While some people have been celebrating these things, other people have been trying to make excuses for them and still others have been watching them unfold with a horrified look on their faces. We’ve heard lots of people giving their own opinions on who is to blame. Jonathan Pie thinks the left are at fault. Others blame the voting public (and the non-voting public). Yet more blame media bias. Something to me seems obvious – this clusterfuck has been brought on by a combination of all these things and more.
It’s true when you tell a pro-lifer they’re stupid and full of shit they tend not to want to debate you. It’s true if you call someone worried about unchecked immigration a racist prick it is unlikely to change their mind, or even make them stop to think. It’s true we need to engage with people who think differently. The problem is I’m not sure evidence and facts really work as well as they once did. Lies are told blatantly and repeatedly by the press and the powerful, but they don’t seem to care because by the time it is inescapable, they’re already on to the next lie.
But. While the best thing for the press in all its current forms would be to piss off up its own wretched arse, it is only partly to blame. Farage, Trump, Murdoch and co are only partly to blame. You can’t have a proper democracy without an informed and engaged populace. It is undeniable that some people are wilfully ignorant and purposefully deaf to attempts to engage. People that can be presented with hard evidence of climate change and claim that it’s just a Chinese hoax and that burning more coal is obviously the answer (seriously, America, what were you thinking?) It is every person’s responsibility to ensure they are aware of all sides of the debate, to at least make an effort to see the other side. To be open to the possibility that just because you’ve always voted one way, it doesn’t mean the current incarnation of your party has your best interests at heart. If you ensure your only source of news is the Daily Mail or the Guardian because they fit best with your worldview, then you are part of the fucking problem. Stop being part of the fucking problem and get yourself a balanced view of the world from multiple sources that aren’t just interested in reporting events through their own distorted ideological prism.
It isn’t really a case of left and right – few politicians have turned out to be quite so Tory as the warmongering, bank deregulating Blair and Brown show, and Hilary Clinton was so far up Wall Street’s arse she probably couldn’t smell her own rank hypocrisy. If you want a genuine change, this is not what you vote for. Of course, the change that President Fartfeathers represents is entirely the wrong sort, and, given the choice, I’d take the more of the same that Clinton would have been and the minimum wage that Nu-Labour introduced over the legacy of needless austerity we’ve been living with recently any day.
I know it doesn’t do you any good to spent lots of time stressed and anxious about what you can’t change, but this year it has been particularly hard, and I can’t really see things improving much any time soon. Maybe I can find a way to move to a little town overlooking a mountain lake or something. Maybe the people who are more like the species of human I remember are all hiding out there.
New occasional feature: Ending with a song relating to the post:
Pixies: Caribou: “This human form, where I was born, I now repent.”
