Activist Paul Street is not impressed with the American public's apathy

© 2017 Peter Free

 

08 September 2017

 

 

Losers all?

 

Political activist Paul Street recently wrote that:

 

 

I am struck by the bloodless social and political indifference and lethargy of millions upon millions of my fellow Americans.

 

Tyranny feeds on mass apathy and docility as much as it does on the marshaling of dark and reactionary forces.

 

Every week, it seems, [President Trump] comes forward with new threats and offenses to basic civilizational decency.

 

Look at recent events: the crazy game of thermonuclear chicken Trump continues to play with Kim Jong Un; the . . . cover Trump gave to the Nazis and other white supremacists in Charlottesville; the president’s threat to “shut down the federal government” if Congress doesn’t pay for his criminally idiotic and racist border wall; his granting of an early . . . pardon to diabolical Joe Arpaio, the former longtime racist-fascist sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County.

 

The federal bench is being remade in the image of the radically reactionary and arch-regressive Federalist Society.

 

Financial regulations are being rolled back along with environmental, consumer and civil rights protections. Trump is doing everything he can to slash health coverage for poor people short of his failed efforts to repeal Obamacare . . . while he angles to pass a plutocratic tax cut for the rich in a nation where the top tenth of the upper 1 percent already has as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent.

 

The worst and least discussed part of the Trump outrage may be the White House’s climate change-denialist commitment to the deregulation of energy and the dismantling of environmental protections.

 

Meanwhile, as Houstonians struggle to recover from an epic storm clearly rooted in [global warming], Trump proposes to lop off $667 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). His budget slashes disaster preparedness and response programs and FEMA’s pre-disaster mitigation program.

 

Trump and his noxious cadres of sociopathic ecology-wreckers and plutocratic racists calculate that masses of good Americans are so pervasively indifferent, self-absorbed . . . preoccupied, distracted, diverted, disinterested and demobilized that they can get away with just about anything while pounding his ugly and angry white base to make the world yet more precarious and vile.

 

There’s something else that Trump counts on: mass acceptance of the childish notion that going into a two . . . party ballot box for two minutes once every two or four years is a great and glorious exercise in popular self-rule.

 

© 2017 Paul Street, The Silence of the Good People, TruthDig (06 September 2017) (excerpts)

 

 

It is difficult to argue factually with Paul Street's main points

 

Essentially, a lot of "bad shit" (for common people) is visibly surfacing, while most of those same folk sit around with the thumbs up their you-know-whats.

 

 

The moral? — There may be none

 

If people are so complacently aquiescent as to allow the "orange tinted beast" (Mr. Street's description of our Commander in Chief) to wreak mayhem at their expense, why should anyone care?

 

I ask myself that daily. The contrast between Germany's public (among whom I recently lived for some years) and the United States' could not be more stark.

 

My impressionistic sense is that American civilization (to describe whatever we have too grandly) has done itself in via lack of attention. The results of what we took for granted may eventually kill or imprison us.

 

Freedom's Mantle seems to have moved on to more conscientious people(s).