The most bizarre political period I have ever lived through

This has been the most bizarre and the most disillusioning political and historical period that I've ever lived through.

It's been a period where bullying has regularly overwhelmed more thoughtful engagement, and where, simultaneously, the adults who have advocated it and engaged in it proclaim at the top of their lungs that all that bullying on the schoolyard and in the world needs to stop.

If I was a young person, right now, there is no way that I could take seriously people over 18 or 30 or 65 or whatever age that people believe that their age offers them more wisdom than it does.

In the last 6 or 7 years, out of our perpetually overwrought and self-righteous political feelings, we have created a culture - in politics, in pop culture, and in everyday life - that glamorizes and celebrates aggression, force, and bullying and acts as if that is the quite natural and best way of doing things with one another. As if that really is the functional end state of human affairs that people have been reaching for throughout their long history.

As long as George Bush can be scapegoated for the failure of this thinking in his prosecution of the Iraq war, noone else has to face up to the failure of this logic, many people must reason. George Bush was using force for a wrong cause, they must reason. His critics, on the other hand, use it for right causes. And, as always, bullying can be justified for any right cause.

It makes no goddamned sense, is the truth. And it means that I and everyone else has to perpetually face and, at times, engage fights from a million self-righteous activists, professionals, authority figures, and every other millionth bully that has decided that their cause is more important than respect for the conscience of their neighbors.

Love thy neighbor is foolish, antiquated mushiness, these folks reason. Respecting your neighbor's conscience is all fine and dandy as long as you want to allow evil and stupidity and George Bush to rule the world. Thinking and engagement are well and good, but they don't save the world from its millionth everpresent boogeymen. That is done by the strong arm of force.

It's the rationalization of every ideologue, every strong man, every repressive leader, every power-monger that has ever roamed this earth. And it would be the long march of humanity if it weren't for the enormous load of tragedy that follows in its wake. But that tragedy, finally, overwhelms the defenses of its advocates and either strong men learn the errors of their ways or are removed from their posts. And, as in the case of Burma or China or Cuba or Iran, there can be a very, very long wait before such a change of heart or change of the guard takes place.

My only hope is that, in liberal democracies, at least, it is in its last throes. It will never earn my respect or the respect of those whom it asserts its will over but does not persuade. Ever. There is no real respect out of fear or force. It is a false means of leadership. Because it doesn't lead. It just asserts its will.

And I've never seen a period that more bottoms out our expectations for power and leadership and so pretends that such bottoming out is something better than it is.

At this point, I am tired of all of the fighting of the last 6 or 7 years. I am tired of the ever polarizing fight that constantly overwhelms reason and more engaged thought in contemporary politics and I am tired of the aggression I have absorbed in my own personal and professional life as a function of all that fighting.

I've never really been more disappointed and had more reason to be disappointed with most of my elders and with the the political and cultural landscape.

It's this one huge mess of grievance and conflict and aggression for whatever purposes we decide in the moment are worthy. It's drama, as people of my generation would say. One long series of drama and conflict forever into eternity. As long as its participants want to fight.

I am tired of the fighting. And I am especially tired of the meaninglessness of it all and all of the senseless tragedy it produces.

It will only end when enough failure and tragedy is produced to overwhelm the defenses of its proponents. How much is enough? I wish I knew.

I just know we can't go on like this.

Love,
Ben