Day 786

Day 786 Sunday March 3, 2019

610 Days to the 2020 election and 688 Days to Inauguration Day

The Fear of Ocasio-Cortez.

Why were the people at CPAC making fun of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Why is there so much uproar about The Green New Deal? What is it about a twenty nine year old woman and former bartender from New York that so unnerves the … the … what should we call them? The Right? The Republicans? The Conservatives? The Trump supporters? The racists? The deplorables? Whatever you want to call them they clearly have something that they think they should fear in this woman. What is it and why?

If you study the nature of prejudice, and we are all having to do that to some degree in the age of Trump, you find that prejudice is based on fear. Fear is based on either not knowing or knowing all to well.  Therefore fear is based on an anticipation. Overcoming fear takes effort. It takes understanding, practice, and preparation. 

Are you afraid to surf of forty foot wave? I would guess most people would be, but those that do it practice and study. They condition their bodies. They think about what they need to do the task they have envisioned. They try smaller waves. they become proficient at the skills they anticipate needing for the task. When the time comes they do and have done everything they can think of to be prepared, to know what is coming.

Prejudice has many characteristics that people have pointed out. First, there is the mental game you have to play. Somehow what ever it is that you don’t like you have to develop a set of reasons for not liking it. Maybe, these have already been created for you by your environment and all you have to do is adopt them. There’s the trying to label and lessen whatever it is. There is the putting yourself in a superior position, and the lessening of the other. The other thing about prejudice is the ability to grant exceptions when faced with what one considers an outlier. “I hate all foo, except so and so because they are okay” (or not like the rest of them). In the case of race in this country most people of African American decent were of lower class and people of a higher socio-economic group didn’t like lower class people. It was easier to say in one’s mind that a black person was lower class and dismiss them than it was to make the effort to find out. As black people have moved up socio-economically this notion is being challenged more and more. 

There is little that one can do to overcome prejudice, unless that person is willing to work at it. However, the one thing that has been proven, verified and proven, to work is to put people who are prejudiced against one another in jobs of equal status. It’s hard to harbor prejudice if you are in a fire fight and the person whom you thought you didn’t care for is covering your ass with suppressive gunfire. Or you’re working side by side doing the same job. 

There is also a tendency to want to be among people who look like you. Therefore over time groups will tend to segregate. When they do they tend to label and fear the other group because they don’t look like them. This leaves room for all sorts of interpretations, most or all of them not good.

Therefore as individuals in a society if we do not want to be ruled by fear and prejudice we must constantly strive to overcome our self imposed restrictions, fears, and prejudices. Associating with those we fear is one way of doing that, hopefully, in an equal status situation (because it has been shown to work.)

Segregating and talking amongst yourselves reinforces and heightens ones predisposed thoughts. This is dangerous. The unfortunate thing about our instant communications and many channels for information is that it allows us to seek out our own and stay within the narrow confines of our own thinking. Travel, as Mark Twain pointed out, is a great way to overcome prejudice. People who are deeply prejudice, rarely travel far.

So what is it about AOC that inspires such vitriol? I would suggest that it is her age, her beauty, her ideas, and her brashness in expressing her ideas so well. What can one do in such a case? You can insult her. make fun of her and her ideas, you can label her and thus try to lessen who she is, and you can invent stuff about her. All these things have been done. What you don’t want to do is talk to her, to listen to her, because if you do you might find some common ground and then you’d work together to solve the problem. Of course the way to avoid this, besides not talking to her, is to not admit to the problem she is trying to solve. So one can say climate change is not real, or not as bad as people say it is, or that it is the natural cycle of the Earth and therefore nothing to worry about. What about the divide between rich and poor? You can say that trickle down economics will take care of it. That there has always been a divide. That solutions such as strengthening unions is socialism. 

Oh yes, and socialism – that’s bad. Look at Russia or any of the countries that were behind the iron curtain. They tried socialism and it didn’t work. It’s bad. Yeah, right. This ignores what she and Bernie and many others are saying. Things are out fo whack and if we don’t take steps to fix the situation eventually the pot will boil over. Okay that’s a metaphor and seeing as how metaphors have been so misused I’ll spell it out, as AOC and Bernie, and Elizabeth and many others have done. All the money and power in this country has gotten collected in a very small group of people. It need to be distributed more. How do you want to go about that? We can tax the wealthy. We can stop allowing a minority group to tilt the playing field to their advantage or we can ignore the problem. Ignoring the problem has consequences, and no one knows exactly what will happen but eventually it is concluded that people won’t take “it” any more and they will raise havoc. A quiet revolution is in my estimation preferable to having people dragged out of their castles and killed as happened in the French Revolution. I know, it can’t happen here. Until it does.

What was really interesting in the Michael Cohen open testimony was how AOC in her three and a half minutes did more than anyone else in that room to advance what Congress should, according to the Constitution, be doing. AOC asked questions that helped Congress with its function of oversight. The thing that the Republicans on that committee fear the most is the truth and she exposed that. She exposed that the president is possibly guilty of bank fraud, insurance fraud, charity fraud, and tax fraud among other things. The other thing she exposed was that Donald Trump is a RAGING SOCIALIST!!! 

This, more than anything else, should really scare those rich people supporting Trump. She pointed out that their is a golf course near her district that was developed by the government for one hundred and twenty five million dollars of government money – tax dollars! – that went to make that land a golf course, from which Donald Trump receives all the revenue. Isn’t that a sweetheart deal? Wouldn’t you like a deal like that? Of course not! That’s socialism! Wait what? You would take $125M from the government? But you said … Oh. It’s okay when you are the one benefiting? But not for some person struggling to make their rent? I mean can you imagine what $125,000,000.00 could do in AOC’s district? It could be put into improving the schools, the infrastructure, helping people with addictions, the poor, but instead it went to helping a entitled fuck to get richer. That’s not socialism – that’s capitalism! Oh wait, it is socialism? Yeah, you are taking money from one group (most or all of us) and giving it to another group (the super wealthy). Yeah. that socialism. Wait. Let’s change the label, okay? Let’s call it Robin Hoodism or Pulling yourself up by the bootstrapism or anything else, but not socialism.

So first let’s not listen to what AOC has to say. Let’s put our fingers in our ears. Let’s babble stuff that we make up about her. She’s a socialist. She’s a witch. She’s coming not only after our guns, but our cows and our pickup trucks. 

Let me ask you this:

Are you for everyone paying their fair share”

Do you think we should leave the planet to our children and our grand children?

Do you think everyone should get a fair shot in life?

Do you think we can do more to help ourselves improve our lives?

If you said “yes” to any of these questions you are backing the fundamental ideas that Ms Ocasio-Cortez is suggesting.

There’s another kind of prejudice going on here too. Age discrimination. She’s young. She’s not putting up with the older folks bull. She’s saying we have to take action now. Oh to be young. You have to understand…Things take time…What do you mean bullshit? 

To quote Shelley Berman, “We don’t have time for coffee, tea, or milk! The wing is a solid sheet of flame!”

In other words, she’s saying if we want to save the planet we need to act now. Oh yeah, and there are these people called scientists who agree with her.

If we want to live healthy lives we can act now.

If we want to live better lives we need to act now.

Oh you want to wait? No, what you want is to keep the con going? Your time is coming to an end.

Time is almost up.

610 Days to the 2020 election and 688 Days to Inauguration Day

PS Zodiac painting on the dome of the caladarium, Qasar Amra, Jordan