Hanging in
by digby
Over in her nice new digs, Emptywheel has a nice think piece on the dangers of progressive despair and Depression depression and quotes this passage from the book Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression:
“Okay weasels,” Foxface announced, “now fill it back up.”
We set to work regarding the reloading the truck by hand, forming teams that passed debris.
“I hate this shit,” Jay said.
It was a contradiction I couldn’t understand. Jay felt enmity, but he was terrified of what he called “the outside.”
“But don’t you fell they are ripping you off?” I asked.
Jay scratched at the hard ground with a foot, scraping at the dust. When he looked back up, he said, “No-o-o.” He paused.” “No.”
I shut up.
I realized what I was seeing: this was a man who had given up, utterly.
[snip]
He had arrived here a destroyed man, beaten by life and the vagaries of the economy. Now he seemed brainwashed, like the cult members I’d written about for the newspaper. Like a cult, the foundation was exploiting his weakened state of mind in order to manipulate him. The work camp practiced classic sleep deprivation: it worked men hard and then roused them after just a few hours’ sleep to do it all over again, seven days a week. Jay said this was how it had been for the previous thirty days.
One must be defeated to be controlled.
And control is the point. When you have income inequality at the levels we have it in this country it is natural for the oligarchs and aristocrats to begin to get nervous. Even in America, the land of opportunity, the malefactors of great wealth have always worried that the polloi was going to use this "democracy" to wake up and grab a pitchfork. One of the ways to control that is social control.
There is, I've recently realized, an impulse among liberals to constantly reinvent the wheel and switch gears manically when things do not change rapidly enough. I suppose that's a natural function of the personalities that veer toward rapid change rather than conservation. But it's a political weakness, especially when it's in reaction to authoritarianism and economic intimidation.
I'm older now, so perhaps my newfound "patience" can be seen as resignation rather than wisdom. But I have learned a couple of things over these years: don't panic, don't drop out and don't despair. The reactionaries and revanchists aren't all powerful and the will to progress is as fundamental to humanity as breathing. Bad things happen, to be sure. But liberal focus and persistence can be a powerful antidote. We need to hang in.
Be sure to read Marcy's entire post.