Changes for the better will necessarily be extreme. If that weren't the case, we would have found a way to accomplish them already. Your "conservative" aunt won't like the changes we need any more than your "liberal" uncle will. News media firms are owned by people who like and propagandize in favor of the current system. It isn't important that all Americans like each other. In our current situation, 95% of Americans share certain interests even though they are culturally opposed. They could work together without liking each other.
After annoying powerful interests for decades, Martin Luther King Jr. finally tried to unite poor blacks with poor whites, not because they liked each other but because they shared common interests. He was assassinated within five months. TPTB can abide less racism, but not more class solidarity.
> Changes for the better will necessarily be extreme.
It’s long been my loosely held belief that _extreme_ change to a political system will _necessarily_ harm the average citizen. I think history has shown that to be true fairly consistently.
sometimes the short term harm inflicted on a few is worth the benefits it will bring society in the long term
"Our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break?"
But who among us has the moral authority to claim which harm is okay on which few? I remain convinced that the path to sustainable progress does not lie in the direction of extremes. Push too hard too fast, and you both amplify your opposition, and risk pushing in the wrong direction.
But the great thing is we can all disagree on that, and still agree to work together where we can.
We are constantly gaslit by the war media, so there is a difference between perception and reality. It would not be extreme in any real sense to stop fighting all or even some of our stupid murderous wars. It wouldn't be difficult; we could just... stop. Yet every time there is a suggestion to stop antagonizing Russia or China, or stop attempting to depose every Latin American leader who isn't a right-wing hardliner, or relax the economic sanctions imposed on a third of humanity, or just accept that Near Eastern nations are going to build the pipelines they choose to build where they choose to build them, we are subjected to intense campaigns of sky-is-falling fear-the-brown-people bullshit.
It would not be extreme in any real sense to give labor unions more power, or to imprison fewer people, or to end drug prohibition, or to stop brutalizing undocumented immigrants, or to have less racism enforced by our bureaucracies, or to reign in abusive social media firms, or to provide adequate health care to everyone. All of these things have already been done in particular states and municipalities. Large numbers of Americans already support these things. Even so, armies of Chickens Little lie in wait to assail those who reasonably suggest further improvements.
We got in this position by gradual "sustainable" steps. Shit runs downhill. If everything continues to change in the way it has changed already, in ten years we'll be even further downhill. The 1960s' civil rights movement wasn't gradual accommodation. Old white people were angered all over the nation. That's why it led to genuine improvements. As Lenin said, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself.
The 1960s' civil rights movement wasn't gradual accommodation.
And this and a multitude of other things drove some to double down on Confederate culture and eventually led to January 6th. The US abounds with examples of blowback at home and worldwide. That needs to be taken into account somehow in any future strategy for improvement. Giving the best and least committed of your opposition some dignity should make it easier to convince them to work with you to restore the much larger gap in dignity for others, and reduce the blowback.
Do you think that it is possible to reason with every person? Do you think that if someone simply sat down with every Jim Crow Southerner and explained nicely that black people deserve rights that would have solved the civil rights issues of the 60s?
> His efforts to improve race relations, in which as an African-American he engaged with members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), convinced Klansmen to leave and denounce the KKK.
Absolutely, many people can be convinced and reasoned with, I don't dispute that. What I'm saying is that there are people who are prejudiced to such an extent that there is no reasoning with them. You have never addressed how we deal with that problem. There are people like this in society at large and there are people like this in positions of power in government and in the private sector. Both problems need to be addressed in some way, because the people in government and the private sector derive power from the people in society who support them and we can't tolerate this in a civil society. I don't know what order to solve them in and perhaps solving one would solve the other, but it's a problem that prevents us from working together in a more fundamental way as a society. Ignoring it is not an option.
I actually talked to him once, his strategy isnt to approach kkk members to convince them to leave, but to let members who are questioning approach him.
He also told me its just as important to disrupt their organizing and recruiting efforts to stop new people from joining
I don't think reasonable people can consider racism a reaction to the civil rights movement that happened in 1960s. Anti-black racism was fostered in what became USA from 17thC, in order to justify slavery. It has been somewhat lessened of late, but if it didn't exist in 1960 there would have been no reason for a civil rights movement. This is like blaming the Native American genocide on recent complaints about it from Native Americans.
So, it's foolish to blame "the events of 1/6" on civil rights organizers. It's also foolish to blame the events on racism. Sure, there were racists involved, but as mentioned above we have had racists in USA for a long time. If they really wanted to have a racist insurrection, they probably would have done it on the occasion of the election of an actual black man, instead of that of an ancient white man whose 93-year record in public office clearly documents that he is also a racist. The occupy-capitol people foolishly identify with a politician whose speech and policies are racist, and that is certainly a large part of his appeal to them. Of course if black people had done similar things they would have been gunned down. Still, the occupy-capitol people never would have turned to Trump if any "real" politician had had a sensible message with respect to national conditions. To name a single example among many, wages have been stagnant since 1971. [0] That's longer than most Americans have been alive. Why doesn't any non-racist politician pretend to care about that?
After annoying powerful interests for decades, Martin Luther King Jr. finally tried to unite poor blacks with poor whites, not because they liked each other but because they shared common interests. He was assassinated within five months. TPTB can abide less racism, but not more class solidarity.