true. i believe we cannot try to repair, try to reverse to some “before times”, because before times were not working, either, for far too many Americans. we must not simply strive to reset some status quo of our recent past (and by “recent”, i mean post WWII “greatness”, an arguably “better” time for some), yet too many flaws.
we need to find another way. look forward and state - out loud - what this looks like: health care, livable wages, housing, food security, and an effort to make our planet a livable place. clean it up!
no one person can “lead” us, it must be collective.
we all have to imagine that better governance and then make it.
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I agree that he’s not grifting and I appreciate his work as governor. I still don’t want another billionaire president. I have nothing at all against Pritzker and think he’s doing an amazing job, especially now. I don’t think he’s a bad guy or corrupt. But we can’t keep putting in people with immense wealth and privilege into our highest offices and expect different outcomes than a doubling down on Neo-liberalism. 
Now, if he is the nominee in 2028, will I vote for him over whoever the GOP offers up, of course. I’m not gonna be happy about it though.
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I agree. That’s why we need to stop treating humanities fields as some sort of luxury we can afford to ditch for all but the elite class. If people have a proper understanding of history, culture, literature, the media, propaganda, society, etc, then they are less likely to be fooled into thinking that the past was some golden age.
That’s not what I’m saying when I say that looking at history can help inform us of possible solutions. I don’t think we can or should replicate the 1950s, even if the economy was booming. But we can certainly LOOK at that period and see what was working, such as having a greater number of workers in unions. Strong union membership translated into a rising tide for more people. That doesn’t mean we need to go back to single bread winner households… but a person with a good understanding of that historical period would understand that that was kind of a myth anyway, and more women than people realized worked outside the home, especially in low-income and in families of color. We also know that society was highly racist (more so than now… maybe?), and that while there was a huge expansion of the middle class, lots of people did get left out.
All that will tell us something that can work - the work force being organized and there being strong labor protections backed by the federal government.
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totally agree, and i did fail to include possibly the most important thing in that new paradigm for collective governance, education.
in order to imagine and strive for a better life, we must first understand the past failures, as much (or, i might say more than) the triumphs. we have to know where we went wrong, in order to build up from there.
when i say a “new way”, i mean there has to be something beyond this binary, pluralistic method of bad vs. less bad, when we should be demanding better. we can sustain the people of this country equitably. we can do the things that the oligarchy say we just can’t afford. no one should go hungry, no one should be unhoused, no one should be left to die of preventable illness.
pollyanna? me?
i don’t think i am aalone in this thinking. in fact, i believe AOC is saying these same things, out loud.
we can’t not demand human dignity and basic rights be respected.
that is looking to build a different approach to what has been broken, and - IMO - cannot be restored.
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Indeed! Every society was built on and by education. Education, ultimately, is about reproducing society, and if we want society to change, that’s an important place to begin - you got to think, what kind of society do we want, and how do we use education to get to that place… I think about people like Maria Montessori, who was seeing the rise of public education in the beginning of the 20th century, and how it was being used as a means of controlling the proletariat, and instead wondered if education could be used to help people build a better life for themselves and their communities. Turns out that when you let kids have some freedom within a safe space with a teacher who guides them rather than commands, unruly kids turn out to be eager and productive learners.
totally agree.
You’re not. Lots of us agree. But far too many people are completely snowed into believing the “common sense” of neo-liberalism, that they can’t see the truth of what you’re saying…
Again, agreed. As broken as the world is, it can get ever more broken. That’s what scares me. I hope we’re not past the point of no return where the only path forward is total systemic collapse.
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I’ve been wrestling with this question since at least 2016- how do you fix a country where virtually everything is broken and corrupt, and a huge chunk of the population are fascist scum who will fight tooth and nail against even the most mild progress?
Before we can even get to the literal “how?”, we have to have people who WANT to do it- virtually all of our politicians have proven themselves to be either bloodthirsty traitors or feckless cowardly wastes of space who can’t be depended on to represent anyone but billionaires and corporations. Many of our fellow citizens are apathetic airheads who couldn’t be bothered to fill out a ballot, and many more are literal death cultists whose only priority is hurting anyone not just like them. To move ahead, we need, frankly, better people. Better candidates, better voters, better humans. People with some bare minimum amount of integrity, courage and grounding in the real world. We can try to educate, motivate and instill a positive vision of the future in people, but at the end of the day, you can’t FORCE people not to be assholes, and so, SO many residents of the USA wake up every day and choose to be their worst selves.
