2/14/20: LOVE AND POLITICS – AMERICAN STYLE
MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS
As I was looking over stories for today’s show and knowing full that it is Valentine’s Day, I was reading an article that was sent to me from a guest broker, who from time to time will recommend guests for the show.
The article was from Campus Reform and written by Eduardo Neret.
Neret went to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. to ask students about dating someone with opposite political beliefs.
Many students said they would not date someone with opposite political beliefs and explained that one’s political views are a reflection of values. Some even went as far as to say they wouldn’t date a supporter of President Donald Trump.
One student stated: “If they were a Trump supporter, I don’t think I could date them ‘cause I feel like in my opinion that shows a little bit about their character.”
This is the kind of attitude I hear all the time when I have to report on the so-called “peaceful gatherings” in my town. Whether it is a nationalist group or Antifa – there always seems to be a disconnect that confounds me.
I remember watching members of Antifa blocking traffic and when someone would tell them to get out of the way the Antifa member who was most certainly white started yelling that the person calling them Whitey, a Nazi, and a nationalist, claiming that being white makes him inherently a racist.
This is coming from a white guy in a black mask holding a stick in a threatening pose.
What was said was racist and yet it is completely ignored because of politics.
This mentality is, obviously, no different to the Nazis he claimed to be against. No self-knowledge, no ability to reason, no self-control – and importantly no self-love.
What we are seeing is a hysterical population where the polarization of opinions and intolerance toward opposition is a symptom of that social hysteria.
A pro-Trump student group set up outside Arizona University Memorial Union Hall. While they were using their right together a young man walked up and started screaming that he wanted to slash their throats that he wanted to slash all republican throats.
Arizona state police were called to investigate.
This of course happened before a Florida man who was arrested for driving through a Republican voter registration tent. He told police he dislikes President Trump and felt like “someone had to take a stand.”
Social media warriors were there to declare that it was justified because President Trump sets a bad example and we are reminded about what happened is Charlottesville.
Yes, what happened in Charlottesville is the worst of hates but of course, we need to justify other hateful acts—out of love.
At least that is what is being programmed into people.
Interactions with psychopaths need to be considered in the same way as an interaction with a dangerous, wild, predatory animal.
There is no love in this situation and there is no justification to continue the hate – no matter what political philosophies you have.
This is not just stupid; it’s dangerous. By only seeing people in terms of their identity groups, all individual differences get wiped out.
That means the people under the spell of identity politics are blind to the variations within their own group: the highs and lows, the good and the evil. More importantly, they can’t see it in themselves. If all that matters is “my group”, and the enemy of my group is your group, the problem is obviously not any individuals in my group or your group, it is your group.
And if your group is my group’s enemy, the only solution is to neutralize or destroy your group. That’s what the Nazis did to their “identity-group” enemies. That’s what the Bolsheviks did to their class enemies. The results were not “social justice”; they were blood, gore, and the slashing of throats.
Saying that ” My group is good, your group is evil” is the political equivalent of being functionally retarded. All it does is make it open season for the psychopaths in the “good group” to run the show while the naive Social Justice warriors let out the worst aspects of their personalities without any insight or self-control. If that sounds like your ideal vision of the future, by all means, continue to be an apologist for Antifa, continue to look away when extremist right groups start causing trouble, and, continue to pretend that being a social justice warrior isn’t an excuse to spread your prejudice.
On a day like Valentine’s Day, it is important to fight for love – not give it lip service.
Human beings are an interesting species. We cry, fight, laugh, love, and a great deal of this all happens automatically and repetitively. However, some types of human experience cannot happen automatically.
For growth to occur, effort must be made. Truth, understanding, and free will must be applied in order to ensure harmonious, creative outcomes.
Most of the time, we operate in the world based on ‘rules’ or habits accumulated throughout our lives, shaped from conception by our genes and socialization.
Our gift of higher reasoning allows us some measure of control over these habits – to monitor, and if necessary, inhibit the aggressive or fearful knee-jerk responses in order to provide for conscious control during situations to which our personalities may be unadapted; for instance, a severe change in the conditions of our external environment.
