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Second day on the front page and no thread I can find. There should be a link to a comments area already set up for each article posted as part of the website.
Anyway, in "liberal" Massachusetts I can't get anybody to even go hold a candle for Cindy Sheehan for half an hour. Revolution? Not until they take professional sports off TV and shut down NetFlix...
September 17, 2005
By TygrBright
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No, I'm not wearing a tinfoil hat. Crying wolf, exaggerating, awfulizing are not my normal idioms. But the evidence is piling up. Doesn't anyone else see it? It's not rocket science: Revolutions happen when a critical mass of the citizenry feel (not think, necessarily, but feel,) that they have no other way to secure the future they expect, the future to which they feel entitled, than to take direct action to make fundamental structural change in their government. Those expectations change from generation to generation, from place to place, and even from social stratum to social stratum. But when a sufficient number of people reach that conclusion, the change will happen.
America has been staving it off for some decades, now. We came very close to real revolution in the first quarter of the 20th Century; the Progressive movement and, ultimately, the New Deal reversed the tide. Post-WWII economic prosperity delayed it further, but things began to unravel again in the 1960s. The Great Society attempted to recapitulate the earlier success of the New Deal, but the haves and the have-mores didn't have enough conviction to sustain the momentum. The Reagan Reaction changed America's direction and began the slide back toward the levels of social inequity and frustration that foster revolution.
The 1990s may have briefly masked those conditions with a high fever of unsustainable capitalist expansion, but with the collapse of that bubble, the underlying problems have only become more acute. More and more Americans are starting to notice, and we will soon reach that critical mass. Disturbingly, the disaffection is now spreading so widely that small band-aid measures aimed at this group or that group are not only ineffective, they pose a risk of increasing dissatisfaction.
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Thus far, the controlling classes have been able to keep the critical mass from developing by setting these various groups against one another, fomenting class warfare amongst them and playing shell games with blame. But as conditions continue to deteriorate, the sustained fury a-building will forge alliances among key segments of each group. The critical mass will coalesce, perhaps with terrifying suddenness.
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