The entire Western world is being overrun by fascism and we in the eye of the storm are still deluding ourselves into believing that it's a time of peace.
We need to abandon our hobbies, our leisure, our luxuries, and stand up against fascism. We need to do everything in our power to put the safeguards in place that prevent this world from going to hell just like it did less than a hundred years ago. The power-hungry are not sitting back and enjoying the view, they are accumulating wealth and power so that it becomes impossible to challenge their autocracy. We must create a power of our own - a power of the people, a power of ethics, a power of justice - and reclaim our world for all those victims of capitalism and oligarchy.
I can't in good conscience sit back and focus on my happiness when I have no guarantee that 3 million of my fellow Americans will be robbed of their homes and "deported", likely held for unspecified duration in concentration camps. I'm not about to let an ethnic cleansing breeze by while I play video games or watch anime. Trust me, there's little more I'd like to do than escape into fiction and art, but I am sick and tired of the onslaught of evil that parades as the will of the people and poisons our sense of normalcy. We know better. We can do better.
We must organize, and it must be all of us. We must come together in the name of human dignity and compassion. We must protect the weakest among us, and we must realize our immense strength. If we do not organize, we are not strong. If we organize, we are stronger than any force on the planet. We must create universal cultural support for peace and harmony that capitalizes on all the mighty drives of human nature, not just a few bourgeois pleasant feelings. We must create solidarity between the working class, the average person, the homeless, the middle class, the military, the academics, the people of color, the allies, the queers, the immigrants, the Christians, and the rest of the world. Our country's leaders have lied to the ignorant among us to serve a selfish, privileged few. They are pitting the weak against the weak in an attempt to weaken us all even further. This weakening must be resolved so that we can claim, for the first time in history, country-wide solidarity.
White rural America has been sold racism as a sugar pill for their economic hardship. They will be given meager stimulus as a means to keep them loyal, in the form of slave labor and prison jobs at rurally located concentration camps, just like with the prison system today. We must promise them more. We have to give them the justice that, as human beings, they deserve, and that must be conditional on empathy for those of our nation who are already marginalized by a cruel system of inhumane immigration policy. Four year-olds are expected to provide their own legal defense in immigration court. What kind of monstrosity is this country that doesn't recognize its unending cruelty? What kind of denial is it that allows people to ignore the suffering they are partaking in? At what point does this slow march of power concentration end in total, absolute godhood for a handful of uberwealthy leaders?
Have you ever read a dystopian novel and wondered why people don't fight back? Have you ever read about a tragedy in history and wondered how people neglected to act preventatively? We are already living in a dystopia. There are surely great evils on the horizon, but we need not wait - we are already in the belly of the beast. We are already living among great tragedies. And it is time that we organize. We must reject placebos. We must stop trying to survive on hope alone. We must plan. We must create social structures that give the people power. We must accumulate and intelligently use wealth. We must reclaim the government as our own. And all of this must be done legally and peacefully, because although we have great power, a great many could be made to suffer terribly through retribution and reactionary violence at the hands of our oligarchs.
Do not give up hope, but do not misplace it either. Put your hope in courage, in creative ingenuity, in organization, and in action. Put your hope not in evil people's benevolence, but in good people's potential. Do not remain merely proud of what we have accomplished, but be fervently proud of what we can do when we work together. Dream of what our society could look like if we, and not our rulers, living in their big city penthouses, chose what it looked like.
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