Good morning world! I have recently recommitted to writing a few minutes each morning, but my dogs are staring me down, so I’d best keep this short! I want to at least put my foot in the door of the topic of ‘extremism.’ And return later, because regardless of anything else, dogs must be walked… 🙂
Ok, much later, here I am, back, after two awesome dogwalks…
I’ve been reflecting on the topic of ‘political extremism’ lately, and have encountered some major blind spots within my own mind, some willful ignorance. I know I’m not alone in reflecting on the protests, and the groupthink that has sprung up around it. But I feel a civic duty to join in the discussion… although I don’t feel particularly well-versed or thoroughly educated on political ideologies, I feel I may have a bit of a unique viewpoint because of the suddenness in which I am shifting my ideologies, or gaining clarity. Please consider the following writing as an exploration, an attempt to get a foothold, and in no ways a promotion of any viewpoint…
It was a very rainy day, and the protests took place downtown. It was a rattended got caught in the crossfire between joyous rioters and looters, and the police herding us here and there. I got stuck after curfew downto and saw these people roaming the streets taking wild swings at windows, pouring into stores to steal stuff…
Sometimes a schism will cause a mental shift to occur that is quite jarring, and I think this has happened to me… it’s been extremely unsettling to swing directly from fear of the extreme right to fear of the extreme left in the matter of weeks… especially when I’ve stayed on one political side my entire life… have I been totally close-minded until now, or has the far-left dramatically changed? And is the media, on both sides, providing such a false narrative that no one has any idea what is really going on, among most people? And another thing, how can both extreme views so thoroughly ignore the rest of the world outside the little bubble that is the American experiment? Maybe I’m making too much of these clashes. The lack of accountability or accurate media depiction of Seattle’s recent CHOP/CHaZ experiment really set the alarm bells off in my head, and made me realize I am going to need to dig deeper to get to the truth of things…
My entire life I’ve thoroughly identified as a liberal. But immediately after attending the George Floyd protests, I realized something else was going on, something that had missed my radar. And that day, the mental ideological ground started shifting underneath me…
It was a very rainy day, and the protests took place downtown. I got caught in the crossfire between joyous rioters and looters, and the police herding us here and there. I got stuck after curfew downto and saw these people roaming the streets taking wild swings at windows, pouring into stores to steal stuff…
I will say that it is rather crazy making that these protests have probably caused more than one of us to swing from the fear of getting crushed under the weight of constant threats of heavy-handed ‘law and order’ exacted upon the liberals, to fear of an all-out chaotic breakdown of society, a ‘smash the state’ in the name of liberalism.
Has the far left considered how hard it will be to ‘rebuild society’ from the ground up, that tearing down the solid structure we do have will take centuries to rebuild?
Has the far right considered the damage caused by their fearless leader and current President? Someone who has systematically used Twitter to create a constant barrage of cognitive dissonance? It’s no surprise that the far left, as wrong as I hope this viewpoint is, to believe that there is no solid ground… Trump’s Twitters leave everyone feeling that there is no one at the helm other than a facsimile to a bored defiant teenager trying to pass the time during detention by secretly sending ridiculous, insensitive and thoughtless notes… For almost four years straight…everyone has been under psychological attack, suffering psychological Stockholm syndrome, and that includes most Republicans, forced into the role of constant apologists…
A nagging voice has been getting louder and louder forcing me to dramatically change my political ideologies… I’m really scared of all this escalating violence, and it is extremely annoying to not have a side I can be on. If civil war breaks out, I will not have the privilege of dying for something I believe in. I won’t have a side to advocate for… yet I don’t really quite have the words yet to describe how I feel, that the extreme left is taking us to a dark place, without any real agenda, and it is forcing the extreme right to match with equal darkness… the CHAZ/CHOP social experiment was ill-conceived, threatened the safety of others, and was immature and thoughtless toward the liberal cause… especially considering the upcoming election.
Tales from the Little Shed 