The people will Get Woke one way or another, and the longer they hit the snooze button the bigger the coming shock. I think the hysteria we see today is an indication of the amount of psychic energy it takes to drown out cognitive dissonance in people who skated through last year (almost!) on self-delusion, and still cling to a sense of entitlement and inculpability, even as the long-term consequences of their irresponsible (“lesser evil”) civic participation loom larger and larger.
Many of us thought a Trump victory would wake up the smug apologists for the corrupt and collapsing status quo, who are the last bastion of Democratic loyalists. And while they are a dwindling clique, the corporate-media narrative is their song, and its broadcast allows them to imagine that their influence is still proportional to their sense of entitlement.
But these are the same people who last year denied the dire condition of the county, denied the suffering of the working class and middle class, denied the complicity of neoliberals in that, denied the corruption of their party, denied Clinton’s habitual lying (even after she admitted it to her banking pals), and denied that Sanders could win…that Clinton could lose…
Then, since Trump won, instead of looking in the mirror and asking “What the fuck was I thinking?”, they’ve swallowed every narrative denying that he should have won! If only they could get rid of him, a new day will dawn (under President Pence, and Vice President Paul Ryan, perhaps!???)
Someday when this is all over we can tell our grandchildren about the time “liberals” lost their sanity and their political identity. But in the meantime there are signs of more mind-bending crises to come, for all of us. It looks like the planet is in the midst of a Dark Night of the Soul, and the only way out is all the way through to the other side. So we need to stay grounded and keep calling things as they are.
