Who Will Be the Hero
Image: Jessica Felicio
There are a lot of accusatory tones when it comes to people looking for those working against the current regime occupying the U.S. government.
The expectations put on individuals under authoritarian regimes work in favor of that regime. We keep trying to individual responsibility ourselves out of things that are operating on far-reaching systemic levels. We are going to have to reckon with the fact that the systems that we live under are ripe to be taken over by people who have the resources and the desire to do it. The vast majority of what we think are absolutes under democracy are actually voluntary and the people most in adherence are those with the least power in it.
I have watched for a year as people have finger pointed, judged, accused, and all other levels of blame for what is happening in this country. From talking about who voted for whom to looking at how people are continuing to engage, people seem to have more vitriol for the general public than the specific people responsible for the actions and policies which are making everything worse.
Some guy from the UK points up his nose to ask what Americans are doing as if the British government is any better. People in France tsk tsking as if we don’t all have the same problems in different languages. The British will call Americans unintelligent while falling for the same propaganda in a different accent. The same greed and sadism plague the world, not just the United States. When the major governing bodies continue to put out useless orders and warrants that change nothing. When politicians continue to find scapegoats instead of solutions. When people have been out in the streets for years at this point for a myriad of reasons and still need to be out there, we have to re-evaluate what our thinking is when it comes to all of this.
Image: Jonathan Cooper
We have all been duped into believing that the power lies elsewhere. It is our lives and many of us will claim to be free while standing around waiting to see what other people are going to do for our freedoms. Exercising our freedom does not mean going to the polls. It does not mean being able to get on social media. It does not mean that we are not the direct targets of the attacks at the moment. Freedom is our ability to live the lives that we long for so long as we are not materially harming others. That is freedom. It is what we say it is, not what other people define it as. We are not free because we do not have anybody claiming direct ownership of us. We are not free because we get paid (however little) for our work. We are free because we are able to determine our own fate through our own belief systems, hard work, and relationships to the people around us. Our bar for freedom is low and we continue to allow people who have it to tell us we should just be grateful to be alive.
A lot of work has been done to immobilize us. The methods that we have been using to build movements have become fractured by the takeover of most of our media. From TV networks to social media apps, most of the tools that we have to build a movement with are being intentionally undermined. People continue to look for people in the streets in spite of the fact that people have been out in the streets for one reason or another for years. We saw what happened when people took to the streets for justice for George Floyd. We saw what happened when people took to the streets to protest for better wages and work conditions. Yet people are still out there in spite of the blind eye of mainstream media. People have had their lives ruined speaking against hatred and murder. People have been tried for RICO cases for protesting cop cities. We act as if the path is clear and as if we are dealing with a ruling class that has ears to hear about our suffering. Yes, we could shut this all down. Also, we can have our lives further ruined and compromised in both covert and glaring ways. People know this. The same government criminalizing people in order to try to conquer their countries are criminalizing the people under their direct jurisdiction. There is no misunderstanding. The powers that be know exactly what they are doing. With this realization we look at what is really necessary to push forward.
We have dealt with a pandemic, a worsening economy, a stingy government, and various movements of hate continuously for years. We are only at the beginning. What may have been a paragraph or a chapter in our history books took years to accomplish. It took 3 years and over a thousand exhibits to get Brown v. Education passed and then another few decades to actually get it implemented. No, the Civil Rights Movement was not just actions that took place in the 1950s and 60s. It took over 200 years for the enslaved to fight to have their freedom recognized. The Holocaust, at its height, went on for 4 years (not including the century before where European Jews were persecuted through pogroms). Apartheid went on from 1948 until 1994. These things do not start and stop instantly. It takes far more than a few actions or a few weeks to get these things accomplished. It takes a steady and unrelenting push to upend these systems, just like it took a steady and unrelenting push to implement them in the first place.
The United States of America has been doing the same things to different groups of people at home and around the world since its inception. Each victory of a movement was a blow, but not an end to the systems that enable the horrors that make these movements necessary. Many of the emblems of democracy that we tote for the U.S. are actually signs of the opposite. It is not a sign of democracy that people keep winning rights in the United States. It is a sign of the opposite that it is continuously necessary to fight.