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I think how you get better people is by having a better society and culture. It’s not going to fix everything, but it can help. People are socialized by their social and cultural environments. What we’re seeing now is the social conditioning of not only capitalism, but neo-liberalism. It pushes a very highly individualistic ideology that makes it easy for people to be just like that. Changing that isn’t easy, but it can be changed.
And yes, there will likely always be assholes, but we can build a society that mitigates that and cares for people rather than exploits them. The goal is not to make everyone into nice people, but to build a society that functions despite them. We ensure that those people can’t do the kind of damage that they’re doing now.
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It feels like a bit of a Catch 22 getting there, though- how do we get better people when we already have a critical mass of people who will bat down any attempts to improve society, and when our government has already transformed from a democracy to a combination fascist regime/oligarchy? It feels like good, decent people have been trying to instill positive change for my entire life, and for the most part have been getting ignored or attacked rather than listened to.
I’ve mentioned before that my personal solution is to give up on the USA and just move to somewhere saner and better if at all possible, and devote my efforts to trying to prevent that place from becoming like the USA. I think the United States is a lost cause, at least within my lifetime- and since I’m of the belief that we only live once and I have no children whose future I feel responsible for, I feel justified leaving this horrible country, to which I absolutely do not owe the rest of my lifespan.
But at the same time, I recognize that eventually, even if it’s long after I’m dead, things will change and evolve, hopefully for the better, and I can’t help but wonder how that will be possible. I used to think that it was a matter of old bigots dying off, but it looks as though they’ve had great success using the internet, the media and misinformation to spread their hatred to younger generations, and I only see that problem worsening as AI poisons everything and the fascists utterly destroy any institutions related to education or science.
I do have, I suppose you could call it faith, that some day the USA will manage to come to its senses, but I really can’t imagine what the catalyst will be, if everything we’ve witnessed in the past couple decades wasn’t able to do it.
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This is where I am coming from. I know someone, an honest person who wanted to make a difference in a minority community he came from, who ran for office and was literally sued off the ballot by the incumbent. And the local DNC paid for the extremely pricey lawyer to sue him and other contenders off the primary ballot so he could run unopposed. Yeah, DNC - not all evil comes from GOP…sadly there’s plenty of bad to go around.
To clarify, I’m not saying we wait for that person, but that’s the kind of qualities we’re going to need. If Trump proves anything, he proves that America isn’t that smart and survives on bite sized bits of info. Almost beyond spoon feeding level. Trump, because he isn’t that smart/is mentally circling the drain, speaks in toddler level language which is easy to understand.
And this time he has smart but evil people around him using that simpleness to do evil. Many of us, during his first term, said 'but for X, he’d be doing whatever he wants" and “thank goodness he’s a moron but doesn’t have a smart people pushing his agenda”. Well, Project 2025 was that and is that.
We need someone who can speak simple but persuasive so that the simple minds follow. And, somehow, get through the bulwark of right wing media.
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So vaccines are evil and deadly, except when he does them, because his are apparently MAGIC vaccines that beat ALL the diseases FOREVER.
Imagine how different the world would be if Republicans ever held their people accountable for anything they ever said. But somehow making grandiose promises like “I WILL STOP ALL VIRUSES FOREVER” and then not delivering isn’t worth the slightest criticism- not the sheer ludicrousness of the claim, nor the eventual lack of results. Republicans seem to enjoy having intelligence-insulting lies thrown in their faces constantly.
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RFK has announced that he is developing a vaccine against all viruses.
Gosh, it’s almost as if we have total scientific illiterates running our health agencies, who embarrass the country every time they open their mouths. Oh right, yeah, we do. I guess it’s only fair, given that every other person leading a federal agency now is totally incompetent in the relevant field. I don’t know how anyone in this country is looking at what’s going on and thinking it’s fine.
(Part of me wonders what RFK heard and misunderstood, but the rest of me realizes it doesn’t matter, because gibberish is gibberish, and his statement may not have been based on anything at all.)
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if what he’s talking about isn’t even a vaccine, but simply all known viruses collected together in a shot, because “if you survive the infection, you’ll be immune, and that’s how vaccines should work!” Given the eugenicist fuckwit running things, it’s not out of the bounds of possibility…
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