“It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.”
By Sam Husseini
Shortly after James Baldwin’s death, Toni Morrison eulogized him: “I never heard a single command from you, yet the demands you made on me, the challenges you issued to me, were nevertheless unmistakable.”
I can’t be as gentle as Baldwin, I’m making a more direct demand, if not command, of my readers. Why? MLK said the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. I’m not so sure. I hear person after person say that Israel is doomed to fail. That a resurgent colonialism is doomed to collapse.
I don’t know that. Colonialism succeeded in the USA. Horrifically.
It is now taking on new forms, including well beyond Palestine.
The Israeli Davos darling, Yuval Noah Harari, calls humans “hackable animals”.
One aspect of that hack is false choices.
This is epitomized by the phoniness of the electoral “choice” between Team Red and Team Blue. A process that pundifies the public, turning citizens into serfs.
I attempt to thwart that hack by getting would-be Trump voters and would-be Harris voters to pair up and both vote for non-genocidal candidates. That’s my VotePact.org strategy.
The demand that I attempt to make of my readers is to give me bona fide pairings. Real-life people who break free of the establishment by relying upon each other. Love over hate. That’s what I outline in this interview on VotePact:
VotePact I believe has the potential to grow exponentially. It could lead in a viral way to an independent candidate actually winning the election. The first pairings are the hardest, then they can tell two friends, and so on and so on and so on per this commercial from my childhood….
But many — including many around the so-called “uncommitted” movement who are tacitly backing Harris — are used to their chains. They have been, as Red in the Shawshank Redemption warned, institutionalized:
“These walls are funny. First you hate ’em, then you get used to ’em. Enough time passes, gets so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized. … They send you here for life, that’s exactly what they take. The part that counts, anyways.”
This duopoly has ruled for my whole life. It’s caused disaster after disaster.
I’ve spent most of my life frantically trying to stop disaster after disaster.
Unless confronted, this false set of choices will rule for another hundred years, if humanity has that in it.
And over time it gets worse and worse. If the system knows you have nowhere else to go, why shouldn’t it get get worse and worse. Why shouldn’t it disregard your views more and more.
We have people serving powerful institutions that are supposed to serve them. People may literally be in need of being institutionalized to get out of this mindset. I should perhaps become a therapist.
If readers were to rise to the challenge, they would turn to those in their lives, create a pairing and then cause person after person to team up.
They would effectively immolate together. Burn through their egos and assert their truest selves.
If there’s no one in your life (and I doubt that) the website BreakTheDuopoly.com is pairing people up.
This would ripple through the society, causing a transpartisan grassroots revolution using the ballot box.
The alternative may be a lifetime of serfdom and the assurance of further disasters.
As James Baldwin himself said: “It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.”
The author graciously has granted this website permission to reprint selected essays.
The views and/or opinionis expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of APS Radio News or of its affiliate, APS Radio.
The author’s essay appeared originally at his Substack page.
