Once upon a long ago time I was a Christian.
When the idea of one God started to naturally seem more irrational to me, I said: Look. Christ said he came to lay down two new laws to replace all that Levitical hebrew crap about ‘slaughter goats for me, and men can’t fuck men, and the earth is six thousand years old’.
His new laws were: You have to love your god whole-souled. And you have to love your neighbor like you love yourself. In short, the entire new law was Love.
So if I can put ‘my god’ in quotes, and love my idea of God passionately and true, and the only other thing I have to do is love my neighbor … then yeah, strictly speaking, you can still call me a Christian.
Then I gave up on that whole approach.
Letting other people call me a Christian, even with an asterisk, wasn’t worth it, and this was mainly because of the other Christians and the way they acted, especially toward their neighbors. I wanted nothing to do with being tarred with the same brush. The label no longer had social utility.
Via much the same mechanism, and for much the same reasons, I can’t call myself a liberal any more. Mainly, the neo Liberals don’t believe in any meaningful form of liberty. They represent for the Democratic party, and that party is controlled from the top down by corporatists,
Why did Joe Biden say he would torpedo any legislation guaranteeing health care to the least of these my brothers? Because the donors that control him told him to, and they told him to because their whole ability to donate and hold economic power and ‘make a better life for THEIR children’ depends on the massive con game of for-profit ‘health care’, and on oppressing other people’s children in the process.
The same applies to Endless War, and Climate Change, and Immigration policy, and on and on. When the Republican Governor of Michigan deliberately poisoned and damaged the brains of the poor and majority minority children of Flint for profit, Obama ran cover for him by going to Flint, telling the poisoned that there was Nothing To See Here, and pretending to drink the vile, toxic shit that was coming out of their taps.
Many years later, when the Governor was finally facing some misdemeanor accountability for his crimes in the courts, he cagily flipped parties and endorsed Biden …
… who welcomed his endorsement with open arms and a press release, instead of doing the right thing, the Christian thing in fact, which would have been calling for his head on a plate.
Everybody is glad to see Donny go.
Successfully crow-barring him out of the White House does not mean anything fundamental will change, or that 2021 will be a better year. Voting Donny down in my newly blue state does not mean I can feel righteous, or go back to calling myself a Liberal.
The moneychangers are still comfortably ensconced in the Temple. The temple of Love. The temple of abundance theology, for an elect blessed few. The temple of liberty and justice for all. The temple of ‘democracy’. Biden will not be Jesus throwing their asses out into the street where they belong.
He’ll be the guy literally inviting them, the Goldman-Sachs philistines, into his Cabinet, just as good old Barack did before him in his first of many Acts of Judas.
Twitter is saved! The Capitol is saved! But the heart of the country will continue to mold and rot. Did I say $2000 checks? Thanks for voting Democrat, Georgia! Now how about, oh I don’t know, fourteen hundred? Will that shut you up?
It won’t shut them up, Joe.
Every other first-world nation has done far, far more for their people during the pandemic, not even counting the fact that their people already had health care as a human right.
No to the Trump. No to the half-measure, business as usual, restoration-of-normalcy neoLiberals.
Well. How about Progressive? That’d be a thing to call yourself, eh?
I can’t.
The name, to begin with–I don’t believe in progress. That’s an entire different discussion, but it’s true.
Beyond that, there’s the debacle of #ForceTheVote, which I should have been continuing to detail in the first weeks of the new year, and didn’t. (Yet.) But you know what I think. At the one point in the process where ‘progressives’ had an opportunity to make a show of actual progress, they demurred, and proved that in spite of their inspiring rhetoric, they had been co-opted by the Machine.
Thanks for voting Democrat, The Bronx! Now how about some pretty young allies-in-name-only? Will that shut you up?
It won’t shut them up, Alexandria.
Their eyes, my eyes, turn toward the farther horizon. Surely Sister Nina Turner will save us.
Surely the Movement for a People’s Party will turn the tide, ennit?
Hope of earning the privilege to shut up, and go back to our lives of worship in the gospel of love is dying like a Covid patient in an overcrowded ICU.
As it fades there are three last whispered words.
Listen very closely as you struggle to hear them.
i … can’t breathe.