Sanity? Civility? We All Should be Mad as Hell!

[Panaconda]

As long as Women and African-Americans were civil, humble and sane what did they get?

Nothing.

Unless you count subjugation and servitude as something. Would those in power one day have awakened one day in a particularly genial and loving mood having experienced an epiphany of sorts and said, "You are so nice and civil- and funny too- I'm going to allow you to vote, own property and while we're at it let's throw in equal pay?"

Dream on.

It took suffragettes and civil rights activists being insistent, unpleasantly arrogant, unrelenting and a willingness to risk what little they did have to attain the few freedoms that are "allowed" today.

Those who are destroying our earth and our communities at breakneck speed are as humble and caring as barracudas and don't give a shit about sanity, humor or civility.

Compromise?

Try talking compromise with a charging rhino, you'll have better luck.

Reason?

Are you fucking kidding me? Transnational corporations and their legions of lobbyists, bought-off politicians and media hacks don't give one damn about a "reasonable or civil discussion." They care about two things:

POWER & PROFIT

The only thing that will get the attention of these modern-day filthy robber barons is large-scale direct actions that bring the system to a halt.

Only when people get interested in taking back active control of the processes that rule their lives and work with each other in solidarity will things begin to change.

[Poboy]

1. Right you are.

[laughingliberal]

2. K & R nt

[KillCapitalism]

3. Rec. Damn straight!

[Starry Messenger]

4. k & r

[TheKentuckian]

5. 100% correct. Folks ultimate desire seems to be conflict avoidance not prosperity, lasting peace,

equality.

[bobbolink]

10. From where I sit, I don't see conflict avoidance. What I see is authoritarianism.

If you have enough power, you can avoid all the conflict by squashing people.

[TheKentuckian]

14. On that I was talking about a piece of the electorate on "our side".

No, the wealthy and powerful are all about shoving it down our throats.

[bobbolink]

20. I disagree. That "piece of the electorate" wants LOTS of conflict.

Just look at the list of names and invectives they like to call us.

They won't be happy until they get rid of every last one of us.

I call that "conflict".

[TheKentuckian]

39. After a fashion, I reckon. I see that as bullying and puppy kicking

Cruel spirited but not a fight. They like underhanded plots, bizarre machinations, and collusion with the enemy to win any "battle" to avoid any real conflict, especially of their ideas.

They are punks and will never stand up without a stacked deck, never.

[bobbolink]

42. You definitely have that right. Passive-aggressive to the max.

[Big Bill Jefferson]

72. Exactly

Passive-aggressive and it gets passed off as 'civil'.

[bobbolink]

73. Hey! There you are!

:hi:

In some parts of the country, it seems that passive-aggressive is the preferred method of communication. It is much more dysfunctional that just straight anger!

[Taverner]

6. No, we should be focused as hell eom

[Initech]

7. I'm definitely mad as hell.

[bobbolink]

8. And we poor people are POOR because we are so damned RUDE!

If we would be more humble, people would help us more, right?

You are so right, but there are so many now who never saw any of the civil rights actions, and haven't a clue.

:nuke:

[lib_wit_it]

64. Well. don't worry. Glen Beckkk is here to explain the civil rights thing to them.

Gee, I seem to be using a lot of :sarcasm: lately.

[katandmoon]

9. K&R

[DevonRex]

11. So women and blacks were "unpleasantly arrogant?" Bullfuckingshit.

Women and African Americans protested PEACEFULLY. It was the bigots who opposed civil rights who were NOT civil.

[bobbolink]

17. If you had been there, you would have known that's how we were SEEN, and what we were called.

[TexasObserver]

12. Disagree. Rallying against fear is good for Democrats.

The election is a few days away. Encouraging people disposed to vote Democratically is a good idea. Disdaining fear is a good thing.

There are plenty of things to be angry about, but that begs the question. The choice is Republican or Democratic for running congress. A foot dragging Democratic majority is much better than a GOP majority.

Until polls close next Tuesday, the only thing that really matters is getting out the vote of those who vote Democratic.

