The Tides of Time
Why hello my (not so) faithful readers. If you were, in fact, disappointed by the lack of posts over the last more-than-a-month, I would ask you to solve some cubic equations with complex numbers for you are obviously imaginary. Little self-depreciating math joke over there. I have issues. Comedy ain’t my thing. I should stop.
Couple of reasons for the absence: one, my college applications, and two, my desire to write something new and not post stuff I’ve already written because that is just so poorly researched that only the left-leaning version an absurdist commentator like Ben Shapiro would say it. It needs updates. I’ll work on them more. Sorry. No climate change as of yet (I HAVE researched even more on it, though. Spoiler Alert: it ain’t good).
Seeing that I have some fairly important exams coming up (again, college application season), I won’t be able to post again until they’re over on November 20th. Thereafter, I’ll have exams again. And a national standardized test. And exams again. And I still have some college apps left. Don’t count on more than three posts after this one until the end of March. I say that as if you guys care. Why do I feel as if the majority of my views are by Russian bots? Putin, I told you I don’t want to be President of the U.S just yet….fake my birth certificate later, I’m busy right now.
Anyway, now that I am all out of cringe-worthy jokes for the moment, let’s just talk about…stuff. I really don’t want to get all into one topic right now. So this is going to be a mixture of different opinions and a little bit of dramatic introspection due to my coffee-induced three A.M stupor….it’s, like, 11:56 right now, but I’m tired. Chemistry and Physics are hard, ok?
Let’s just take this one step at a time.
One: The Princeton Oligarchy Study.
A study by Princeton found that, in the USA, the vast majority of legislatures were passed because they helped the richest, the top 1%, the biggest stakeholders in politics who weren’t politicians themselves. Even when the legislature helped the “common man”, it was only because that legislature probably helped the rich folks too.
I’ll just put up a disclaimer here: a Vox article tries to rebut the study, and the authors make it clear that they assumed the top 10%, with the lowest base salary in that bracket about $160K a year, as rich. Go and search it for yourself. Don’t attack me for being unfair.
Now, that Vox article may be true. It mentions that the rich and the middle class both win over each other about half the time, and that the rich haven’t been able to destroy the Social Security program in the US. Fair points, but a bit removed from the point I want to make.
The top 1% in the US control about 39% of the country’s wealth, and it is also home to the only two people (two of three, if we count that French dude who I’m not sure about) valued over $100 billion, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. And if you think they’re humanitarians and great philanthropists, just find the total percentage of wealth they’ve donated.
That kind of money and power obviously gives one sway over some of the policy decisions and laws coming into effect. Donald Trump has repeatedly cut back taxes on the rich, and also lowered carbon emission standards. There’s also the famous case of Amazon making $11 billion in profit in one quarter and paying $0 in tax. Again, disclaimer: there was some weird reason behind it which I didn’t understand, so check up on that. You’ll probably find some Daily Wire article pounding on the leftists and Democrats and “whiny liberal snowflakes” while also making fake sex tapes of AOC on the side.
The point is, rich people have it good, and more and more people are struggling day by day to put food on the table, or, since a lot don’t really have tables, on the floor.
This is even worse in India. The top one percent controls over 58% of our wealth, and just 9 Indians control as much money as the bottom 50%. To put this into context, 50% of Indians number roughly twice the total number of Americans, or about seven trillion times the population of Wyoming.
Let’s all just pause for a moment and celebrate my Internet coming-of-age with a Wyoming joke.
If you don’t see something wrong with that and are of the opinion that rich people have “earned that money through sweat and tears”, poor people work three jobs and struggle to pay rent. Everyone works hard, but only a few get the rewards. Another great source to be, as Fox News would put it, be “radicalized” by socialism would be to watch the Patriot Act episode on Amazon and their sort of icky market strategies.
Anyway, socialism v capitalism is a whole different blog, and one with arguments on both side I want to explain and dismantle, so let’s put that on the backest of burners for now.
Let’s tick off some random news. India has lost 9 million jobs in the last 6 years, not gained 20 million per year as promised. Oops.
There are protests happening around the world, in Chile, Haiti, Lebanon, Spain, Iraq, Hong Kong, and other places I’m forgetting. The common factors? A government not of the majority’s requirements, austerity measures, rising taxes on the poorest, and just general apathy towards the citizens. Over a million people came to the streets in Chile, and people in Lebanon formed a human chain all around the country, regardless of their faiths and religions and cultures.
There’s the whole thing with Syria, ISIS, the Kurds, al Baghdadi, and Turkey. Also Trump being unpresidential. Again.
Kashmir is still under lockdown, and Indians are gobbling up the government propaganda like a bunch of six year olds eat French Fries.
And this brings me to my introspection. What are we, as a species, heading towards? A better world? What does that even mean? Climate change isn’t slowing down, and climate change deniers are just rising in number. Hateful rhetoric is seeping into more and more vocabularies, especially in places run by conservatives and right wing governments. Criminal justice reform is hard to come by, people in India are denying that casteism still exists, Muslims are automatically labeled terrorists and anti-nationals, Narendra Modi is touted as the greatest leader ever and portrayed as Superman or the strongest person alive by the Modia (Modi media) even though the economy is struggling, crimes are getting higher, pollution isn’t falling, coal mining regulations are being lifted, and we’re dropping in almost all the indexes.
