I’m Ashamed to Be an American

Weapons! Not food! Not homes! Not shoes! Not need! Just feed the war cannibal animal! I walk to the corner to the rubble that used to be a library! Line up to the mind cemetery now! What we don’t know keeps the contracts alive and moving! They don’t gotta burn books! They remove ‘em! While arms warehouses fill as quick as the cells! Rally ‘round the family, pocket full of shells!- Rage Against the Machine

You know the scene at the end of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, where the Mayans see the Spanish ships bearing down on their shores and immediately realize that not only is their old way of life coming to an end, but something much worse is coming along to replace it? I felt an inkling of that feeling when Donald J. Trump first sullied the Oval Office with his presence, but now that he’s somehow managed to win a second term (as of this writing, at least), that feeling has increased a thousandfold.

Maybe it’s a bit presumptuous to compare Agent Orange Round Two with the mass genocide of an Indigenous people, especially considering I’m a white man living in the 21st century (also, maybe it’s in poor taste considering Gibson’s… controversies). Still, though, we all feel it, right? That overwhelming sense of dread and terror now that that…thing now has had practice with fucking up the processes of the US government and is now prepared to wreak ten times as much havoc? It’s hard not to panic a little bit, knowing all the people who Velveeta Voldemort and his enablers will hurt.

I fear for all the immigrant families that will be torn apart because of his draconian immigration and deportation policies.

I fear for the transgender community (and, by extension, the rest of the queer community) as far-right politicians continue their campaign of cultural genocide against them in their psychopathic efforts to banish trans people from public life.

I fear for the women and girls who will be (and already have been) hurt or even killed by cruel abortion restrictions.

I fear for people of color all across the country who will likely be extrajudicially murdered by trigger-happy police officers who will be celebrated by the Republican establishment for their “heroism.”

I fear for the people of the Global South (be they from Palestine, Sudan, Congo, etc.) who will continue to suffer from the rapacious greed of multinational corporations and the military-industrial complex.

I fear for the wildlife and ecosystems we will inevitably lose due to pollution and global warming as we continue to sacrifice them on the altar of Big Oil and thus continue to run out of time to avoid their worst effects.

Above all else, though, I fear that the very concept of democracy itself may not survive another four years of his mayhem.

I imagine that doomers everywhere are repeating similar words to what I’ve just said here, arguing that it is proof positive that humanity is doomed as a species, especially with anthropogenic climate change seeming to get worse and worse by the day.

At the same time, though, I can’t help but imagine that at some point within the next four years, someone in the second Trump administration may end up repeating the words that Isoroku Yamamoto, Marshal Admiral of the Japanese Navy, is reputed to have spoken after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor: “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

After all the protests we saw across the country in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the over 1.2 million American citizens we lost because of Trump’s negligence during the COVID pandemic, I can’t imagine that anyone who stands to lose something because of these capitalist vipers in the halls of Congress will take what they’ve got in store lying down. Many of us see the institutions that were supposed to protect us being slowly eroded to preserve Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos’ stock portfolios and the military’s annual $800 billion budgets. Many of us also see how the Democratic Party has refused to properly stand up to the increasingly fascist Republican Party because they’ve found a status quo that works for them, and they’re going to stick with it come hell or high water, no matter how many Palestinian babies have to die for it to happen.

Never mind that that status quo is basically the same neoliberal trickle-down economics model that Ronald Reagan introduced in the 1980s, which is widely agreed nowadays to have as much basis in reality as the lost continent of Atlantis.

We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch! We had unions! We had debt-free colleges! We had a high marginal taxes on billionaires! We had everything we needed, and it all ran like clockwork! You could have shut your mouth and let workers make as much money as they ever needed! But no! You just had to blow it up! You, and your pride and your ego! You just had to be a corporate bootlicking Jesus freak! If you’d done your job and known your place, we’d all be fine right now!

It’s become abundantly clear that the state won’t give us what we need to survive, so we must take it for ourselves. We need to do what we can to slow down capitalism’s march of destruction and eventually stop it in its tracks once and for all.

“But Preston,” I hear you whine across your keyboards, “don’t you realize that the only alternative to capitalism is socialism?! That means the government makes all decisions about your healthcare, and you have to share your house and your toothbrush because no more private property, you libtard soyboy cuck!”

Maybe that stuff counts as private property under the capitalist definition (property not directly owned by the government). Socialists going all the way back to Karl Marx, on the other hand, argue that private property is more properly defined as property that generates capital for the owner without said owner having to perform any physical labor. This can encompass anything leftist philosophy describes as the “means of production,” such as factories, mines, dams, and other similar infrastructure. Things like toothbrushes, houses, cars, and clothes, on the other hand, fall under the category of “personal property,” which the government cannot interfere with your use of (unless, of course, you’re renting your house to a landlord, which would make it private property. Us leftists don’t like landlords very much).

“But communism killed 100 million people!” you continue to whine. “That’s way more people than Hitler! How is that better than capitalism?!” I already went over this in greater detail in a previous article discussing Marxism-Leninism, which is what most 20th-century socialist governments (the Soviet Union, Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, and many others) are based on. Leaving aside that the 100 million statistic introduced by 1997’s The Black Book of Communism has been widely disputed (including by three of the book’s own coauthors), many studies of worldwide rates of death by hunger, curable diseases, and lack of access to drinkable water caused by a lack of equitable distribution regularly crosses 100 million every five years.

