Alienation

[DaveT]

Alienation, noun

1. the act of alienating, or of causing someone to become indifferent or hostile:
The advocacy group fights against prejudice and social alienation of immigrants.

2. the state of being alienated, withdrawn, or isolated from the objective world, as through indifference or disaffection:
the group's alienation from mainstream society.

In American history, there have been several great transformations produced by political protest movements -- abolition, suffrage, the Populists, labor, civil rights, women's rights, gay rights. Please forgive me for overlooking other examples of popular pressure forcing changes in how we live. Although we have not brought about Heaven on Earth, real change has occurred on many fronts due to protest. There is plenty more to protest and there are no final victories in life -- but we do have a lot of history behind us showing that the ugliest of human habits like chattel slavery can be ended if and when millions of people take concerted action.

Each of these movements required decades, sometimes even generations, to achieve victory.

How do you hold a movement together for long, lonely years of struggle without victory? The most successful protest campaigns share one feature -- alienation from the mainstream of the culture. You need millions of people to be indifferent to the Respectable Opinion of the Day, which always acts like abomination is normal; that owning another human being is a reasonable way to allocate human resources; that women are too weak minded to vote; that unions are a criminal conspiracy against the public; that Jim Crow is nothing but a manifestation of State's Rights and a necessity for social cohesion; that women are inherently subservient to men; that homosexuals are evil predators.

All of those campaigns began with a "realistic" consensus telling them that they had no prayer of changing anything -- that they were going against common sense and against human nature.

That poses the fundamental test of any social movement -- can you mobilize masses of people to behave in a way that friends, neighbors, and parents all regard as an embarrassment, at best, and depraved, at worst? First and foremost, you must develop an alternative narrative -- an alienated world view -- that holds the protest together. This leads to "underground" networks of communication that consider what you get from the established voices in society to be a pack of lies. It is not enough for people to have a cynical distrust of the Powers That Be. The movement needs its own version of The News.


Today on Democratic Underground, there is an excellent OP that notes how the Main Stream Media refuses to call anyone a terrorist who happens to be white skinned. And, we continue to be frustrated how domestic terrorism by right wing white people is "reported." Why should that be a surprise now? How many whoppers does it take to make us realize that we are in the same kind of fight that William Lloyd Garrison fought; that Eugene Debs fought; that Martin King fought.

Thirteen years after starting a war over "Weapons of Mass Destruction," we are told that we must continue that war because these new guys are EVEN WORSE than Saddam Hussein. We have been arming guys that they tell with us with a straight face are "Moderate Rebels." Even as their lies are exposed, the people in power who tell them remain in place to tell new lies.

You see thread after thread after thread that debunk all manner of lies told by our government, our major corporations and our mass media outlets.


At some point you have to make up your mind about all this. If you really believe that everything is pretty much rolling along in a normal way, you have to pretend that there is no pattern to all the lies. I can't do that any more. The pattern is too clear and the historical parallels are too similar for me to pretend that I do not see the big picture.

Once you embrace your alienation, the path ahead is obvious if not particularly appealing -- we have build an underground movement that does not worry about getting the approval of the main stream culture. Like the abolitionists through to our brothers and sisters from Black Lives Matter, we are in a continuing fight for the future.

We must not let the "realists" discourage, deter or otherwise make us believe that this is the way it has to be.

[2naSalit]

1. I have been in a constant state

of what might be called horror since W.Cheney took office in tandem... I guess I am just used to it now. I try to encourage citizen ownership and educate others about our responsibilities and our survival being intertwined yet I often feel as though I am speaking from within a glass walled sound-proof booth.