while excellent for making dents in large problems, only go so far, and certainly not far enough.
4. Monied interests will always want to keep their money.

Ugh, I'm sure the list could go on longer and longer. I could get into how tribalism and racism are at the root of many of our struggles - sexism is there too, but it manifests slightly differently. People think Obama is getting crap because he's black, and yeah, that's happening, but he wouldn't have an easier time if he was white, because he's a Democrat. Anyone who thinks he would be riding high if he was white have forgotten the Clinton administration. And don't even talk to me about how the media would be treating him. Back in the 1990's, we were just starting the "both sides" rhetoric, and now it's so culturally ingrained that no one can even mention that one side might be wrong without adding useless equivocation. The nation has been gaslighted by reactionary monied interests for so long now that we no longer know right from wrong. Well, some of us anyway.

Sigh.

I know there are people out there who get it, and I'm actually somewhat hopeful, but damned if I'm not angry. Because these people who now get it were staying home in November 2010 when they could have prevented all this shit from happening in the first place. It was spring 2011 when people finally woke up, and by then it was too late. TOO LATE.

We got screwed with gerrymandered districts in 2012 because too many people didn't get it, too many people were convinced that their vote didn't matter, that nothing mattered, that because Obama couldn't make manna come down from heaven that it was "time to give the Republicans a chance". FUCK THAT! Republicans HAD their chance, they've had too many chances, and each one sucked, but you wouldn't know, because the people who should be telling you are living in the both-sides fallacy.

Then there are the people who were barely paying attention who all wonder "where it went wrong". They think that there was a time in America's past where we had it right, a time when we all cared about each other and things were great. Even intelligent, savvy people who have paid attention fall into this trap, but the truth is, the individualistic, screw everyone mentality is a CORE AMERICAN VALUE. Every single non-Native, not-descended-from-slaves person in this country came here to make it on their own. They left families, left towns, or left countries to "be free" from their old society. Then when they set up society on the east coast, some of them left to be even more "free" to go west and really live on their own. No, our past was not a socialist paradise, our past was a ruthless, cutthroat, dirty, dangerous, horrible hellhole that people somehow managed to survive long enough to have children in.

Even the period of time after WWII wasn't great if you weren't white or male, and even then, it still wasn't that great. It was a blip on the horrible history of our country, a random, uneven blip of sort-of okayness for some people that's gone now. We remember it as so great because the popular narrative of the time paints it that way, but millions of white men lived with untreated PTSD, raising kids with an iron fist, like their father did. Millions of women were frustrated and bored, full of resentment that they couldn't place. Millions of black people weren't much better off than they had ever been in this nation. Shit was bad, shits always been bad, and if we want to improve this shit, we have to get over the paranoia about working together. We have to literally go against every fucking thing that brought our ancestors, or ourselves, to this rock, and get over it. So I'm angry, angry about the bad rep socialism gets, angry about the failure of society, and angry about the reality of America.

Wishes

I wish I could make you understand what it is I'm going through, but it isn't really that hard to explain. I guess. I'm depressed. Nothing is as it should be, even though everything is fine, sort of. I'm overweight, overwrought, over everything. Nothing is that interesting to me at all, and to hear people gush over it like it was is like nails on a chalkboard.

I wish for a million more wishes. I wish to lose a pound of body fat from not my brain every week for two years or until I'm at 13% body fat, whichever is sooner. Second wish, I want to keep it off for the rest of my life. Third wish, I don't want to lose any random body parts to accomplish this. I don't care if I still have depression at this point, because at least then, people will give a shit about how I feel, and people won't hate to look at me, or at least I won't hate to look at me.

But genies in bottles aren't real, wish granting magical creatures are fiction, and I'll never get to lose the fat that won't go away. The best I can hope for is to lose about 30 pounds, but it won't stay off. I just wish I could have a surgery to remove abdominal fat, or maybe that fecal transplant from a thin person so I can digest food more effectively. But I have no idea how to get into that, and no idea how to find a weight loss doctor who isn't a quack, or even how to do it while I'm completely overwhelmed by my job. While I'm completely overwhelmed by doing 20% of what I'm supposed to do with my life.