In all honesty, though, this may be an underestimate. More recent estimates suggest that 9 million people die from hunger alone every year.

And even if the “100 million people killed by communism” figure was genuine, that still wouldn’t change the fact that fascism broadly and Naziism specifically is inherently an exclusionist and eliminationist viewpoint, something that communism, even at its worst, was not. Quite the opposite, in fact. Contrary to common conservative claims that socialism’s end goal is to subjugate all individual citizens to government control, with some (like my own father) going as far as to argue that they want a one-world government, the real endgame of socialism is a classless, moneyless society where workers own the means of production. To put it more simply, socialists think the workplace should be owned collectively by all its employees rather than by a boss, CEO, or board of directors and that state governments should be abolished in favor of small, self-governing communities or communes.

Granted, different types of socialists disagree on how we’re supposed to get there. Statist socialists, including Marxist-Leninists and Maoists, argue that a vanguard party and a centralized government are necessary to achieve a “withering away of the state.” Libertarian socialists, also commonly known as anarchists, argue that any socialist state will inevitably entrench itself just as thoroughly as a capitalist one and that it’s better to just quit the state cold turkey. My own personal views, which I’ve written another article about, fall closest to anarcho-communism, as theorized by Peter Kropotkin.

Maybe that’s why I’m still optimistic about the future despite everything going on right now, even as I continue to fight back waves of anxiety-induced nausea. I know there is a better way forward for all of us, despite forty years of post-Cold War propaganda insisting that “there is no alternative.” While there may be depressingly few in America today who realize this, that’s no excuse for us not to go out and spread the word.

I want to participate in this reeducation, but I first have to find a way out of my parent’s house, where I’ve been holed up like a hikikomori since I graduated college six years ago. I plan to be as annoying as possible this coming new year about getting a driver’s license so I can seek out the nearest DSA meeting or mutual aid network and then find out where I’m going from there. Sure, my parents may protest, but I’m almost thirty years old. What can they do, ground me? And yes, maybe adding another gas-guzzling car to the road isn’t great, given the ongoing climate disaster, but do you have any better ideas for getting me out of the house? Especially after Big Oil made us defund public transportation? I thought not.

True, there are going to be massive growing pains for someone as autistic as I am, but I know that sitting alone in my house with family members I can’t count on as political allies is not good for my mental health. They won’t help my generation to become the collective midwife of Antonio Gramsci’s new age that struggles to be born (and I probably can’t count on them to help me get The Divine Conspiracy off the ground, considering how much of my leftist politics have seeped into that story). So I’ll find someone who can.

And to all of those who are right now screaming across your keyboards, saying, “But Preston, humanity is an inherently selfish species that cannot be trusted to govern itself under the type of socialist system you advocate for!”…uh, how do you know that? Sure, you may think you have Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and the Bible’s “original sin” and endless stories of war and crime in the nightly news to back you up. Still, we remember something Fred Rodgers told us when we were very young: “When I was a boy, and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” If humans really were as selfish as people like you claim they are, then why do we always come out in droves to help out when disaster strikes, like a flood or a hurricane or a missing hiker? Why do we react with such horror when someone steals a child’s ice cream cone or kicks a puppy for no reason? Shouldn’t such a selfish species not care whenever stuff like that happens? How do you explain the Neolithic-era cavemen who took care of their sick and disabled friends and relatives?

Maybe my faith in humanity is misplaced, but I really don’t think it is. Besides, as I hinted earlier with the Apocalypto metaphor, black and Indigenous people in this country have suffered far worse than what white people like myself are likely to experience in the next four years. There’s even a book by Choctaw elder Steven Charleston called We Survived the End of the World that covers this exact topic (I haven’t read it yet, but I bought it on my e-reader this morning). I believe they may have a thing or two to teach us about standing up against four more years of Trump.

It may be tempting to just surrender to nihilism and sit back and watch as our society circles the drain, but I refuse to. There is far too much at stake for us to surrender now. We have far too much to lose.

I know not what course others may take, but as for me, I will continue to talk about stuff that makes me happy on this blog. I will continue my cryptozoological tour of the United States and finish those retrospectives on Jurassic Park and 2023 in animation. I will also talk about the political realities of our era and what is necessary to improve them, no matter how drastic. I’ve been hesitant to resurrect “The Complete Noob’s Guide to the Left” due to how research-intensive such topics tend to be, especially given how much the well has been poisoned with Cold War propaganda. But I’m seriously considering bringing it back so I can do my part to help rehabilitate the image of leftist politics, however small it may be. Maybe I can talk about what a solarpunk society may look like, or what people like Thomas Sankara or Jacobo Arbenz were up to before the US-backed coups toppled their democratically elected governments, or explain why Cuba is so determined to remain socialist despite 60+ years of trade embargoes.

I can’t be sure all of these promises will play out. Who knows? Maybe my attempts to earn a driver’s license will go as well as SpongeBob’s.

The only thing I’m completely sure of is my closing statement: Fuck you, Donald Trump. I won’t do what you tell me.