Power Politics, and Getting Things Done

Why people consider politics as something dirty is because there are two aspects to it.

The first is to get into City Council, or the State House of Representatives, or Congress, or the Senate, and somehow get some legislation you really want passed; hopefully some law that will make things better for everybody.

The second is to get yourself elected.

Members of both parties are concerned with both aspects of politics; you can't do either without the other; sometimes someone who aspires to public office has to compromise on his or her objectives in order to persuade voters to elect them.  Some people go as far as lying about what they want to do once elected, in order to get votes.  Others are brutally honest about their agenda, and endure not being elected for years and years, hoping that the electorate will finally see that their agenda is the best for the electorate.

Now, looking around us, we can't help noticing that there are two terrible forces that are advancing on us: (1) The relentless advance of climate change.  Just like the GOP has finally recognized that it is insane to urge their people to refuse to get vaccinated, so we must hope that those who insisted that climate change was temporary, and not a result of society's disregard of environmental effects, will see reason.  Many fools who screamed at the science that was trying to persuade people that it was going to get too hot and too wet to continue to live the way we like to live, are belatedly coming round to say: we have to do something.  (2) The fact that it is the poorest among us, African Americans and all sorts of minorities, immigrants, women, single parents, disabled, and uneducated, who suffer most from the excesses of the society we live in; in particular, and increasingly, the ravages of climate.

I have, most of my life, dreamed about going into space.  If society was equitable, if poverty was not something that was going through the roof, if there were no more suffering in the world, not to mention the USA, I would have dearly loved an opportunity to go into space, and so would have many others.  But given the horrible future that awaits us if we keep going in the direction we have been, there's something a little crass about billionaires riding out on their own private spaceships, to satisfy their craving to get into space.

There's no doubt that we have to pull out the big guns now---figuratively speaking.  We don't need to choose between dealing with (1) above, or (2); they have to be dealt with together, and with a steady eye on the long term effects of what we do, and what they do to oppose us.

It's sort of a no-brainer that controlling sales of firearms will reduce gun violence across the USA.  But conservatives of all sorts are stockpiling their own personal armories because they expect that the poor will come looking for them, for all the wonderful things they're hiding in their basements, such as a second freezer, and the computers on which they play computer games.  The vaccination fiasco has shown us that conservatives are not the smartest people in the country.  And their leaders are not even as smart as they are.  In a recent article in the New York Times, a writer exclaims why he's sure that Trump will run for President again in 2024.  Not to make things better for the country.  Not to make money out of his hotels.  Rather, to take revenge on everyone who didn't support his electoral bid the last time!  The country is burning on one side, and flooding on the other; his followers are dying of COVID, his fellow-Trumpers are perjuring themselves and ruining their reputations to remain in his favor, and does he care?  No; his first objective---according to this writer, and the idea makes sense to anyone who has been paying attention to the sorts of things that Trump has done while president---is to take revenge on his political opponents.

It is no time for pettiness.  Every act of pettiness detracts from our resources, our time, our energy, all that it takes to move society, and the law, towards dealing with the climate that is grinding towards an intolerable condition.  Many Democrats, in particular, those considered to be among the so called Left Extreme, but who are quite moderate in actual fact, have tried to portray Clean Energy as something that could Profit the big Energy Companies.  Some of the energy companies have bought into this, and have tried to take over some parts of the clean energy industries, and proceeded to build wind farms, and solar farms, with the usual heavy-handed, environment-destroying, jack-booted style with which they were accustomed to developing their energy assets.  They've plunked down solar panels right in the middle of virgin forests.  Wind farms in residential areas.  What are they trying to do?  Make citizens hate wind and solar, to that they will get the OK to drill for more oil?  This is interesting.  The conservatives are now motivated more by hate than by greed.  This is not the time for Democrats, and progressives and liberals generally, to fall into the same trap.  It is almost impossible to avoid feeling hate, because of the destruction that the conservatives are causing.  But it is a mistake to act on hate.  It is not just that liberals and progressives are superior---which they probably are---but that we have our eye on the ball, and we can't get where we want to go by retaliation.

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