9/30/20

By Josh Rubin

When those we are against behave as horribly as those we now face, knowing what we are against is easy. We are against racism and xenophobia, and we are against a terrorist government that encourages terrorism by paramilitary groups and more official arms of terror like ICE and CBP, whose persecution of the poor and brown and black make them easy to hate.

What we are for is clear in the abstract, but we are forced to be more nuanced by the tremendous weight of our opposition, and its outsized inertia. It will take more than our few pebbles slung in the right direction to do more than irritate the Goliath of greed in our way. Which is not to say that the enemy won’t notice us. They just might, and they are dangerous when challenged.

So we begin making compromises that owe to our weakness, and then make others to try to grow our forces. We seek allies from among those that think all we need is a bit of a course correction along the merry way toward a just world, peopled by the well-intentioned. We appeal to the courts and the law, for instance, as if the courts and the law were not securely in the pockets of the powerful. And sometimes we vote for nice guys, all in the hope that they will keep their running dogs leashed.

I love dogs, by the way. The dogs I mean are the ones with helmets, mace, and clubs and guns. The ones that wage terror.

And we should compromise, we must. Those we defend live only one life, and we cannot, on some sort of purity principle, sacrifice that life to our ambition, no matter how virtuous. So, vote that bastard out, and those other bastards, too.

But let’s not lose sight of our ambition, and our enemies.