[truedelphi]

13. the problem is, just who should we be mad at? Most important link you'll ever go to -

Link at bottom of my rant.

A great deal of our national policy has been foisted on us by the onslaught of the acronym agencies. The G 20 (Formerly G8) IMF, World Bank, andlast but not least - the WTO.

These organizations are in charge of setting the overall agenda for the United States. And to get anywhere in terms of leadership, like the Senate or the Oval Office, you basically have to let the folks at these places realize that you are a team player.

How scary are these orgs?? (It is after all, Halloween, so I should be trying to scare someone with more than my broom and witch routine.)

According to people who have researched these agencies, these agencies were all in agreement by 1985 (probably earlier) that American jobs should be overseas. That Americans should not be producing anything here, but merely serving as debt ridden consumers.

And it doesn't end with just shipping our manufacturing and those well paying jobs overseas. Even farmers are getting the shaft - these orgs have as their goal the total importation of foodstuffs from other markets. Ever notice how hard it is to get locally grown food - unless of course you visit farmer markets over the summer?

Anyway, here is the link to the lecture one researcher presented. Iowa Public TV has kept it up and running so we can all learn how bad things are:

www.iptv.org/video/detail.cfm/3135/ittv_20081220_155

[Hardrada]

45. Very good lecture. Summarizes a lot of what I knew or suspected.

[treestar]

15. Totally wrong - those changes took place within the system

And angry people accomplished nothing. It was the dedicated people who worked in politics. Angry people undermine the cause by giving its opponents something to point at.

[Panaconda]

30. No they didn't

You have no idea what you are talking about.

For example:


‘Sit-ins’. In 1960, 4 black students asked to be served at Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, reserved for white customers only. When refused they staged a sit-in protest. By 1961, 70,000 had taken part in similar sit-ins. These protests gained publicity for the plight of blacks in the South.









Within the system huh? The system is so filthy and corrupt to suggest working within that system is like soaking your infection in dirty water in order to heal your wound.

Compare any of the above images with the passivity of yesterday's harmless parade.

[LanternWaste]

69. From where I sit, sit-ins and suffrage appear rather civil

From where I sit, sit-ins and suffrage appear rather civil-- even tame when compared to violence. But then again, I imagine we each have what we believe to be The Answer... I'll go with Gandhi's though, but thanks for your vote of violence anyway.

[Marr]

44. Bull. Shit.

People in politics responded to popular demands, when ignoring them outright ceased to be an option. That's all they ever do-- though they always take the credit.

[datasuspect]

67. revise history much?

[ipaint]

16. But the liberal class, in our age of neo-feudalism, is now powerless

"But the liberal class, in our age of neo-feudalism, is now powerless. It offers nothing but empty rhetoric. It refuses to concede that power has been wrested so efficiently from the hands of citizens by corporations that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty are irrelevant. It does not act to mitigate the suffering of tens of millions of Americans who now make up a growing and desperate permanent underclass. And the disparity between the rhetoric of liberal values and the rapacious system of inverted totalitarianism the liberal class serves makes liberal elites, including Barack Obama, a legitimate source of public ridicule. The liberal class, whether in universities, the press or the Democratic Party, insists on clinging to its privileges and comforts even if this forces it to serve as an apologist for the expanding cruelty and exploitation carried out by the corporate state."

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_world_liberal_opportunists_made_20101025/

The corporations love rallies like yesterdays. Diffuse anger, de-legitimize dissent and stroke the egos of comfortable middle class liberals.

A third of this country lives in poverty. Unemployment is rampant, homelessness is exploding, unions are useless, health care remains unavailable to increasing numbers and wars are eating our young. A rally calling for reasonableness is 3 decades too fucking late.

