between centers

it’s like, yeah, i get it, she’s out of touch. for such an intelligent and composed person, she doesn’t understand how politics and society has changed. she lacks self-awareness. she is unwilling to acknowledge her own flaws and failures, not that she’s unique in that regard.

but man, nothing makes me less interested in participating with the far-left than the endless stream of vitriol that they spit at her.

one thing that’s clear from listening to her is that she actually believes her “between center-left and center-right” stuff. it’s true, she’s not a liberal, never really was. but in that sense she is totally authentic. she is, to her core, a boring realist who lacks vision, not because she doesn’t care, but she has genuine faith in her milquetoast strategies for change. she believes in the system that we have. this is the game she knows and it’s the game she wants to play.

fuck me for seeing merit in a diversity of political ideologies. do i agree with her? god no, but i recognize she comes from a place of experience and knowledge, that she does offer meaningful insight into the realities of bureaucracy and politics, that she still has value and power even in the shame of defeat. there are people who like and even love her earnestly for who she is, and there is no virtue in shitting on them for that.

mostly i’m just feeling politically isolated. sign me up for that sweet luxury automated gay space communism but leave me out of the endless pissing contest over bernie.

the tenets of my bleeding heart

edit: The first commenter made a very salient point, that my train of thought is quite incomplete at the end. There were a few paragraphs missing – hopefully I’ve managed to remedy this.

I have not often strayed into discussing the directly political, but I am gradually understanding that if I want to pretend to be an agent of change, I have to face facts. The slow, creeping resignation that changing society means more than just changing minds has forced me to stop and take stock of what I really believe when it comes to the role of government and the purpose of law. Politics isn’t easy conversation, but I’ve found that practice truly does make genuine discussion more viable over time. Primal emotions are accessed very rapidly as core values are placed at odds, and my knee-jerk response to toss away respect for others has to be tamed in light of the very constant reality that I really won’t find many people in the world that agree with me about everything. It’s the joy and curse of individuality.

It’s strange to rediscover what it feels like to have a moral zeal for something like, say, global warming – an issue I once believed wasn’t happening at all – and to now find myself gravely concerned for the future of the human race because of it. I’d changed my mind about it a few years back, but I didn’t quite get the “big deal” factor until more recently. It started by watching nature documentaries (if you want to feel emotional about global warming, watch a polar bear try to hunt walrus because it can’t find land), but relentlessly consuming TED talks and working with brand new ecology manuscripts every day has exposed me to a lot of really potent research. Statistics are cheap, but having a glimpse into the excruciating amount of detail and thought driving the process gives meaning to otherwise anonymous numbers.

Continue reading the tenets of my bleeding heart