There is another time in our lives when all of this tends to fall apart and that is when we are looking for companionship and want to find love.
Of course, we are seeking out someone who we can be harmonious with. Sometimes opposites have been known to attract. However, we are living in times where love and finding love is harder because of a horrible and evil breaker of hearts.
Politics.
Yes, political views are killing relationships and it used to be that just having typical male and female differences were a matter of negotiation or meeting in the middle, but it appears that politics are something that is non-negotiable.
Politically, these are rancorous times. Not only are our social networks turning into poisonous echo chambers, but partisan animosity is also higher than it has been in decades.
Oddly enough, I asked my wife to start going out with me on election night in 2008. I remember when they announced that Barack Obama was going to be our President I said to her: it looks like things are changing in the world and I think that maybe I should change and grow with someone I care about.
We have been together ever since –and at times we don’t agree on things politically but for us, it really isn’t all that important – we fight about a lot of things but politics are not an issue – I really don’t have a political opinion so love seems to conquer all.
Maybe being older – I still believe that differences are what make a relationship interesting.
It would be nice if the majority of people would say “You vote red, I vote blue. The debate is hot, and so are you.”
But today identity politics are ruining relationships and shutting down opportunities.
The whole irony is that while the younger generations and the progressives love to talk about diversity and harmony – programming and prejudice is hiding underneath all of the virtue signaling and some of the ugliest of positions are putting a knife into the heart of love and its ability to conquer all.
I have heard so many virtue signalers who speak of diversity and equality. They will tell you that if we were to love more instead of hate our nation would heal and be better off.
That all sounds fuzzy and loving up until the point someone finds out what your political leanings are and immediately the prejudice sets in.
It is then that the harmony they preach about goes sour and immediately changes to a torrent of hate and anger.
They find it hard to conceal their judgments and convey preconceived feelings on everything political and even issues like xenophobia, immigration, kids in cages, abortion rights, racism, sexism, and the list goes on.
While they are dropping all this on you – you start to feel a little awkward and even though you may agree on some things you find the extremism to be a turn-off.
There is no love when things are triggered – just rage and anger and hypocrisy.
Identity politics is stupid. It divides humans into various arbitrary “identity groups” and then stops there. All analysis and understanding go no further than the level of the group. But what is identity?
It comes from the Latin idem, meaning “the same, in the sense of repeating over and over”. In other words, identity implies something about you that carries over from one instant to the next, making you. Of course, things like your sex, skin color, and orientation do that. Contrary to popular opinion, you can’t just decide you’re a lesbian Latina grandmother.
Identity is more than what biological category you happen to have been born in. It’s who you are – singular. The only true identity politics would have to go down to the level of the individual because no matter how similar two people are, they are never identical.
But the idea that your skin color, or sexual orientation or even your politics define you is completely is absurd.
If you can’t find love because you are critical of someone’s political views, you are a bigot.
Think about it: if identity politics makes all members of a group, Blacks for example, identical—then this is where we are stepping ironically into racist territory.
Putting a race of people into a corner and stating that they are equal in their views and saying it with conviction makes you a racist
Racism is a serious issue.
Applying it to everyone who holds a contrasting view from the populist opinion is entitled to clarification. However, regressive liberals have loosely assigned the term ‘racist’ without that clarification; without vital logical reasoning.
It is as if they have programmed themselves to take arbitrary, robotic, triggered action to anyone who offends them, or anyone who might offend others. Sloppily crying ‘racist,’ to easy targets, is an actual disgrace to the victims who legitimately suffered racism.
The opposite of a regressive leftist – is an extreme conservative who can also be triggered into conversational traps by assuming that one particular race or sexual orientation cannot hold populist views or even nationalist views.
If you assume that all blacks are liberal or all gay people are liberal or that all liberals are not patriotic, you have a problem with perception. You also are falling for the propaganda that divides us with obvious stereotypes.
Stereotypes have a bad reputation and for good reasons. Decades of research have shown that stereotypes can facilitate intergroup hostility and give rise to toxic prejudices around sex, race, age and multiple other social distinctions.