[Poboy]

18. ipaint- Nice post. -nt

[chidy]

25. i agree with most of your points, except this one:

we're never "powerless." like in any war, it's all about choices. do you choose to fight for what you believe in? to the bitter end?

i suppose people huddling in fear, barely hanging on to what they have gained from their experience in the economy of Old America may take comfort in a message of "can't we all just get along and go back to the 90s?" but not people who are on the front lines of today's AmerryKKKa. which is to say: queers, the poor, not white people, people with a bust that ruins their ability to get a job, the homeless, people who are smart enough to go to college but can't afford it, the under- and unemployed, people getting shot at in Af'stan for no good reason... gosh, it's a pretty long list, isn't it?

but people who have the freedom and wealth and free time to go and watch a TV show host mock false media constructs, i guess i'm less sure if they really understand what's going on. no, i don't think they do. it's so much easier to be a political moderate when one is comfortable, or desperate to remain comfortable.

anyway, my point is: sustained sit-ins. peaceful, but sustained. we've got to be camping en masse in front of places like the Fed or Faux news. as i like to say: *these* democratic leaders are mostly useless. it's time for people to recognize and understand that the people, yes, even little brown uneducated poor people, are the strength and basis of this nation's real "power." it's very energizing, too. my Civil Rights veteran mom likes to say, "and, the sex is really good. protesting isn't just right, it's also fun!"

[bobbolink]

37. Thank you for posting that. I'm going to have to agree. "Diffusing anger"...that is

right on the bullseye.

Thank you for posting this!

[Solly Mack]

52. True.

"The corporations love rallies like yesterdays. Diffuse anger, de-legitimize dissent and stroke the egos of comfortable middle class liberals."

[Naturyl]

68. Thanks for this post.

If memory serves, Orwell said "in times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

And that's what you just did.

[Scruffy1]

19. This is right on the money

And money is what it is all about. Attending feel good rallies won't change anything. Direct action gets the good.

[felix_numinous]

21. Hey I think that sanity rally

helped the people of the left with morale, we needed that first in order to get our collective voices tuned up. We are just getting started. Just my take on it:)

[leftstreet]

22. K&R

[hfojvt]

23. you undermined yourself at the end

"work with each other in solidarity"

You said that.

So how are we supposed to get Republican voters to work with us when our messages are

1. you are racists
2. you are idiots
3. you are homophobes
4. you are full of hate
5. we are better than you (which is really ironic considering our own hateful message and arrogance. Unless arrogance became a virtue when I wasn't looking (and yes I know that some people are just so darn great they cannot help it))


There are people on both sides of the aisle who say "You cannot reason with people on the other side so it is better to just mock them and call them names." And the more people who buy into that ideology, the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy until we finally can have an all out civil war and Mr. Gould can provoke half of the working class to beat the crap out of the other half while they continue to exploit and rob us.

[ipaint]

26. Republicans have been "working" with us for thirty years.

Here we are. fucked.

The liberal class in gov., universities, churches has been assimilated. They no longer fight for the poor including strong welfare benefits and public housing, for the preservation of unions and workers rights, the public commons, our public institutions such as education, universal health care... the list is endless.

EVERYTHING has been compromised beyond recognizable form. Great fucking strategy you got.

At what point are working people and the poor allowed to get angry and aggressively demand change, and when the hell is the middle class going to stand up and join in instead of playing authoritarian and characterizing the anger as name calling and impoliteness.

When half the country lives in poverty, when 100 million people have no health care???

There is NO more room for compromise, not one inch.

[Hardrada]

27. More like forty-three years. I tried to get university professors

involved in the antiwar movement in 1968 and they had no interest whatsoever save for a random remark in a lectures about America as an oligopoly. And these were self-avowed liberals too who would not come down to the front lines to help. We in SDS had no illusions about them.

[hfojvt]

28. who said anything about compromise?

The point is about civility and the ability to get more people to work on OUR side. If working people are angry, it does no good for them to divide into Jets and Sharks and start throwing invective and then fists at the other gang.

As for compromise, often that is a way to get a single positive step, to get a slice when you CANNOT get the whole loaf, or sometimes to give up a slice when somebody is trying to take the whole loaf. The alternative is a battle, where almost everybody loses.

