It seems that nearly every year since 2001 I have been happy to see go come New Years and 2014 is no exception. While sometimes it’s personal reasons, the grander narrative seems to be my prime motivation for hating a year. This year it is all the news and personal reasons contradict the trend as one of the darkest years in our nation’s history, and a key moment in what may turn out to be part of a larger crossroads period is now officially on the books and in the past.
It is essentially my faith in the historical pendulum that is keeping me going at this point. A belief that things move in cycles and do bounce back. There are few moments in history where everything changed on one day as well, though things can get really bad really fast. Usually things move too slow for you to notice, and history buffs like me are the few who notice or even ask questions about where we are and where we are going. All the while the world is often blind.
The same trend I have been talking about for the past 10 years continues, as conservatism continues it’s inevitable decline, despite some alarming backlashes and counter-movements. These are merely death-throws of a dying movement that is slowly coming to grips with the fact that playing to the way things were is no longer working and spending half a billion in an off year election to keep people home is the only way to cling to power. That is a frightening display of events and could be the beginning of the death of democracy. My better sense tells me, however, that America is resilient, the world is as well and despite some of the darkest periods of apathy in the last 200 years, the historical trend is toward improvement.
My honest belief is that things are getting too difficult for the powers that be to control the social order like they used to. So this year we got a mega dose of it. Old divisions fractured all over the place. The North vs. the South, East vs. the West, black against white, color against less color, 3 generation immigrants vs fresh immigrants, men against women, old vs young, poor vs the less poor have all been boiling over the past year. Fox News has been on the wrong side of every single one of these issues siding with the powerful, oh sorry, I mean victims, for good reason: They represent a potential new order of billionaire capitalist anarchists, who favor a “libertarian utopia” that allows them to have all the freedom and the power to take away the people’s freedom and power.
Division on All Fronts
Racial riots over the killing of Michael Brown went nationwide, sparking a militaristic crack down by that was cheered on by anti-government conservatives. Meanwhile, a grand jury in New York found there was not enough evidence to have a trial when the entire killing of an innocent man was caught on video tape! More protests followed. More police crackdowns did as well. It was a bad time for race relations in this country. So much for post-racism because we elected a black president. Only older guilty rich white people in the media believed such foolishness, as older non-guilty rich white people began crying about how their country was taken away from them. A pathetic display that was echoed this year about men becoming victims, Christians becoming victims and especially rich people becoming victims.
What’s sad is that race relations have deteriorated in many parts of the country. There has always been a silent contempt for minorities among many of the nation’s lighter skinned but once saying it in public got you in trouble. Trent Lott was the Majority Leader in the Senate in the early 2000s and suggested that the nation could have been better if Segregationist Strom Thurmond had won the presidency. Just 2 weeks ago, the House Majority Whip, Republican of course, had admitted to attending former grand wizard David Duke’s political events and didn’t even get a slap on the wrist. That isn’t words, that is actions and you can see that old white racist America, the self-titled Real America, is tired of having to hold their tongues around all of them there black folk blasting their Snoopy Dog gun waving rap music (no joke, they still talk like that 30 years later). The racial component has a heavy generational disconnect thrown in as well.
Age is a major factor in what is going on. We are divided on many lines by generations that didn’t have to go to college and were able to have a successful career and generations that had to go to college and still can’t find a decent job. Many have no sympathy for the economic conditions their generation created as they soak up Medicare and Social Security and cry about big government and how kids are just lazy these days. If so many kids didn’t have to live with their parents into their 30s, we would be on the cusp of one of the largest generational divides in history. We very well may see it in 2015, though if there is no way to vent this out, the traditional agist youth who have little understanding of elderly nor the respect of those that came before them and did everything the young think they invented, will boil over into hard resentment that could have far-reaching negative implications. The young are often self-centered, though the up and coming are more politically active than most generations that came before. As it is the youth and thirty-somethings that are driving the push towards legalization of marijuana and gay rights (2 issues that even young conservatives are for). Though if conservatism and the Republican party fail to realize this and continue to divide race and sexuality and age, as they most likely will, they are in for some very hard times by 2020.
There was also an endless amount of shootings in 2014, all of which were answered by the same predictable media response that is similar to the local news coverage of murder. It is a combination of both outrage and apathy. “My God, tragic events are unfolding today and oh the humanity! Too bad there is nothing we can do about it, so let’s move on to the next shooting, tonight at 11.” When shootings of children and innocent people no longer spark an outrage, but people still watch the horror, this leads to a nihilistic fetishization of tragic events, once only reserved for the killing of upper-middle-class blonde women. Are we going to have Lifetime dramas about Sandy Hook now? When do we stop talking and do something to combat the National Rifle Association? When 90% of Americans (including many NRA members) support stronger gun laws and Congress can’t even bring a bill to the floor, democracy is failing.
