AthenaAwakened
Contributor
- Joined
- Sep 17, 2003
- Messages
- 5,338
- Location
- Right behind you so ... BOO!
- Basic Beliefs
- non-theist, anarcho-socialist
The French got it right.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
Liberty, equality, brotherhood.
The U.S. started out with loving liberty, or at least a certain type of liberty, the white male ownership class kind of liberty. Then through through war, waves of immigration and migration, and the emergence globally of free states from other former colonies, an acceptance of equality grew.
But America never has grown to love brotherhood, for brotherhood flies directly in the face of america's institutionalized, romanticized, and lionized selfishness known as rugged individualism.
Rugged individualism taught white folk it was okay to enslave black folk and wholesale murder red folk.
Rugged individualism taught rich folk is was perfectly fine and proper to exploit and alienate working folk.
Rugged individualism taught that unions were evil and when they weren't evil, they needed to be segregated social clubs not organized universal engines of structural change.
Group activity should be inside corporate culture, rugged individualism said, harnessing the labor of many into building wealth for the few, pitting one against the other as they fought their ways up the corporate ladder. Cooperation in order to enrich the few while the many fight over the scraps that remain, that's the American way.
This last year has put rugged individualism in the spot light and left it naked and exposed.
And it ain't pretty.
Half this country believes not coughing on people, not breathing their germs on people, not being a nation of Typhoid Marys is infringing on their ibdividual liberty, as opposed to gifting liberty to others.
The words Black Lives Matter are for half the population carrying in them an idea so threatening to that half of the population that they cheer police brutality and set up Go Fund Me pages for white folk who kill black folk.
And now winter has come.
Winter has come to the State of Texas and Texans are dying because of it.
Dozens now are dead and scores more must now live as survivors of hypothermia and the numbers are rising. Neither the utility companies nor state government was prepared for the onslaught of human suffering currently being endured by the citizens of Texas. Holes in the energy infrastructure of not just Texas but the entire nation are laid bare for the world to see, and what is the nation discussing, debating, arguing over?
An idea no where near being made law, a series of suggestions known as the Green New Deal.
For half the country, the GND is an attack on their liberty, their manifest destiny, their rugged individualism.
Under the guise of American Exceptionalism we have hidden the cruelties and costs of rugged individualism. Walking this world alone means never bending to help the fallen, never having a helping hand extending to you when you are the fallen.
By subscribing to a belief that competition with your neighbor more important than compassion for you neighbor, we are now literally leaving the second biggest state in the union out in the cold.
From the Harriet T. and Ida B. Gun Club and Sewing Circle, this is me, and I'm jessayin'.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
Liberty, equality, brotherhood.
The U.S. started out with loving liberty, or at least a certain type of liberty, the white male ownership class kind of liberty. Then through through war, waves of immigration and migration, and the emergence globally of free states from other former colonies, an acceptance of equality grew.
But America never has grown to love brotherhood, for brotherhood flies directly in the face of america's institutionalized, romanticized, and lionized selfishness known as rugged individualism.
Rugged individualism taught white folk it was okay to enslave black folk and wholesale murder red folk.
Rugged individualism taught rich folk is was perfectly fine and proper to exploit and alienate working folk.
Rugged individualism taught that unions were evil and when they weren't evil, they needed to be segregated social clubs not organized universal engines of structural change.
Group activity should be inside corporate culture, rugged individualism said, harnessing the labor of many into building wealth for the few, pitting one against the other as they fought their ways up the corporate ladder. Cooperation in order to enrich the few while the many fight over the scraps that remain, that's the American way.
This last year has put rugged individualism in the spot light and left it naked and exposed.
And it ain't pretty.
Half this country believes not coughing on people, not breathing their germs on people, not being a nation of Typhoid Marys is infringing on their ibdividual liberty, as opposed to gifting liberty to others.
The words Black Lives Matter are for half the population carrying in them an idea so threatening to that half of the population that they cheer police brutality and set up Go Fund Me pages for white folk who kill black folk.
And now winter has come.
Winter has come to the State of Texas and Texans are dying because of it.
Dozens now are dead and scores more must now live as survivors of hypothermia and the numbers are rising. Neither the utility companies nor state government was prepared for the onslaught of human suffering currently being endured by the citizens of Texas. Holes in the energy infrastructure of not just Texas but the entire nation are laid bare for the world to see, and what is the nation discussing, debating, arguing over?
An idea no where near being made law, a series of suggestions known as the Green New Deal.
For half the country, the GND is an attack on their liberty, their manifest destiny, their rugged individualism.
Under the guise of American Exceptionalism we have hidden the cruelties and costs of rugged individualism. Walking this world alone means never bending to help the fallen, never having a helping hand extending to you when you are the fallen.
By subscribing to a belief that competition with your neighbor more important than compassion for you neighbor, we are now literally leaving the second biggest state in the union out in the cold.
From the Harriet T. and Ida B. Gun Club and Sewing Circle, this is me, and I'm jessayin'.
Time was, enter "Internationale" in the Search window and find a dozen glorious renditions. Now I have to hunt to get