On Internal Exile

...and on finally (potentially) belonging in my own damned country...


“You do not become a "dissident" just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. “--Václav Havel: The Power of the Powerless



This:



I have never, in my lifetime(I'm 46) felt like I belonged.
I understand that a lot of this is due to where and when and how I came of age, and to my own weirdness...made more acute by that where and when and how....
I am allergic to Reagan's America, it turns out.(....or, perhaps I am the allergen, and it is allergic to me...)
I cannot kiss the boss' ass, nor am I near Sociopathic enough to “make it” in business, as currently configured.
For all my adult life, I've suspected(then become convinced) that the game was rigged...that the water we swim in had been poisoned...but that noticing that poisoning--and worse, pointing it out--.was arguably the most grievous of sins.
We were, instead, supposed to blame the Scapegoat Du Jour...and if none was near enough to hand, to blame ourselves...Bootstraps, baby!
God smiles on the Rich, you know...and they are Rich because they are more moral than you, little fish...more worthy...
Money, under this paradigm, is the sole metric of personal worth.
Nothing else matters.

Bernie is the expression of the rejection of this paradigm.

At long last, here's a Presidential Candidate who is saying...”Yes...the water is poisoned, the game is rigged...and you didn't poison or rig it”.


http://quietmike.org/2016/01/26/loud-republicans-quiet-democrats/

http://quietmike.org/2016/02/03/what-democrats-learned-from-the-iowa-caucus/


But here's Hillary....”let us continue to nibble around the edges...filter a tiny fraction of the water we swim in...while the Big Fish(now devolved into an all encompassing Algal Mat) poisons even more of it, by leaps and bounds.”
She says, “we concede...we'll just hafta make do with the rigged game, and the poisoners unbound, and the Hidden Aristocracy who really runs the show....we'll muddle through with all that as a Given...”
Is it any wonder that so many folks my age and younger are more fired up than they've been since the 70's...prior to the Reagan Counterrevolution?


Of course, one old Socialist does not a Revolution make:
http://weeklysift.com/2016/02/08/say-you-want-a-revolution/






...But it's a start...and it's certainly pretty cool to hear the same sort of shit I've been saying all these years on the evening news.