People just aren’t good to each other

We need internal discourse. We need to feel comfortable with having our tactics and arguments examined from within, and we need to take seriously the flaws in our arguments that are pointed out by those whom we least want pointing them out and to make adjustments to those arguments accordingly.

If we want Donald Trump out of office, we need to be willing to have our own opinions examined because we need to do better this time, and relying on the same silly nonsense we did in the last election will almost certainly not work again because it already didn’t work the first time.

There is a large swath of people, somewhere in the middle, who are somewhat undecided about what this coming election holds for them. I’m not referring to the impatient liberals awaiting the resolution of a faltering DNC. I’m referring to the generally uncertain and the undecided and the unconcerned. They are the people who are deciding the elections. They always have been, and they probably always will be. As much as you want to champion the decisiveness of your convictions, you are not making the decsions. What you are doing is convincing others to make a decision. It is not the people who already have their minds made up; it is not the Trump supporters, anymore than it is the Trump detractors. And, unfortunately, being uncareful about where your desent is directed, or your middle finger with a ‘pat-pat’ of your bare ass is maligning those people who stand somewhere near the direction of that uncareful slight.

I’m referring to those people who might just as easily relate to the hunters and fisherman who support Trump as much as they could with the conservationists and enviromentalists who do not, or the Christians who are disgusted by Trump’s moral acuity who might, given the opportunity, come to realize we can no longer ignore the bad to come from an unregulated economy in favor of the unholy dollar. Those uncareful slights are blunt force tools that have lost their utility in our changing and evermore connected world, and have become only counterproductive to our objective.

We need to find ways of relating to one another more, not less because we are, in fact, more alike than we are different, and still, despite knowing this and even the championing of it, “People are just not good to each other / we are afraid / we think that hatred means strength […] And people are not good to each other.”

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Excerpt from “The Crunch” by Charles Bukowski

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Pardon my sentimentality.