Keep looking down and mocking and insulting people who are responding to the trauma of the last few years differently to you.
You just keep on doing that.
Keep cheering on the censorship that, ten years ago, you would have at least given a token amount of lip service to fighting.
Keep policing people’s choice, brand and quality of mask – whether they can afford them or breathe in them or not. Keep giving sneers and eyeballs towards people whose story and reasoning you haven’t bothered to learn.
Keep doing that.
You’ll just keep sending them into the loving arms of right wing extremism far quicker, where, believe me, Clive Palmer is the least of your concerns, and people like me are constantly trying to reverse the damage you are doing to people on the ground.
Keep blocking, ignoring and not engaging vulnerable people who have legitimate upsets and fears but may have the wrong end of the stick about who the enemy is and where the threat lies.
Keep punching down on those who are looking to you to not only tell them but show through your actions that it’s going to be okay, destroying any faith they once had that we’d have their back.
Keep blaming workers and small business owners for being angry over abandonment by those that have pretended to care, after decades of empty platitudes, Instagram posts about #kindness and #gratitude, and a trail of broken promises of change and hope.
Keep doing that.
But never consider what you have become.
Keep ordering Uber Eats, who have the audacity to #thank us for our #support whilst taking pretty much all of the margins from small business destroyed by the pandemic… and …Uber Eats. But so long as the poor driver is socially distanced from you and your Mee Goreng, and none of them dare make eye contact or talk to you about conspiracy theories or you’ll get them fired. Nevermind that it is the only thing that maybe gives them the reassurance they need to justify bringing you your food for next to no money.
Because firing anti-vaxxers is what good people do. You’re a good person. Your Facebook friends said so.
Keep scolding the people who have the least power, who live outside of your seemingly beloved yet psychopathic institutions, processes, paperwork and impenetrable media and academic caste systems.
Keep making people feel like shit for being curious, or having the smallest understanding of history. Keep smirking at those with a healthy and absolutely justified mistrust of power on that basis. Especially yours.
Keep conveniently ignoring the fact that the left asked people to be suspicious of the conduct of Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Monsanto and the Military-Industrial complex led by the United States government, but now when they believe us; you punish and and abandon them because it is convenient, or costs you something, now that you have built nice careers out of talking about human suffering, whilst those people who suffer are left behind.
Keep believing that ones and zeroes are the only information that matters, whilst billionaires send unsolicited capitalist sky dick pics to our eyes and ears. Keep ignoring, conveniently, that the men who literally own all of the information in the world can’t even use it to read a goddamn room.
Keep being a cheerleader for the powerful, whilst punching down to impress them. Keep hoping that you might be invited into the club if you make the lives of the curious or skeptical a living hell. Just make sure you don a #rainbow flag as you do it, and maybe nobody will notice.
Keep being awful; because there are troll farms and Facebook groups and subreddits and email lists to greet them where you continually fail to show up and meet them where they are.
Keep doing that.
But never consider what you have become.
Keep punching down on the vulnerable (who outnumber you 100 to 1), because they’ll eventually find friends who care about them even less than you do, but will absolutely pretend they do, using the fact that you abandoned them as soon as you secured a nice life for yourself to convince them that you are their enemy and that the only solution is to be armed and dangerous and on the streets.
Which, honestly, I’m starting to wonder if that IS what you want, because you can scapegoat everyone else without ever having to confront that you’ve become complicit in the institutional bullying and abuse of power that you once said you cared about – right up until you became that institution’s bitch.
You’ll never have to ask how you became this person, never examine your politics and to avoid being judged by your actions, not your words or theoretical quibbling.
Keep assuming your way works, in an election year.
Keep losing and losing and losing and blaming the other guy so long as you never look at who you have become.
Keep writing the same empty slogans, to the same bubble of fellow sloganeers, with the same corporate backing, using the exact same institutional power and patronising tone that has subjected everyone but the very fortunate to the most egregious psychological, physical economic and emotional abuse on behalf of the state that will take an entire generation, maybe two, to win back public trust.
And this is regardless of how you feel about the fucking masks or vaccines or lockdowns, for crying out bloody loud.
This isn’t about the issue.
This is about you, what you keep doing and who you have become.
Keep on assuming that wealth, power, big fancy words and jargon equals correctness and keep thinking that being ethical means having received a High Distinction for an essay on Kant in 1999.
Keep writing impenetrably dull papers and think pieces about semantics and quibbles and definitions of words and about how that guy you don’t see as legitimate said a thing you don’t like when he is one of the few people they trust… because you are fixating on him for clicks and dollars when people are suffering right in front of your face.
Keep thinking your #selfiesforthepoor make you a good person.
Keep thinking the people that are hurting don’t know how much money you make off the back of their pain and trauma. Keep thinking they don’t see what you leave out and what you prioritise and how you never examine what you’ve become.
Keep assuming that if people are incorrect or don’t use the right fancy words, that they don’t have something insightful or important to say, or know something about their experience that the spreadsheets leave out.
Keep sitting idly by watching powerful and influential people sadistically humiliate and publicly torment those who are simply lashing out from pain, fear and trauma the only way they know how. Keep pretending that those who do this are not still sadistic bullies simply because you happen to agree with their position, and keep demonising people like me who come to their defence.
And be honest with yourself why you do.
Keep doing what you’re doing.
It’s worked a treat so far.
Or, the professional left could actually get out from behind our desks, from behind our broadsheets, and defend the vulnerable like we once claimed to do.
We could actually go to these communities, talk to people, get to know them – or take the time to look up from that human being you see as a fucking data point on a graph, brought to you by Dick Rockets and Soylent Green Incorporated.
Or, you know, you could keep sending them into the loving arms of fascism and subjecting the poor to abuse of the criminal justice system, just like the left have always done, all because you refuse to see that they are begging you for help and a little bit of compassion… and you keep kicking them in the face.
And so you can ignore what you have become.
Keep doing that. It’s not like that’s how fascism rises. You know what you’re doing, and you keep doing it without ever looking at who who have become. You know best, like the bureaucrats, socialists and academics who had it all handled the last time. I mean, if the conditions were set for a repeat of history, you’d absolutely know about it, and it definitely wouldn’t be you who enables it, because you sit at the desk, and you sign off the policy and you know everything. The spreadsheet didn’t say so. You have this under control because the Dick Rocket Guy and Lean In Lady said so and you just need to keep your head down and do your job, and control the flow of information and demonise and scapegoat groups of people, including socialists.
You have this under control.
It’s under control because you haven’t seen it… mostly because you’ve blocked them all and ignore everything you disagree with. But hey, you’d know if something was up. Fascists don’t wear suits. Fascism is an ideology and you bought a cupcake on RUOK Day and bought a Red Nose and cancelled your Spotify Subscription.
Jesus.
Get your shit together.
Stop blaming Joe Rogan and fucking microaggressions in workplaces most people would dream of working in and ask not why people trust Joe Rogan but how the hell you LOST their trust (and therefore, your credibility and your authority).
Stop blaming the poor and vulnerable and unwell and uneducated for YOUR failures. Stop blaming everyone else but yourselves and your refusal to see that you are now so out of touch; so detached from both your original politics and your humanity that you’ve likely become the very thing you seem to believe you’re fighting.
Keep doing what you’re doing, so long as you never, EVER, have to face what you’ve become.