These Are My Pet Peeves

My pet peeves include:

•  False dichotomies: The idea, for example, that everyone can be broken into one of two categories, liberal or conservative, and placed somewhere on the big stick of socio-political allegiances.
•  False equivalencies: Usually an extension of the first idea. The most common and perplexing example being something like, "Fox News is no worse than Rachel Maddow."
•  False assumptions and groupings: In my circles, it most often sounds like, "All conservatives/tea------rs/Republicans say/believe/think the same about /minorities." Experience proves, again and again, that this isn't true - even if it's true in that person's experience.
•  Other forms of Broderism: Such as using a rare example to show that "the other side" is likewise guilty

Of course, the reality is that I need to get over the peeved part of that, as well as the pet part. There isn't enough time or energy in the universe and there are other, more grave injustices to struggle against. Otoh, though, I realize that ours is not a fight of flesh and blood, but of powers, principalities, and psycho-socio captivity as well. The battle of freedom is not to be waged, as I constantly note here and on Facebook, on just one level - just as we cannot rely solely on private charity or on governmental action to fight poverty. And I also realize that not everybody thinks deeply about what divides and unites us (did I just hint that I think deeply? Do I? You'll never know...) So I want to at least have something to point to next time someone picks on my nerves over the intertubes.

And this is the message:

We're all a lot more complex than that. We truly are. Maybe we should ask more questions and surround ourselves with more people we can disagree with intelligently, capably, and agreeably.*

As you can tell, I'm mad as a hatter!

Now on to the reasons I wrote that qualifying intro. The current crop of specific pet peeves.

I'm tired of the Occupy Movement being confused for partisan politics. As in, I'm tired of it being confused as an arm of the Democratic Party by jealous-sounding conservatives. Likewise, I'm tired of the Democratic Party trying to co-opt the movement. I'm tired of their lame Occupy the Vote campaign. The DP is part of the two party system that has been corrupted and corrupts completely through its oligarchal/corporatocracy factions. They are not listening to the American people and will not listen to us until they loosen the bonds of the Military/Prison/Educational Industrial Complexes as well as Big Oil/Coal/Pharma/Banks. And they will not do that as long as the DNC is complicit in taking their donations, nqa. Chase Bank wants to make sure its investment pays off and Boeing and Caterpillar want to make sure that they stay in good business. The OWS is about the process of consensus-building democracy. As in, everybody gets involved, every person has a voice. Human people, that is.

I'm tired of baseless allegations being leveled at every forward-thinking person or organization. Worse, I'm tired of Americans buying into the discreditations as if those should stop the message. And while we're speaking of the message, I'm thoroughly unimpressed with white paleo-conservatives ability to take a five second clip of one of Dr. King's many fine speeches to try to prove their ignorant, backwards, and regressive point. If minorities WERE to be chosen based on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, then jails would be empty of them and universities would be full of them! Besides, the same thugs who try to praise King now, removed by amnesia as they are, were defaming him for sleeping with white women and for being a Marxist when it suited their purposes. Another pretty blatant lie that suits the paleoconservatives is to plant allegations of rape on progressive and subversive leaders. All allegations should, of course, be taken seriously. But these same dittoheaded d---hebags only care about the accusation when it's tossed at men behind the Black Panthers, WikiLeaks, or now Occupy Wall Street. Men who were very likely set up by the powers they are trying to challenge. These Glenn Becks, Rush Limbaughs, Michael Savages, and J Edgar Hoovers don't care about women protection when it's the military or military contractors being accused of sexual assault or rape and then locking up the victim for days on end in a janitor's closet...

I'm tired of being told by my good friends that voting for a third party is not just throwing my vote away and giving it to the GOP. That's foolish and worse, bad math. Of course, I'm also tired of those who say that voting for ANYONE is preferable to voting for Obama. Seriously?? There is a distinction between the two evils. I will not waste my time campaigning for the Dems, but I sure won't stand idly by if someone compares Obama to any neo-con. Seriously, I love my country too much to hand it over to another John McCain or George W Bush (fortunately, I live in a state where Obama's vote is all but guaranteed).

I'm tired of cynicism, often from my closer friends, my irl friends. This is the affliction of knowing something must change, that something needs to change, of maybe even agreeing about a course of action but then... Phfeweeeewww... Their sickness lets out all of the air. They are generally smart enough to know that nothing worth changing will changith ease and overnight. They understand that the future isn't full of non-allergenic puppies and rainbow-riding unicorns. But they lack long-term prophetic vision.

And without vision, the people perish.

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*Like much else in my blog nowadays, this is as much directed at myself as at anybody else, if not more so.