I guess all those aging white people scared of “blacks” coming to their homes and robbing them need to have a stockpile of weapons that could supply a local militia in their homes more than innocent people need to be protected. Yet good guys with guns have killed many innocent people this year and even a young girl accidentally shot a guy trying to show her how to use an UZI at a firing range. Still nothing happened. According to Fox News conservatives why don’t we do something about all of the “blacks” killing themselves in the “ghettos”. A silly logical fallacy. Anything to protect their precious, precious, precious guns. Video games are to blame now, more than ever. Even people I respect are touting this opinion because they are older and don’t understand them or history. Someone seriously said, how come there wasn’t the kind of violence there is now before video games came along. I pointed out an incident in Colorado called the Sand Creek Massacre where a 19th century non-sanctioned militia attacked a Cheyenne camp filled with elderly, women and children and committed war crimes such as murdering children and mutilating old people in disgusting ways. It was just the first to pop into my mind, there are so many moments in history where people have been massacred, mutilated and killed in extreme ways for as long as humans could carry a sharp object. The official policy of punishing treason until the Victorian age was called Drawn and Quartering. It is unbelievably grotesque and people came around to watch it as if it were a baseball game. Violence predates Call of Duty and Doom, though it is another example of how all of the divisions are dividing on so many lines with so many contradictory arguments that it is hard to keep up with.
Speaking of video games, this year saw something called “Gamergate” as well, which was a fascinatingly stupid example of the future of gender relations. Hyper-feminist opportunists attacked the portrayal of women in video games (a topic for another day) and set back the progress that had been made by singling out unpopular examples, only to be attacked by hyper-masculine, cowardly and anonymous trolls who threatened women, called in a fake bomb threat and seemingly gave legitimacy to the hyper-feminists. It was a trumped up affair that made national headlines and even reached the Colbert Report! A hand full of people with an agenda sparked a predictable reaction from a handful of idiots and it has been causing people to take sides and even divide those that stand for equality to suddenly be against feminism. For such a thing to happen to the once promising youth culture was a disappointment. It also signals that gender relations will be rough for generations to come.
Oh and don’t get me started on immigration and those whose grandfather came through Ellis Island or even over the Mexican border crying about immigration. These people are holding up the progress to give a path to citizenship to people who have been here a generation, while their ancestors were given citizenship right off the boat. We have never had borders as closed as they are today and it is unrealistic because capitalism needs the workers and middle-class people of any stripe, even lower class Americans just can’t hang in the fields or digging foundations. This is just fear of a decreasingly white society being replaced with new generations of darker skinned people. They mainly fear the Latinos, though they always seem to forget the massive waves of East Asians and Indians. You don’t see Minutemen at the Port of Los Angeles. America has always been a melting pot, well, more of a mixed salad, and what today is “white” once was Anglo, Irish, Italian, German, Polish, Lithuanian, Russian and more. Anglos hated the Irish, Irish resented the Germans (who came later), the Germans resented the Poles who resented the Italians, who resented the Puerto Ricans who were actually citizens (because Puerto Rico is a US Commonwealth) who resented the Cubans and so on. Mexicans get it differently because they come through the West and enter into what was once their country. In any case, the Radical Right isn’t going to deport the illegal immigrants back to China, Mexico, Central America and India. All they are doing is making enemies and ranting racist garbage.
Unified in Division
Ok, so we are pretty well divided. How do I see hope in this mess?
For starters, look at how fast gay marriage has come into acceptance. People were so worked up about it 10 years ago in the 2004 election that it reelected a very unpopular president Bush. Today Obama was reelected being for it. There is still a long way to go and many of the Red States are still using this at a local level, but the national trend is now away from this as a form of division. It has been spent and those that hold out are now in an ever increasing minority.
Though the real hope comes from the fact that those that are inflicting the division to get political power are no longer unified. The billionaires are fighting each other, old money vs new, corporations are battling each other. Congress is just a pawn of the game but there is no overarching power. All of the division cuts too many ways and that in the end doesn’t divide, it toughens. Americans are largely on the same page on the issues. As the aging conservatives die off, they will find they have no issue left to divide. What comes next is an attack at the real and only division that matters: The haves and the have nots. Every single other division is to distract you from this one and all the flailing around this year shows that the haves are pretty damn scared as their old methods of retaining power are no longer working as they once did. There will always be division of some kind. The difference between Dodgers vs Giants or Yankees vs Red Sox however is something that won’t bleed over into escalating violence.
The people are becoming unified in this rough experience though it will take some time. It will likely matter less in 2016, when people actually show up to vote and now, generally, trump Republicans into the ground. In time, they will soon be able to barely flex a muscle to trump the radical conservatives that have ceased the Republican Party during midterms like 2018 and 2022 as well, though likely the later. This will be good to sweep out the radical factions, though then, as it is here in California, what then? A pro-corporate Democratic Party is better but leaves much to be desired. I would gladly have that problem nationwide today though, and let’s look forward to the day when those that seek to divide us along social lines to be elected to Congress where social politics matters very little thanks to the Constitution, are relegated to the fringe of this nation, which is all they actually represent, even in places like Texas.
There is a whole lot more I wanted to talk about that occurred in 2014, though at the crux of most issues lies the preceding. We experienced a year with Wars that divided liberals, torture reports that divided conservatives. So much division that I nearly reached my breaking point. 2014 was filled with protests, anger and apathy at the voting booth (about the only thing a vast majority of Americans seemed to agree upon), giving more power to the very people that pull the puppet strings in Washington. While this is in no way definitive of my own view of 2014 and its repercussions, to me the division of the nation’s populace is the image that will prevail when we look back at this crossroads of a year.