stalling because of enemies

It’s important to realise that these battles don’t come with a price. The price just happens to be hovering above my head at this current instant, but that’s besides the point.

Case in point: politics is a war, pitting no real side of winners against the other. Everyone loses in some way or another. Today my loss happens to be the accusation of racism, even if I know what I’ve accomplished in my term has been anything but and has always, ALWAYS, focused on doing the best and brightest I could muster.

The accusations will not stop, however. It’s easy to slap a label on someone who disagrees with one thing or another one says. The label could be varied; maybe it’s socialist this week, fag the next, racist the following morning. The point is, such labels do nothing but belittle the person who is making the labels.

The same applies to those of us on the left who are quick to lash out and point fingers and scream, “capitalist! neo-con! neo-liberal!” to everything that moves with the shadow of currency behind it. Not only in the end are our arguments belittled to nothing more than a rant, the respect we must earn in the minds of everyone ignorant to the real wars in our world is lost, if it was ever even present.

Rather, this world and this struggle will be built upon rationale, intelligence, and good sense when it comes to these arguments. It can’t be made by simplifying our enemies down to a label. We must know who and what stands in the way of an equality for all – is it their intentions to achieve wealth, or is it the motives they use to do it that is the problem? Certainly no one can find fault in the intentions, because usually even the most basic of capitalist has at heart some vague notion that for one to succeed in capitalism, someone else must fail. The point being, we can’t attack those who use faulty motives to achieve what they think is correct – we must attack the motives and at the same time educate them to the reasoning behind alternative goals.

Let’s start saving this planet through a simple means. The next time you go out for a meal, save 25 cents for a charity or community cause you believe in. This 25 cents, call it whatever you want to call it, but save it along with every other 25 cents you can when you go out for meals. My weekly savings will total a couple dollars most likely – and in a year, a couple hundred. Think of the difference we can all make by alloting some of our greed and consumption patterns (and that some is such a small amount) to those who really need it.

And don’t get bogged down because of the name-calling. There are too few daylight hours to use to end this struggle that can’t be wasted on such trivial matters.