Danny@TheEarthPartyAn Open Letter to Democrats
Updated: Dec 17, 2019
Dear Democrats:
PLEASE LISTEN!!! You're making the same mistakes you made in 2016, and if you don't change soon, Trump will get reelected!!! PLEASE, LISTEN.
Imagine a person.
Female or male. Black or white. Any identity. It doesn't matter.
For clarity, let's call this person "Jane" if female, or "John" if male.
This person:
-Is living paycheck to paycheck.
-Can't afford a 500 dollar emergency. Would go into debt if they had one.
-Works three jobs, totaling more than 70 hours a week. None of the jobs offer benefits, since they're all part time.
-Makes $9.00 an hour.
-Has developed chronic illnesses from the stress of working so many hours, with so little security.
-Has no healthcare coverage, or has inadequate healthcare coverage, and cannot afford the medical treatment they need. Regularly makes choices between food and medicine.
-Is already in debt from previous bills, the interest on which is a bill in its own right.
-Is barely making rent, and is in danger of eviction.
-Is preparing for the possibility of sleeping in their car this coming winter.
You can't call this person "lazy." They're working a full-time job. TWO full-time jobs, almost. It's not their fault they're not getting compensated enough to make ends meet.
In addition:
-The company they work for (with help from both major political parties) just busted up the labor union that might have led to some improvements in salary and working conditions.
-One of their close family members, or best friends, is hooked on prescription opioids and can't access cannabis or psychedelic therapy for addiction treatment because all such plants and fungi are still illegal.
-Another loved one is in Afghanistan fighting for who-the-hell-knows-what. And when he gets home, he's going to have PTSD, because he just spent 5 years killing people for no reason, and no matter how hard he tries to come up with a reason, he can't think of any, because there isn't any. And no one in politics is providing any. They're not even trying. The mask has come off, and the leaders of our country are not even bothering to TRY to justify the absurdity.
-They're watching as the already fabulously wealthy get even fabulously wealthier, and use that money to buy elections and buy politicians, to pass legislation that makes them even more fabulously wealthier, at the expense of squeezing our Jane/John even tighter.
And:
-The Amazon (the real one) is burning
-The Congo is burning
-Australia and Indonesia and Southeast Asia are burning
-The Arctic is burning and belching billions of tons of fart-gas into the atmosphere
-California is burning
-The oceans are turning acidic and hypoxic
-Species are going extinct at 10,000 times the background rate, and scientists are telling us we have just one decade to completely redesign our entire civilization from the bottom up, or risk the total collapse of all life on this planet.
If our Jane/John is a member of a younger generation, he/she has no future to look forward to. And if she/he has kids, then those kids definitely have no future to look forward to. They're looking at death by literal starvation or thirst, as the food and water sources dry up from climate chaos and ecological collapse.
Here's the question:
What public issue do you think this person - our Jane/John - cares most about?
Is it... The Steele Dossier?
No, probably not.
Is it the Tower Meeting?
No.
How about the pee tape?
No.
Stormy Daniels?
Definitely not.
The Ukraine phone-call?
No. How does this impact our John/Jane's life in any way?
It doesn't.
What about the Russians?
No, not that either.
A bunch of Tom Clancy-esque spy-novel intrigue in the Whitehouse?
Couldn't care less.
The president's nasty Twitter tweets? All the "decorum" he's breaking?
No.
None of these things make even the top 100.
Neither does impeachment.
Americans are too poor to care about impeachment.
How is someone supposed to care about any of this spy-novel celebrity drama, when they're barely able to put food on the table, or in danger of living on the street?
And guess what: This isn't a tiny minority of people. Our Jane/John is the majority. While you weren't looking, half the country became poor, as corporatist policies pulled the rug out from under the economy. Things have been going great for rich people, who just keep getting richer... but for everyone else, the bottom is falling out.
This problem is older than the Trump presidency. The factors that are causing it, they go back decades, and presidents of both parties are responsible for it. The hollowing-out of the economy was a bi-partisan project.
And if you're like most Democratic Party loyalists, you're not aware of this, mainly because the big corporate news networks never talk about it. They've insulated you. They've failed to keep you informed of what's really going on in this country and this world.