The ruling party has no elected Muslim Members of Parliament, though it enjoys a self-majority and the country is 22% minorities. Over in the US, Trump has succeeded in convincing his base that all negative media coverage of him is fake news, and that he is the greatest human being to have ever walked the planet. In the UK, a man who called burqa-clad women “letterboxes” has been chosen Prime Minister. I have so much material that my brain is overloading. This gives me an idea for a new series, though. We’ll call it “The Problems With”, and each country will probably get multiple parts.
We assume that the tides of time are always towards justice. That demagogues like Modi and Trump are all just minor icy obstacles in front of the icebreaker that is the morality of the human race. But what if they’re not? What if we’re the Titanic, the unsinkable ship, and they are that iceberg. The dark to our light, the F to our A, the butterscotch ice cream to a perfectly good sundae that DOES NOT NEED BUTTERSCOTCH. IT’S THE WORST FLAVOR THERE IS AND IT SHOULDN’T EXIST.
I’ll have to do a whole other series on populist, authoritarian leaders, won’t I? “Fuhrer Watch”. I’m not that bad with titles, if I do say so myself. And no, I couldn’t figure out how to get the umlaut over the ‘u’. Sue me.
If any of you are ever slighted by my political views, I’m sorry, but I don’t care. I’m willing to engage in an exchange of opinions wherein we both might compromise, but I am not moving on my principles of secularism, equity, democracy, feminism, need for wealth equality, free healthcare, free education, affordable housing and food, clean water, and a few other things. We may differ on the details, but if your goals regarding all of these aren’t the same as mine, we don’t have a difference in opinion, we have a difference in morality, and I don’t associate with people who are the human equivalent of a pile of horse dung. Sorry, Tomi Lahren.
Getting back to the topic at hand. What are the tides of time, if not positive? I mean, this is the most peaceful time in our history, but more people than ever are displaced. We’ve made significant advancements in health, education, and the sciences, but still there are people who refuse to believe in vaccines, climate change, or that windmills don’t cause cancer.
“Oh, but all that is insignificant when compared with the good stuff.” Is it? Is it really? When was the last time you saw the front page of the newspaper (and try to read at least 5–6 of those, instead of just one), and the good news overshadowed the bad news? And I’m not talking about people in Texas being mad that the Astros lost the World Series, I’m talking about the fact that we have gotten so used to scandals in the US and Islamophobia in India that Trump talking about al Baghdadi’s death doesn’t automatically qualify him as insane or that a BJP MLA in India asking Modi to basically initiate a purge against Muslims and give every Hindu an AK-47 doesn’t automatically lose his seat.
I’m talking about the fact that Indian news channels have had, in their last 200 debates, discussions attacking Pakistan and attacking the opposition government, discussions praising Modi and the abrogation of Article 370, and only a handful of discussions about the PMC bank scam and the falling economy, and no talks at all over healthcare, our dismal showing at the Global Hunger Index, poverty, job loss, or education. We’re more concerned with vilifying Kashmiris and the activism of the students of JNU rather than actually listening to their views and wishes.
The tides of time are entirely dependent on the people of that time. Hitler only came to power because the people fell in love with him, and blindly followed him when he led them down the path of anti-Semitism. Stalin and Mao were able to commit their atrocities because the people didn’t rise up, and those who did were silenced by a spineless army which used the excuses of them “doing their jobs” to justify such grotesque human rights violations. Just like every tyrant in the past, the demagogues of today depend on our silence, for the silence of the majority is complicity in the dehumanization, degradation, and destruction of the minority.
The tides of time are in our hands. The planet is dying. Minorities are living in fear. Hate is winning once again. I don’t need to prove all of this in my blog for you to know that what I say is true. But to sit in silence when they should protest makes cowards out of men.
This is not a call to action. I’m 17. Let me get into college first, so I can find that CS major BFF to help me get viral. I’m extremely photogenic. Until such a time as we take to the streets, or to the ballots, or to the courts, take a good look at the person closest to you whom you don’t even know. Know that they might not share your gender, your sex, your sexuality, your race, your religion, your politics, your culture, your language, your status, your nationality, or even your morals, and then tell yourselves that you will fight for them and their right to lead a respectful, healthy, peaceful life just as hard as you’ll fight for yourself.
Change begins individually, and you’re never too small to try. If someone says something bigoted or ignorant, stand up to them. If you see something wrong happening, report it. If you see something you can do to affect real, positive change in the world, even if it’s helping an old lady cross the street, or reminding your parents to switch off the engine in a traffic jam, or plant a tree, or go vegan, or overthrow oppressive regimes, do it.
The time is always right to do what is right, no matter how seemingly insignificant the deed. And the time when we need righteousness the most is always, always, the present. And so will flow the tides of time.