[bobbolink]

41. You h ave characterized exactly what poor people have to take from "social workers", from those who

run homeless shelters... from all who are in authority over pooor people:

"At what point are working people and the poor allowed to get angry and aggressively demand change, and when the hell is the middle class going to stand up and join in instead of playing authoritarian and characterizing the anger as name calling and impoliteness. "

You got it in one!

:applause:

[Naturyl]

70. The middle class is gone, irreversibly.

Forget about them. They are too comfortable and too thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea of one day "achieving success" and joining the upper classes.

Nothing meaningful is going to come from the middle class anymore. That's all over with. Our hope has to come from the large segment of society that is currently marginalized and ignored - the working class and the poor.

But first, we have to extricate many of them from the manipulative clutches of Glenn Beck and the Tea Party.

[TheKentuckian]

29. They aren't going to work with us because they are racist, idiots, homophobes, full of hate and fear

and most importantly because they are preemptively greedy servants of the economic royalists.

They aren't going to stand up against the wealthy and powerful nor did their ideological forebearers going back before recorded history.

The few have always had to many and the powerless had to oppose the powerful.

The massive societal evolution you dream of is a ways off and if we are to survive to it then a few will have to stand against many.

[nashville_brook]

24. eggsactly right.

[maryf]

31. Remember Republic Windows sit in??

It worked!! anger worked, no compromise...even got the msm to write about it...

[rucky]

32. Hot Anger vs. Cold Anger (a DU blast from the past):

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x832709

[jillan]

33. You can fight for what is right without stomping people on the head.

[TBF]

36. Did the OP talk about stomping people on the head?

Marches, sit-ins, protests.

[Panaconda]

38. Who's talking about that?

Look, there's plenty of righteous anger to go around and it is valid. Let's not diminish that point. Certainly much if not most of that anger is misdirected. Let's put the focus on where it needs to be.

I can and do talk to all stripes and when the conversation is put in terms of how we are being fucked by big business and the wealthy every step of the way I rarely, almost never, have any problems getting folks to drop their petty grievances and understand such a simple truth.

It is also true that heads have mostly been stomped by the ruling class protection racket during times of protest.

[JoseGaspar]

34. Man, am I ever tired of this "Slow decline of Empire" bullshit...

If you divide income in the USA into ten tiers, each representing ten percent of the population, the tiers have been dropping off one by one since the 1970s. The lowest tier that was on the rise stagnates and starts falling and then it is time for the next. One by one, the people racing to the bottom are dizzy with the "real" stats - 20 million unemployed, 10 million houses up for foreclosure, poverty increasing faster than at any point since WW2, no job ever again for many over 50, hunger...

Meanwhile, the ever-shrinking higher tiers are baffled... "Why is everyone so upset? Can't we be civil? Aren't we all the same - Americans?"

No, No, and No... in that order.

But the whining about how "stupid" the mass of people are is the worst. Republicans/Democrats/TeaParties... They all hate the general population. "Why are you unable to appreciate the fine points of the President's policy and wait for recovery", asks the first. "Why don't you just start a business and get rich instead of asking for handouts?", wonders the second. "How come you are so BROWN?", asks the third.

What an incredible crock to call for "civility" when the lack of it is among the few real indications of what is happening "below decks". "Why" might be a far better question... but then you couldn't assume moral superiority.

If you want "civility", you have money in your pocket and an inordinate amount of time for hobbies.

[kenny blankenship]

40. +++ to this

"please starve more politely"

[Naturyl]

71. +1000

Please report to the homeless shelter in a quiet and orderly manner.

[lib_wit_it]

43. Watching the rally yesterday, my husband said it's easy to be civil when you're Jon Stewart--he may

care about the poor, oppressed, stomped upon in general, but at the end of the day, it really doesn't affect him. He' doing work he's good and an enjoys. And if he's not completely irresponsible, he's set financially for life.