Stereotypes are often used to justify injustice and discrimination, validate oppression, enable exploitation, rationalize violence, and shield corrupt power structures. Stereotype-based expectations and interpretations routinely derail intimate relationships, contaminate laws (and their enforcement), poison social commerce, and stymie individual freedom and achievement.
Research has shown, for example, how individual performance may be affected adversely by heightened awareness of negative group stereotypes, a phenomenon known as “stereotype threat.
Looking around, most of us have seen with our own eyes the harm that can come from stereotyping, from stuffing complex human beings into categories at once too broad and too narrow and using those to justify all manner of unfair and vicious conduct.
Looking inward, most of us resent it when our deeply felt complexity is denied; when we are judged by those who don’t know us well; when we and robbed of our uniqueness, our genetic, biographical, psychological one-of-a-kind-ness.
I always take offense when someone who I do not know and doesn’t know me sends me an e-mail or posts on Facebook that labels me as a liberal or conservative without even considering that I am a complex human being, that I am not shackled by views that are shaped by the media or a political party.
However, this is how a lazy mind is programmed.
We all have a unique story that is far deeper than any political view. That unique story needs to be fleshed out in order to find love and respect.
However, judging a person solely by an external group resemblance, or by how others who share some of the same political views have behaved, or by any measure that does not require actual knowledge of the person, and you are not someone who stands for the justice you are doing and injustice.
One can hardly quarrel with the notion that we are all individuals and should be judged as such, on our own merit and the contents of our character, rather than seen as mere abstractions or derivatives of group averages.
Comments like “You are a Trump Supporter, therefore, you must a be a racist” or “You are a liberal you must support communism” – take away the complexities of how people operate. Prejudice is what destroys the ability to love.
Both sides are doing this and both sides are wrong in doing so. We used to call out such bigotry but now it is accepted because it is political –but it is this type of behavior that is destroying friendships and love/
Attachment to ideas that are wrong – incorporating lies into our identity causes chaos. Just as some give their lives to ideas of beauty, harmony, creativity, and truth, so do some give their lives to ideas of ugliness, discord, entropy, and lies. And most of the time, people are somewhere in-between, drifting one way, then pulled the other.
It is not difficult for people to find themselves attracted to those organizations that share their concerns. That, in itself, is not a problem.
It becomes a problem when people begin to define themselves primarily by a particular interest or identity and when that interest is bent on gaining advantage from the community at large. Any sense of national interest or common good is overtaken by special interests as they vote for their identity grouping first. It is good to have a cause but when the cause turns caustic and it becomes a militant effort to suppress other viewpoints – it goes from being divisive to destructive.
We the people who favor improvements for a more perfect union see the prospect sicken and it is the “we” that becomes “us and them.”
It requires someone or something to oppose or worse something or someone to hate.
It thrives on competitive victimhood. Groupthink replaces the reality that we are equal, individual human beings, capable of seeing the bigger picture of the overall good – it blinds us to the organizers of globalist conspiracy, literally those who are waiting to employ their strategy of control.
The cause now is to just divorce ourselves of an identity-based in politics – it is time to stop the politicking of weather, human interest, reproductive health, skin color, sexual preference, and even religion.
Identity politics is in many ways the lowest form of politics. Why? Because most people who identify themselves as a “type” eventually become a stereotype and myopically obsess over their own and other people’s victimization.
All so-called rights and terminologies then become trivial.
We hearken back to the boy who cries wolf and the identity warrior crying fascist as he is guarding his flock.
It is like whoever guards the victims decides to shout down any unwelcome visitor that wants a piece of the action.
It is like a cult leader who keeps his subjects away from their families and the real world. There is anger and mistrust – not only do people take different opinions personally, they take them politically.
So people’s personal and private behavior is of political importance, in the same way, that their actions in public life are. This means that people’s private behavior becomes a legitimate target for public scrutiny and political criticism.
How anyone can’t see this as a destructive dynamic is beyond me.
https://soundcloud.com/groundzeromedia/love-and-politics-american-style-february-14-2020