And that's why, in 2015, you were caught off-guard by Trump, and didn't see a demagogue like him coming, and why, in 2016, you didn't foresee any possibility of him actually winning. The media ignored the pain, and you had no idea how much of it there was, and what desperate measures it was driving people towards.
Perhaps you've suffered some too. Perhaps you're dissatisfied with the way things have gone. Perhaps you're even mad.
But...
If you have the time and resources to focus on Trump and Russiagate, rather than the economic and environmental shitstorm engulfing the working class, then you're not in that much pain - not nearly as much as the people in the middle of that whirlwind.
If your anger is mainly directed at Trump, and you think the biggest thing to worry about is Russia, then you're not experiencing the same pain and insecurity that the majority of the world is now dealing with.
There is a term for this. It's called class privilege.
Your economic class (middle and up) gives you enough comfort to focus on cloak-and-dagger spy-intrigue in the WhiteHouse. You wouldn't be thinking about that drama, if you were poor.
If ALL you care about is Trump and impeaching him, and you don't care about the things in this list, this is a sign of your *privilege*. You are rich enough, comfortable enough, white enough, square enough, well-connected enough, "normal" enough, and powerful enough, within the current economic system, to afford to not care about these things.
And here's your big blind-spot of the past 4 years:
You assume that most of the country is in the same comfort as you are. But they're not. The "comfortable class", which has the time and room to rage over Trump's bad manners and phonecalls to Russians, now constitutes only about 20% of the population. The other 80% are perched on the edge of an economic cliff. Half the country is downright poor. Half cannot afford a 500 dollar emergency. Half.
Their lives are constant emergencies.
You might think Trump constitutes an emergency. But the difference is, for you, the emergency is on TV - while, for the other 80%, the emergency is in their day-to-day lives. You have the comfort of being able to turn your emergency off. You can withdraw from it, by turning off the TV.
But they can't switch theirs off. You can't switch off poverty, chronic illness, job and rent insecurity, and a dying planet, just by flipping a switch on a remote.
And that is most of the population's situation. And you are never going to get them on your side by focusing on the Russians and the potty-mouthed president. They are too poor to care.
You will not win the election that way. You will not win by making it about Trump.
PLEASE, PAY ATTENTION HERE:
The more you focus on Trump, the more you convince the poor and struggling that you're not paying attention to them. That you - and more importantly, your Party - don't care about them.
Every time you mention his name, you are driving more votes away from you. Every minute spent talking about him is a minute spent not talking about ways to actually improve lives and solve problems. And that convinces the struggling masses that they have no reason to vote for you, or your Party. That even if you win, nothing will change for them.
They couldn't care less who occupies the WhiteHouse. No matter who gets in, nothing will change, and their situation will just keep getting more desperate, while the rich get richer, and the media ignore them, and politicians of both parties laugh in their face. Whether it's Trump, Pence, or Pelosi, the agenda will stay the same: Squeeze the poor, service the rich, bomb brown people, consolidate corporate power, rob the young of any possibility of a future, and erase biology from the only planet in the cosmos where biology is confirmed to exist.
And whenever you act like "Trump" and "Russia" are the biggest problems facing America, you're just reinforcing that pattern, and re-confirming this near-universal assumption that Democrats don't give a crap about real problems, and even if a Democrat wins the WhiteHouse, nothing of substance will change.
And in this condition, most people stay home on Election Day. Or worse, they vote for Trump. They're drawn in by his rhetoric of "feeling their pain."
Yes, he's conning them.
Yes, he's probably laughing behind their backs.
Yes, he's only pretending to care about them.
But at least he's doing that. At least he's talking to them. At least he cares enough about them to address them... even if he is lying to them.
But the Democrats? The corporate ones, like Biden? They can't even be bothered to do THAT. They won't even ADDRESS the struggling masses. They openly - BRAZENLY - dismiss them all with a wave of their hand and a chuckle.
Here's Joe Biden saying he doesn't care about the struggles of millennials:
And you expect millennials to vote for this man? After he publicly declares his apathy towards them? And laughs at them?
Here's him responding to a man with a question about government corruption and nepotism, by calling him "a damned liar" and "fat":
How is this "electable"? In what universe have you been living?
Wait - there's an answer to that. It's your media environment. The billionaire press has not been keeping you informed of what others are going through. Since they don't tell you, you might believe Joe Biden when he says they have nothing to complain about!