History Will Not Treat Those Sleepwalking Through This Crisis Well
There’s a peculiar form of blindness that comes from prolonged safety. Like a frog in slowly heating water, people who have known only stability become incapable of recognizing existential th…
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Genuinely, what is the appropriate word for this?
In history, retrospectively I believe it was a "collaborator". But that to me does not evoke a sense of currency or anticipation of what is to come, which would be more helpful to us now.
Likewise the article suggests "complicit", but I have roughly the same problems with that.
Ultimately this smacks of "those who are not with me are against", which itself is vaguely similar to "the ends justify the means"... which is both obviously true and yet obviously so very not at the same time, presumably the difference lying in the circumstances where each applies or not.
There are people who voted against this. Then there are people who voted for it, but not for what will come as a result. Does it matter, in the end?
Thus I can't quite think of the right word, I guess bc the variations and nuances and subtleties paralyze me there in trying to come up with one. As I imagine is true for the nebulous "them" as well. Not that we should let that stop us, mind you: like Ukrainians fighting off the Russians, perhaps compassion is something that you offer when you can but not at the cost of doing what needs doing in the meantime.
And maybe that's why the word I am looking for is so hard to find: perhaps it doesn't exist at all, except in retrospect?
I don't know the word any more than you do, but a lot of catastrophes in previously-comfortable societies were enabled by a large amount of indifference by the people who if they'd been spurred to action would have been able to stop it.
Solzhenitsyn said that so many times, in the Gulag, he played it over in his head what he and people he knew should have done to resist, but they didn't do much of anything.
You are right of course, so what I say next is on top of rather than instead of that: those people could easily be said to include you and me. Like Bernie Sanders, who devoted his entire long life to fighting this... did he do "enough"? Is AOC doing "enough", by "merely talking"? Obviously Luigi tried, but it didn't work so was it "enough"?
It's so easy to get caught up in what others should or should not have done. What agonizes me these last few days, keeping me up at night, is what I should be doing. Which is not so simple as simply "fight back". If someone is both robbing a home and that house is also on fire, it is not enough to stop the one - you must also stop the other. So like, I'm no climate change researcher, but I can only imagine the hard choices they must face: "should I play along, and try to do something about the climate, or... just resign, or what?" People that do aid work, if they are somehow still there, should they continue to do aid work, bc it helps people who more desperately need it? What about people working inside the system - like tax season is coming up, should they quit or sabotage things so that people don't receive their refunds or what?
Okay so none of this is truly "sleepwalking", but it could look like that, from the outside? Someone making their own determination about whether they did "enough" is one thing - and ofc it's never going to be enough - but I could easily see someone labeling what someone else as done as not being "enough", and it's a slippery slope from there to McCarthyism.
Maybe - probably - I'm not helping here, bc there legit are people who not only are "sleepwalking" but I have actual family members and friends who are outright cheering it on. And no amount of quibbling over whether something is enough is going to compare to actually rooting and even asking for it to happen.
So to me, "sleepwalking" seems both to not go nearly far enough, and also to potentially go too far (in practice if not in theory), and in general it just seems not all that helpful to me to understand things.
As compared to watching such material as e.g. https://youtu.be/uqsBx58GxYY. Which ironically could lead to a charge of sleepwalking itself, bc staring intently into something as it happens is merely another way to excuse oneself from actually doing anything at all about it.
What am I doing? Attempting to Bee a bulwark against fascist bullshit. That's functionally what can be done. I can't exactly walk into the White House. The Fourth Estate has failed, so that's no longer an option.
Pay attention to those in your community and help where possible. As Scotty said, "it gets bumpy from here."
That's solid advice:-)
those people could easily be said to include you and me
IDK about you, but it definitely includes me. Like you, I don't really know what to do.
I went to a protest. I talk about it online. Mostly it's just watching it all burning, though. I feel like I need to be doing way more.
There's this:
We may soon be past the point where protests will have much effect. But not yet - most of what I'm saying is more for the future, while for now protests are absolutely helping:-).
I mean all kinds of things can have an effect. A lot of totalitarian regimes were overthrown starting from a way worse position than "Trump and Musk are in the White House and a lot of people are doing what they say." But also, the US is sleeping right now, and a lot of what it takes is just a shitload of people to be on your side. Right now they are not.
Of course that can change.
That's the thing: what is happening right now, is doing so at the behest of We The People - who shouldn't be wanting it to happen, but nevertheless, they DO.
I heard that Nixon's impeachment was similar. Before it happened people absolutely refused to believe it. Then when all the stuff came out, they were shocked, but they believed what the news media has said.
Since that time, the game has changed... people heard the facts about Trump, and refused to believe it or refused to care if they did. So long as the libs are sufficiently PWNed, it doesn't matter what else happens: we will continue to shoot ourselves in (previously) vital organs, just for spite.
Exactly as the people funding conservative media sources seem to want to happen...
Perhaps Quisling?
That is an interesting word - not "just" another word for collaborator but "Aurally it contrives to suggest something at once slippery and tortuous." - thanks for sharing:-)
