Another Post About

 My darlings abroad, you have questions about what the fuck just happened in Amerida. 

You have concerns. 

Here is an answer, swathed in capitalistic intrusions as it is:  

    Why Did Trump Really Win? It’s Simple, Actually. – Mother Jones   

No seriously you guys, read that link. Particularly you kids from Parts Foreign. 

And mark that news source - Mother Jones. 

From the time I was 14 I've been taking my news analysis from Mother Jones.  It got me through the last years of Carter, it got me through Reagonomics, and here we are in 2024 and Mother Jones is still holding the line, skin of the teeth, fingernails, straining, still trying to tell you the fucking truth.

Now I am a leftie bred. My mother was a steelworker, Rosie the Riveter, proud holder of a union card. My father was a staunch Boilermaker who risked his life during the Dillingham strikes in the 1970's. His father Karl helped unionize the woods when the logging companies were running what amounted to slave plantations, and he helped unionize a lot of other trades and businesses by sitting in, setting fires, and resorting to gunplay. 

My grandmother was an Amazon.

I am a Teamster.

I believe that the workers should rise up and seize the means of production - that consumers should rise up and seize the means of distribution - and that everyone should pass the culture on, the culture of making do and mending and self-reliance and co-operation. 

Plant a garden. Live off the grid. Educate yourselves and educate your children. Socialize medicine. Socialize learning. 

                                          UNITE MOTHERFUCKERS. THE TIME IS NOW.

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Isn't it weird though, how all social movements, whether liberal or conservative, seem to circle around and meet in the middle?

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I've met a lot of people out here in the county over the years who are quite separatist - religious, educational, social, political - and in getting to know them I've found that once you get past the icing and into the creamy filling, they all seem to follow the same idea - be free of the Man, inculcate the kids with your ideologies out in the howling wilderness, and then....let them...go do shit. I guess.

(OK they were home schooled. And I am all for that. I absolutely believe that the public school system as it stands in the U.S. is a fucking joke. I was set up to home school the Stainless Steel Amazon, in fact. Luckily, we'd moved into the new and improved Nooksack School district, where the teachers were competent, and they had security guards at all the entrances.)

So anyway.

What do those kids go on to do?  Those Ebeneezer Christian kids, the punative home birth kids, the Holiness Spirit kids who speak in tongues, the Rainbow kids, the kids who grew up on communes, the kids who grew up in cults, or in the woods by Nooksack Falls, or in those gated communities way up on Mt. Baker?

I run into them. They seem healthy. If anything those kids were raised on good, clean groceries and that shit was carefully selected and prepared. 

Here are my observations. 

Very few of them know how to read well. Forget books. Forget any higher training in how to think or how to read critically. 

Very few of them know how to make a decision when faced with modern options. They haven't been urbanized. 

There is an acceptance of shoddy goods. An attitude of 'Oh well, that shit happens' capitulation, instead of indignance. 

There seems to be very little recourse to the material world. The digital world, fine - but when faced with material dysfunction, the impulse is to discard and move along. 

They seem to believe that everything is difficult and that purchasing 'solutions' is their only option.

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Do you know when you're up in the dark of the night, reading something abstract, absorbed in it, and the quiet is like being inside a box - and the radio goes silent for a beat, and them comes on with a song that feels like it saves your life?  Do you know what I mean by that?

I'm here by the water and it's slack tide and I can't hear any birds going over. It's the quiet between now the next rain storm coming through.