Thursday, April 17, 2014

So What am I Doing?

Given all that I typed yesterday about how the left needs to start thinking about solutions and thinking big and thinking long-term and thinking major resources of time and energy, in order to TAKE power and SOLVE problems, ... what exactly am i doing?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm doing nothing at the moment.

I thought i could give up my political pretensions altogether, after gradually winding things down. But not so far. So far I just can't seem to give it all up and resign myself to life as a helpless shlub with no autonomy and no agency. (Besides the autonomy and agency that some people have to be materialistic jerks.)

But, ... after spending years proposing "Workers as Citizens" and getting no feedback; while all the while NOTHING ELSE is being proposed, ... after contacting so many people and TRYING to contact so many more people who were nobodies like me but who claimed to be up for something, in order to deal with stephen harper's crimes against our democracy, and getting nothing, ... I admit to being a wee bit dispirited and tired. I spend a lot of time drinking and wasting time.

And, given my always present fear that I'm just a deluded crackpot, I also wait in hope for the powers-that-be amongst the lefty leadership, the progressive community in Canada, to propose a way out. Aside from that patriotic fellow walking from Victoria to Ottawa, and Lead Now's token petition and delivery of the petition, there's been nothing on that front. Nothing. The party we let get away with stealing an election is now proposing to codify their stealing and everything else and we are proposing pretty much NOTHING to stop them.

Which is why I sometimes think that I'm the sane one and everybody else is crazy. Every once in a while I'll read an outraged comment somewhere: "Time to revolt!" "We have to DO SOMETHING!" But it's all as vague and meaningless as the threats and boasts at that pathetic and pitiful protest I attended a few months ago.

Check out my attempts to elicit some sort of response to the harper/poilievre monstrosity at EnMasse recently. I decide to count each day that nothing is proposed either at EnMasse or from the Canadian left in general, and I ask why that is so. The trend of the conversation is that we're defeated. We're tired. It doesn't matter. Canadian democracy has always been a complete sham so who cares? Then it descended into an outburst of anti-Canadian regional animosities. And throughout it all, the poster "Al-Qabong" posted off-topic comments which were sometimes related to some on-topic thing that somebody else wrote, and sometimes he just introduced things randomly.

If anyone ever needs a lesson in how to get burned-out while doing nothing, just watch the left in action.


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