No party offers anything material, just a more complete reification of things into people, and people into things. These hats, bumper stickers, and lawn signs represent more complex personalities than me or anyone I know. And a few folks reading this may be clutching their pearls, “That’s their team, not ours! Don’t you know what’s at stake, what we’re fighting for?” Yes, they’re the same things as 4 years ago. I too understand they couldn’t put real material demands in place, because there’s elections to win. We can’t let these talking points just disappear in success, let alone prevent tens of thousands more deaths.
I used to drink with rednecks at the bar. When we were kids we’d eat dinner at their houses after playing video games for hours. They had custom Dale Earnhardt wooden “3s” on their garage doors, Bush/Cheney and FUBO (F.U. Barack Obama) bumper stickers on their trucks. They called me a ****** because my parents liked John Kerry. Yet, whenever politics came up it was somewhat of a jovial debate session rather than a hateful inquisition. We recognized we weren't so cookie cutter in our beliefs. We all had a degree of respect for nice guitars, funny stories, and characters.
Now I see their red hat. They remember my deleted Facebook statuses and college degree, and we don’t talk. We’re just things, who are no longer representative of each other anymore.
Nietzsche used to say one should be like a great sea, which can take in polluted streams without becoming polluted itself. Now they’ll find plastic in every speck of water on earth. It’s in our brains, blood, and breast milk.
Perhaps that primordial black ooze became our fungal overlord, pulling the levers to compel us toward our self-destruction. Some failsafe measure by a watchmaking God.
We should have kept up the idea of humanity as mysterious, creative, and curious beings, instead transferring that consciousness solely to our machines.