I totally agree. I like Stewart. He's funny and smart, and he generally supports progressive causes, but, I think he tries too hard to find fault with our side for the sake of his own claim to "fairness and balance." I disagree that the purposely deceptive or the willfully ignorant deserve respect. It took him far too long to see McCain for what he's become. I too have wanted to ask President Obama--"Where's the effing audacity?!" But, although he does better than most, I don't know if he's ever pushed quite so hard at one of his Republicon guests as he did with Obama.

However, the thing that's really strained my agree-to-disagree respect for him is that I find it completely irrational to equate, as he has, MSNBC with Fox Noose. It is not reasonable to invariably believe the two-sides-to-every-story myth. As I frequently mention, HBO's The Wire had the best line on that:

A lie is not another side of the story. It's just a lie.

[Hissyspit]

46. "A lie is not another side of the story. It's just a lie."

[no limit]

55. So you think our side has no faults? I know for a fact MSNBC has many faults. That includes Shultz

and KO.

You might not like that, because they agree with you. But sometimes they can be just as bad as fox news is (in no way does that mean as often). And when they are just as bad as fox news Stewart points it out, as he should.

[lib_wit_it]

62. Exactly! I think "our" side has no faults. Excellent interpretation of my comments. I'm going to

spend loads more time trying to have a reasonable discussion with you.

:sarcasm:

[no limit]

65. You said: he tries too hard to find fault with our side

It's not that he tries too hard. It's that our side also has faults. And all he does it point them out. It is not his job to keep score, it's his job to point out absurd statements made by pundits no matter what side they come from.

[no limit]

54. We haven't had civility in decades.

You say income has been coming down since 1970? Well no shit, so has sanity and civility in our national discourse. Do you think that is an accident? I don't.

[TBF]

35. K&R nt

[maryf]

47. morning kick, nt

[Poboy]

61. Afternoon kick. -nt

[madokie]

48. Right on

brother or sister, right on

[Lagomorph]

49. The size of the elephant...

...requires a worldwide action network. Simultaneous direct action on four continents, preferably all at the same moment in time. That would make an impression.

[blindpig]

50. Get uppity

and never stop.
(You forgot the pro forma apology to barracudas, their behavior is natural...)

[deacon]

51. Last election "anger" was a bad thing according to the GOP. This election they are embracing it.

Ahhhhhh, the hypocrisy of it all.

[no limit]

53. The point is to get civility and ESPECIALLY sanity back in to our media. No more pundits

The people that aren't civil and aren't sane will probably never be changed. But those people are a very tiny portion of our society despite what the media wants you to believe.

[Panaconda]

58. The media isn't "ours"

It is wholly owned by The Owner Class.

You can't reform this system of which the media is only a part. And if you could you wouldn't want to.

[The Uncola]

56. Nothing short of civil...

.. disobedience will make any substantial difference, I'm convinced. Hopefully that will be minus wholesale violence, but quite honestly, I don't see how as it can be avoided. It's not just Teabaggers that are angry. These are desperate times for MANY of us and the "leadership" of both major political parties are too effen interested in holding their own personal wealth and power and not interested at all in doing a GAWDDAMN thing for those of us their fucked up "system" has failed. There is a large ugly storm brewing and I truly fear for the future of my grandkids. This nation is teetering on the edge of the abyss, the Regressives are telling us to jump and the Dems are too spineless to do a thing about it.

[DirkGently]

57. Sanity and civility aren't incompatible with courage of conviction. We can leave crazy for the RW.

[raccoon]

59. "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will."

--Frederick Douglass.


You said it! and we'll have to DEMAND a national health plan. We won't get it until we do.

[FirstTimeVoterAt37]

60. Somebody beats up a woman in front of me...

And he's walking with a limp for the rest of his life. So in that regard, I'm uncivil.

[kctim]

63. If you're fear of the 'evil' corporations

justify insane or uncivil behavior, then why doesn't the fear of 'evil' government justify insane or uncivil behavior?

Kind of hard to take back the active processes that rule you're lives when you can't agree who you should fear.

[Naturyl]

66. K&R. You're right.

And FYI for anyone who is confused - compassion and nonviolence don't mean being a spineless wimp. If anything, they mean the opposite.