Defeating the old systems isn’t enough. We need to reconcile with our past involvement in them. To make amends for our participation in a social pathology that’s slaughtered millions in the global south, deprived people of basic needs while telling them they deserve it, incarcerated people and shot them on the streets for their skin color, and ravaged our planet in ways that won’t be reversed for millions of years. We’ve all in some way been part of this, and we all should to take part in that healing process. But Clinton Democrats need this reconciliation especially.
I’m not talking about emails, or the Democratic primary, or anything from that distant series of election events which got us to this state. I’m talking about how horrific acts have been committed, and how Democratic loyalists have been complicit in them. I read the reports of the mass human dismemberment and death as Obama’s military dropped an average of three bombs every hour in 2016 alone. I saw the pictures of the babies that have
been born horribly disfigured from the depleted uranium that Obama and his secretary of state Hillary Clinton rained onto mideastern countries. I’ve learned about the record seven wars and drone war expansions that were carried out under the last administration, the million or so deaths that happened from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which Democrats helped start, the incomprehensible destruction the neocons are threatening to create right now by instigating conflict with Russia.
And I’ve seen you, Clinton Democrats, the supporters of those neocons, not take responsibility for this. I’ve seen you deny any of those things happened. I’ve seen you deflect from them by turning the conversation to things like Bernie Sanders’ tax returns. I’ve seen you try to excuse it through statements like “we’re always at war, what’s one more?” and “‘interventionism’ is just a word.” A lot of people have suffered and died from what that word means, and those people deserve a healing for what’s been done.
That felt good to say. But what do I mean by a healing, and what good would it do in a moment like this? Both parties are trying to lie us into regime change wars with Russia, Syria, North Korea, and possibly Iran and Venezuela as well. The conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen have been greatly expanded this year, with Trump already dropping almost more bombs than Obama did in 2016. This is resulting in attempts to cut the social safety net to near nonexistence so that the wars can be paid for, and growth for the fossil fuel industry when we have an estimated three years to safely bring down carbon emissions. Action to end perpetual war and the neoliberal order it enforces is needed now. And the way we bring about the healing process I’m talking about correlates with how we take that action.
We’ll achieve this healing-by which I mean a collective effort, on the part of Clinton Democrats and all other Americans, to reckon with the atrocities we’ve committed as a nation-by creating a society based on compassion and social awareness. By getting rid of the profit-worshipping, violence-glorifying, blindly tribalist old systems that get people to support horrific acts in the ways I mentioned. When the system goes, the mentalities that support the system will go with it.
We can make it go by looking the Deep State in the face as tries to consume us in its current spasm of deceptions and totalitarian takeovers, and unflinchingly striking a death blow to it. By speaking the truth about its propaganda and organizing to stop its goals till the corporations have their power taken away, there’s no longer a surveillance or police state, and things like war for profit are in the past. In that ecologically sustainable, socially just, non-imperialist social democracy, the societal mistakes of the previous era will all become open to learning about and studying. And if not all the current participants in those mistakes experience a sense of remorse and then emotional growth in that coming era, their children will.
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