Painful Choices...

Hey Everyone!

I want to discuss something that I don't think enough people are being honest about: the state of the political system in the US and how it impacts the 2020 election. Everyone seems so invested in arguing for their "team," that a lot of people are refusing to see that the lies they've been comforting themselves with are simply that, lies.

Our political system is like a broken leg. And instead of doing their job and fixing the leg, both Democrats and Republicans have spent decades arguing that the other one broke it. So, now the leg is healed, but it healed badly and the wound is septic. It reeks of and oozes corruption.

And, now, the wound has festered so badly that Donald Trump has oozed out of it, but he is just the symptom of the disease, not the disease itself. Trump is the pus leaking out of the wound. But the establishment of both major parties are the underlying infection. And, as with all illnesses, treating the symptoms might make people feel better, but it's not at all a cure.

If fact, in some instances, masking the pain of an injury is counterproductive. Pain is the body's way of sending a warning; it's the way we know we need to take action to correct a problem. If we just dull the pain but do nothing to treat the cause of it, we only make the problem worse.

And that's where we are in our political system, as well. Trump is the equivalent of opening the wound and exposing the corruption for all the world to see. He is an embodiment of the decay in our system, and he forces people to confront the ugliness and rot in our country. Biden and the Democratic leadership want us to wipe the pus off the outside the wound and cover it up, so they can continue on befouling our nation without challenge. But that won't solve the problem. The patient will still be dying.

So, what we really need to do is face the fact that we're going to have to endure some pain to heal the injury. We've ignored the disease too long, and healing it will be neither painless nor pretty. But the alternative is to allow our country to succumb to the septicemia we've been cultivating. We have two choices. We can rebreak the leg, debride the wound, flush out all the putrefaction, surgically remove the necrotic flesh, undergo an extended course of powerful antibiotics, and hope we can keep the leg. Or we can amputate. Neither option is pleasant, but one or the other needs to be chosen if we want to save ourselves.

Bernie would have been the surgical option. He would have been a slow change for the better. His administration would have gotten rid of some of the corruption, and it would have laid the groundwork for the additional surgeries we would need if the Democratic Party was to be preserved. He would have moved us in the right direction and given us a chance to salvage the leg.

What Bernie wouldn't have managed is getting everything done that needs to be done to repair the damage to our political system in general and the Democratic Party specifically, but he would have breathed new life into the party and given it a fighting chance to be a viable party going forward. The same way FDR did in the 1930s when he built enough momentum for the Democratic Party to coast off of for the last 8 or nine decades.

And, yes, it needs to be acknowledged that FDR was deeply racist, many of his policies didn't help people of color, and he put Japanese-Americans in concentration camps. So, anything FDR accomplished needs a big asterisk next to it. But the fact remains that he pulled this country out of the Great Depression and gave the Democratic Party new life.

Fortunately or unfortunately, Bernie lacks FDR's ruthless streak. This makes him a better person, but a less effective politician. He doesn't want to twist arms the way they need to be twisted to force politicians who have been bought and paid for by oligarchs and multinational corporations to start serving The People, the way they are supposed to. There would have been a lot more fighting to be done, and a lot more changes to be made after Bernie left office, and there would have been quite a lot of pain as a result of some of those changes. The process would not have been pleasant. But he still would have made progress in the right direction and at least given us a chance to save ourselves without having to resort to severing large portions of our political infrastructure.

Unfortunately, it looks like the Democratic establishment has been successful in preventing Bernie from being given the chance to save the Democratic Party from itself. The leadership is more interested in profiting from the demise of the party, and the nation, and hiding their own criminal negligence than they are in salvaging what can be saved. So, that leaves us with amputation.

Because of the destructive intransigence of the leadership of the Democratic Party, they've made the party a danger to the continued viability of the country. The corporately-owned media also has played a major part, but at least the fact that they are owned outright by the enemies of the republic isn't hidden. Unlike with the establishment of both major parties, who pretend to serve The People but really serve only their donors. But, between the efforts of the corrupt political establishment and the corporate media, we have now been brought to the point where our only remaining option, if we want to save ourselves, is to abandon any efforts to preserve any part of that establishment and, instead, wipe the slate clean and start anew.

If we're to have any hope at a future for our country and our species, we must amputate our gangrenous leg by tossing out the duopoly that currently has our political system in a stranglehold. And the only way to do that is to build new political parties that will actually represent The People. We do that by voting for, volunteering for, and donating to those parties until they grow large enough and strong enough to fill the vacuum left by the amputation of the old parties and support our crippled nation.

Yes, I realize that the prevailing wisdom is that minority parties don't have a legitimate place in US politics, but political parties have fallen and been replaced in this country before. And the prevailing wisdom is also that one does not lop off body parts. But when the parts in question are beyond saving and, worse, a threat to the continued life of the body politic, what goes generally ceases to apply, and it becomes necessary to take drastic measures.

As for when we should start this process, as always with infections, the sooner the treatment is started, the better the chance is of saving the patient. And considering the two rancid pustules we have to choose from in the upcoming presidential election, there's certainly nothing to be lost by starting now.

Peace!