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About Messaging... [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-05-31
There was an article recently suggesting that democratic messaging was why we lost the vote. Many people commenting on said diary supported this notion despite the interjections of more ‘marginalized’ people countering with comments about our lived experience and why our representation matters.
As I see it, the problem is not that Democratic politicians paid lip service to just causes, the causes of equality. The problem was that the far right, backed by billionaires, alchemized ammunition out of the morally- and scientifically-just cause of equality. That’s not a problem of the message.
In the case of some Democrats merely paying electoral lip service to these issues without a deeper commitment to them, that’a problem of pretense. It’s also the problem of a well-funded PR machine, backed by a relative few, that mangled the cause of equality to the masses to scapegoat those who struggle for equality.
They did so to divide the populace against one another so that they could gain more power in order plunder the country to enrich themselves. They’re living out a supremacist dream that is a nightmare for the rest of us.
INEQUALITY is what’s holding us back. Inequality allows that us lower-class human beings are unable to halt a business practice that is cooking our planet and us along with it; inequality is what allows a self-selected minority to keep burning fossil fuels. Inequality is what prevents us from stopping manufacturers from churning out megatons of plastics that devolve into microplastics that invade our bodies and nearly every inch of our planet. Inequality is what licenses wars that kill civilians, that kill children.
It wasn’t always thus. I studied anthropology for years. For about 50,000 years prior to our current state, our prehistoric ancestors founded and developed societies that were egalitarian and highly functional. Not perfect but equal.* This present, egregious inequality started less than 10,000 years ago. We went from believing in animistic spirits and the wholeness of each other to being forced to live under a striated ranking system.
This forced striation is baked into our culture with notions of monotheism and omnipotence invested in one person or class of people - those who hoard and form security forces to protect their hoard. This snowballed into authoritarianism and leads to police states with wholly artificial but enforced class divisions.
For centuries some of us have been forced to live as mere FRACTIONS of those who claim superiority to us, who claim that only they are whole. So, when anyone admonishes us now that we should wait for our cause - that we should neuter our tone and the words we use to describe our condition, our struggle, ourselves - you are, whether you realize it or not, suggesting we be okay with living as a fraction of the person we really are. We’re being told by people born into one of the fuller values society sorts us into, to accept being less valued.
What can we do to fix this? We can study the peoples’ history. We can introspect instead of telling others to stop talking about the reality of their lives because it makes us uncomfortable and feels off-putting to us. We can ask ourselves why we find another person’s struggle for equality off-putting. We can look inside and challenge the notions we hold that impede others’ equality. At the very least, we can stop telling oppressed people to stand down with their truth and the vital, personal need for full liberty and full personhood.
As for us, we don’t need your permission to fight for our equality. Deep down, we know we’re equal. Thank you.
*Women’s Evolution by Evelyn Reed/The Golden Bough by James George Frazer
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