Are you left wing or right wing?

What wing are you on? Are you a Democrat or Republican? A Liberal or a Conservative?

Here’s a wild concept. You are neither! Imagine that. There’s more to you than two narrowly defined ideologies. You are not an independent either. You’re just a person. Same as me, same as everyone else. And even if you are one of those people who rigidly defines yourself by being left or right. Even if you do envelope yourself with strictly right or left wing blogs, news sources, punditry, philosophy and perspective. Even if you are completely incapable of believing anything or saying anything you haven’t been told to by your respective left or right wing sources. Even if you have absolutely no ability to form your own opinions, ideals and morality…

Here’s something to consider:

It doesn’t matter if you’re left or right wing when the plane is on fire and spiraling uncontrollably into an active volcano.

And make no mistake people of earth. The plane! The plane! The plane is on fire!

To this, most people and ‘leaders’ on earth reply: “We don’t need no water, let the mother fucker burn!”

But no, I’m afraid we really do need water, and unfortunately it appears as if the only way we’ll get it is if the plane veers right of the volcano and crashes into the ocean. Then we can swim around for a bit, squabble over the chunks of floating wreckage and wait for the sharks, starvation and thirst to take us down. Maybe we can throw in some cannibalism too, just for good measure!

Please make no mistake, this is not something I am trying to prevent, or hope to curb with this blog… I’m an observationalist (I don’t care if that’s not a real word, it should be.) I try to observe the world objectively and in this case I am making a prediction, if anything. Honestly, if you are looking for comprehensive answers and solutions to the problems of mankind in a single blog entry from a 24 year old, then you are many times more hopeless than even my most misanthropic view of human beings. Which I will discuss in much more detail in upcoming posts. So if you’re here to scream and shout in the comments “Well what the fuck is your solution then asshole?” Please, by all means, go away and never return.

Back to point. What is supposed to be a system of governance is now a game. Those that are supposed to be acting as representatives of our beliefs, our needs and our desires, are now telling us what we believe, need and desire. Or, more accurately, convincing us through massive amounts of advertising, blatantly puppeteered punditry and media. Driving the wedge further between us, painting the canvass with only black and white… draining the color from our lives and our self. There is no longer what we say, there is only what we’re told. Just to be clear, I’m with George Carlin on many things, but this especially… let’s not pretend that the answer lies in the past. That there was some mystical time years, decades, generations ago when things were so much better that we need to get back to.

There was no such time.

In many respects, they sucked even more. The past and the present are important, but they far too often overshadow what should be tantamount: setting achievable and rational objectives, and taking concrete progressive steps towards them.

How many of these big problems that persist day in and day out, that we are all aware of, that get debated year in and year out, that are in every newspaper, on every newscast, on every panel and every platform… could so easily and swiftly be dealt with, by just stripping away the nonsense. By a frank discussion of what is actually going on. By a severe and brutal assessment of the facts, the problems and the required steps towards solutions.

Your vote doesn’t count. Because you have no say in what you are voting for. You are told that you believe one thing, or you believe the opposite. You take one side, or you take the other. If you don’t, you are dismissed and marginalized with terminology like:

fringe, independent, third party, unpopular opinion, conspiracy, wacko, loser, deadbeat, non-contributor

“If you don’t vote then you have no right to complain” is a mindless cliche I hear thrown around all the time. This handy bit of regurgitated nonsense is usually first heard from the lips of parents or other authority figures and embedded in a young, impressionable human brain. It is not a useful or intelligent thought. It is, like all cliches, a nugget that people spit out in conversations because they know others will inevitably nod in agreement as if something has been said. “Yep, aint that the truth.”

No.

It’s not even close to the truth. It’s an empty slogan. It’s a new age ad campaign. Words with no meaning. It’s a way to feel like you belong. There is nothing more powerful in the human species than the need to feel accepted. The need to belong to a group. This is exactly how and why we can be played so easily against ourselves, dividing ourselves into these two camps. There is no ‘they’ consciously and intentionally doing this. That kind of thinking helps no one, addresses nothing and solves nothing. People give far too much credit to ‘them’. They don’t exist. You do. I do. They don’t. They don’t need to, because we do this to ourselves. We allow ourselves to buy into this left/right nonsense. The product is bullshit, and we’re the consumers.

And no, the answer isn’t a third or fourth or fifth hastily thrown together wave of new parties either. It’s not to weld on five or six more clumsy wing designs onto the same plane.

The plane is crashing. That is happening.

This mechanism is obsolete.

Time to go back to the design room.

Time to build a new kind of plane.

Or maybe a new mode of transportation altogether… a new destination and a new route.