So tired

This is going up late. There has been a cold making its way through the household, and it appears to be my turn.

Even before that, knowing what I wanted to blog about did not feel great, because it feels so repetitive. I say the same things all the time.

It is true that this blog is for me. It helps me work out my thoughts, and keep them organized, and there is a certain amount of discipline involved in posting daily. All of that has worth to me, and I know I don't really have a wide audience, so I shouldn't be expecting to change the world anyway. I guess it just feels self-evident to me that there are changes needed, and that they don't happen is discouraging. I don't need to have a wide audience; the information is out there.

Clearly it must be time to do something lighter, like review comics again, but I do think I need to spend a few posts on The Act of Killing, and I am still going to try to make today's point again. I believe yesterday I promised a grand unified theory of things that annoy me.

There is a common thread between defending hip hop and hating respectability politics on Monday, and believing that there is potential in everyone, and that everyone has something to say on Tuesday, and even writing about how you need to not lose your feelings of love for people on Sunday. It is so common to make these divisions. We are gifted people and you are not. These are hard-working people and these are lazy people. Those are ignorant liberals but we know the truth. It's such a load of crap.

I can believe that their are instinctive elements in it, but there is a lot of conditioning in it too, and somehow the other group always ends up being less valuable in some way.

I believe that when some people hold on so tightly to prejudice and privilege, part of it is knowing that while they are not at the top, they are still above someone, and that feels like enough. I may not understand that mindset enough to really argue it. I do want to go back to this quote from Marriage For Moderns that I used in a different post:

"If a woman can find adequate self-expression through a career rather than through marriage, well and good. Many young women, however, overlook the fact that there are numerous careers that do not furnish any medium or offer any opportunity for self-expression. Besides they do not realize that only the minority of women, as the minority of men, have anything particularly worthwhile to express."

http://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2014/06/being-person.html

That attitude infuriates me. I know that when people start talking about limitless human potential it tends to be in a cult setting. Maybe that's just because so many people are selling something. That is probably a part of why I don't feel like I can do any ad-linking on my blog; I don't want to get corrupted.

However, if there is a tendency for there to be profit motivations behind most messages, that's worth looking at too. Because maybe black males get a self-esteem boost for not being black females, and maybe Asian-Americans get a boost from not being African Americans, and maybe poor white males get to look down on all of them, but no one is getting the boost that corporations get from having candidates who will do what they want because they keep getting voted in by people who are voting against their best interests. No one racial group is getting the benefits that gun manufactures are getting, or pharmaceutical companies, or Fox News.

Normally my argument against these kind of things is just that it's wrong. The hierarchy that we have in place causes so much pain and suffering, and then hearing people who are fine with it because they have bought into these divisions is sickening. That should be enough, but apparently it's not. So, it's probably worth pointing out that it is also financially stupid. Living standards go down, health goes down, free time and family time go down, everyone gets brought down together except for the very top.

Someone on Twitter had made a point about how the GOP got us to this current state of polarization, because there are things bearing fruit now that were planted in the Nixon administration. The next logical question was what the liberal strategy was, and I don't think there is one. If you care about people, it feels like that is basic human decency, and it should be self-evident, that some things are wrong and must be stopped. Well, no, there's no evidence that it works that way.

And I know that all of the things that I normally write about self-care, and gratitude and relationships, are true. I haven't really given up on humanity yet. You will know when I do because there will be no more band reviews and songs of the day and travel blogs, because there will be no point. I'm not there yet. But I am kind of discouraged, and only part of it is the cold.