Ron Paul Revolution Misunderstood

[liveonearth]

Shirley doesn't get it. She doesn't understand why Ron Paul fans would join the Republican Party for just one year to support him. She doesn't understand how a Revolution can be built without a clear party affilation. And at the rate she's going, she never will get it.

But let me make it really plain for her and the likes of her. Ron Paul supporters have been joining the Republican party because that way we CAN vote for him. I have no love of the current Republican party. It is fascist in my view: overly patriotic and completely sold out. Party membership is a tool, not an allegiance. We did not get him nominated this year, but we got the most support for Ron Paul yet. Every time he runs he gets more. When open minded people hear him speak they realize that he is not a raving lunatic. The media consistently portrays him as a such, but in person he is wonderfully reasonable. People discover that he is a highly moral philosopher. He is not like most politicians. He did not expect to get elected. He ran in order to be heard. And he was, more than ever before.

I come from liberal origins, but I have supported Ron Paul for years. People don't get that either. Both the Democrats and the Republicans have been lobbied, and conquered, by multinational business interests. Our government is a corporatocracy, based on the notion that we are consumers and that an economy based on our lust for houses, cheap plastic shit and entertainment will provide great wealth for those providing it. And it has. The problem with this scenario is that it has no respect for the planet or the species on it, including homo sapiens. It doesn't matter if we live or die, thrive or suffer, as long as we pay.

Ron Paul's proposal to bring our government back down to the minimum function and stop doling out favors to ANYONE may be the only way that we derail this freight train that is our economy. Infinite growth is not sustainable. Nobody else has really faced the fact that our current approach is leading to devastation. Obama knows it but is trying to change it gradually from inside the system. It's very slow going. I don't really want all social services to be eliminated, but at this point, it's a choice between chopping those, or allowing the corruption that runs congress (and sometimes the presidency) to continue spending our tax dough. Starve a few now, or everybody later. So let's take it all away, and deal with the lack of government hand holding. If we can stop our blindly suicidal course of consumerism, painful as it might be, we might survive as a society and as a nation. This is the purpose of the rEVOLution. To save our skins against the wills of those who would gladly bury us for a profit.

I know this is simplistic. It is no more simplistic than Shirley's confusion about our apparent idiocy in not getting more votes in the runup to this election. It's not about votes in one election. It's about the long run. That's the part that can't seem to stick in the minds of the media. This is not really even about America. It's about the Long Emergency.

Comments

[d2leddy.livejournal.com]

I appreciate this, immensly. I'd like to offer an observation--though your mileage may vary. While this critique acknowledges the government/corporate overlap in a a general sense, it seems that conservatives vilify government and unions, while liberals villify corporations. While these organizations certainly have salient differences, they have something in common, hence why we call them "organizations": they are complex organizations, and by their nature lack sufficient feedback loops on the personal level so that activities, and the causes and effects of those activities can be monitored. Perhaps it's worth thinking about thinking about talking about whether complex organizations have inherently human toxic characteristics that are the "root cause" of our objections expressed politically. What's causing us to overlook the common thread I describe here is our tendency to be tribal. It is over-riding realistic observations.

[liveonearth.livejournal.com]

You are absolutely correct. I agree that we humans are fundamentally tribal, and that overextended tribal allegiance is at the root of our society-wide problems. Any org large enough to permit individual humans to evade personal responsibility has the potential to contribute to mass confusion and destructive action.

I don't mean to attack corporations in general, but rather to specify the giant multinationals that manipulate many governments, not just our own. I intend to incorporate my own business. It is indeed the size of the biz and the degree of removal from face to face honesty that allows such bad behavior.