There is no culture war.
It has never truly been one. The media likes to imagine the struggle as being like two cultural nations at war with one another.
That makes it simple and emotionally driven for media types to understand.
So they sell it as not just liberal versus conservative, but car versus truck, rock versus country, kale versus steak, or any other completely irrelevant difference between the two camps they can seize upon and say to both sides”They hate you for being yourself! Are you going to take that from them?”.
But the thing is, neither side is actually trying to destroy the other. Most people, when they have a chance to cool off, agree that people should just live and let live, and that differences in taste are simply a difference in personal preference, and not morality.
So it’s not, at its heart, a culture war. Both sides think they are acting in self-defense and have little to no interest in forcing their culture on the other, merely defending their own from the supposed attacks of the other.
But difference is not an attack.
This is the gravest failure to distinguish between morality and taste I can think of. It’s a fake war, a phony conflict, and the stakes are very high.
The real conflict is purely an ethical one. And even that is mostly fake, because if you put it in neutral terms, you would find both sides feel the same about most things, and it’s only media fueled madness that causes that to get lost.
It is therefore up to us to learn to see beyond this dangerous delusion and see the fundamental humanist truth of the situation – that there is more that unites us than divides us and we have far more in common than we could ever differ.
That’s even true genetically. Every human being’s genetic code is 99.99 percent identical. All our differences lie in that last 0.01 percent.
But oh, what a fuss we make over it!
This phony divide between people is currently tearing America apart, and doing a lot of damage to the rest of the world’s democracies as well.
So here is what I propose : that as many prominent people from both sides sign a symbolic document saying that they are not looking to force anything on anyone, that the culture war is media bullshit, that they don’t hate the other side or want to destroy everything they hold dear, and that with this symbolic act, they are declaring a ceasefire so that both sides can figure out what the hell they really believe, and do their solid best to remember that people are not their politics, people that are mad at each other say all kinds of crazy shit that they don’t believe, that the media thrives on conflict as stokes it whenever they can, and that at the end of day, we’re all just people with jobs trying to make our way through life.
We could stop this crazy train dead in its tracks.
We just need to remember that we are human.
Wow. Sometimes I look at the sort of thing I write when I am in Jesus mode and wonder who the heck that guy is.
My better side, I suppose.
But I am no saint. Instead, I am just another human trying to make sense of this era of blood and fire and pandemonium.
The truth is that, as much as I want peace as outlined above, another part of me is a hardcore truth warrior who wants to come roaring out of the gates and kill the shit out of all the filthy and hateful lies I see.
And if that hurts the people promulagating those toxic ideas when it happens, I am one hundred percent okay with that.
Next time trying thinking, asshole. And caring.
Listen to Jesus, at least.
This is a great and terrible era to live in. We live in interesting times. No doubt future historians will be pouring over the records of this era and asking themselves how it got this way and how they can keep it from ever happening again.
I know how Trump got elected despite the fact that nobody, including himself. thought he could win.
Forgot about the ideological issues for the moment – he won because he hired very, very good political flunkies.
Ones who know all the in and outs of the electoral college and all the dirty tricks you can pull to get your candidate those sweet, sweet electoral college votes even though they did not really win them.
Now of course, none of that would have mattered if Trump had not found fertile ground for his xenophobic message. But it was not that everyone who voted for him is a racist, or even semi-racist.
Because you have to remember that, just as with Brexit, the voters did not think he could win either. So they saw no harm in voting for him as a way to tell the system that had forgotten them and told them they were wrong for being who they were that it can go fuck itself sideways with a rubber cactus, thank you kindly.
Once Trump won, though, everyone on the right felt they had to line up behind him and stick with him to the bitter end because loyalty is a huge part of the conservative character and he was “their guy”, so they owed him their support.
Backing the guy no matter what is not without its costs, though. Trust me, they are hurting. That’s why they are so touchy and sensitive. Part of them knows exactly how terrible he is, and suffers like a sick animal because of it.
That’s why he has lost a lot of his base.
The remainder are the people who simply see no way out and so they are going to keep fighting even as history rolls over them like a steamroller.
They are simply not capable of the sort of mental flexibility it takes to turn on one of their own. There is a level of coldblooded calculation involved in doing so, and a lot of people just won’t (or can’t) go there.
So here we are, in the realm of the mad king, wondering what fresh hell comes next.
If only we could all agree to ignore him.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.