For a short time in the late 60s I was heading toward being politically radically left. I’d participated in several anti-Vietnam War rallies and marches and was a member of the Southern Methodist University (SMU) Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organization (although I was not an SMU student). I’m not ashamed of any of that and, as far as it went, I was on the right side of history and morality. The downtown marches were usually ended by the marchers being beaten by cops and rednecks. After one of those episodes, I was sitting in the downtown El Centro College student cafeteria, watching the detritus and fallout from the chaos outside. I’d been hit a few times, mostly by thrown beer bottles and cans, and glancing blows from enraged and terrified cops’ nightsticks, but I was young and indestructible and, mostly, unharmed if disappointed. Up to late-1968, I’d been under the delusion that my fellow US citizens were decent people who were just misled by bad information. The violent and irrational opposition to Vietnam War protests were eye-opening and I would never be that optimistic again.
As I was watching the chaos, another young man I knew from the SDS meetings sat down beside me and pointed to an armed and armored cop on the sidewalk a few feet from our vantage point and said, “I can’t wait till we’re in charge and they have to be afraid of us.” In that moment, I realized that the difference between the far left and the far right was insignificant. 50 years late, when I expressed that view to a good friend, his response was, “The left isn’t usually as violent or destructive, don’t you think?” We ended our discussion there, but I think it’s just a matter of degree rather than a real difference. Right or left, if you go far enough in either direction you end up circling back to the same practical point: jokers on the left and clowns on the right, both meeting at the same point of stupidity.
In the last 40 years, I’ve been disappointed by folks I once thought were on the side of the Martin Luther King’s hope, quoted often by President Barak Obama, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." After 2016, I have given up entirely on what I would define as the “far left,” which is not at all the people Trump and the fascist far-right would label “far left.” They do not, in any way, understand the concept of baby steps, which is how all change happens. They want it now and on their terms, just like their fellow-nutjobs on the far right.
Irrationality and magical thinking comes at us from the far, nutty ends of both sides. Damage-wise, I don’t see enough difference between the two to make it worth my time to parse out the left-right advantages. They both work hard to sow discord, disbelief, and distrust in our democratic institutions (media, education, government, and community) and neither offer anything constructive to take their places. Thanks to both, we are now at a point in the decay of the American Empire where we are on the cusp of destabilizing the entire human world for the interest of argument. I don’t see an easy way out of this mess. In fact, the more I learn about the plans of the 2025 Trump Administration, the more I expect the future to be bleak.
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