Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Example : the present rampantly destructive pattern of global trade flows. Both sets of American elites tout some version of a better world tomorrow through wider-open borders. But we all know -- or at least, judging by the polls, more know than don't – that this win-win parade is more like a nonstop go-everywhere raiding party that leaves huge lose-lose blocks of mortal souls in its wake. And its producers, the mighty transnational corporations, have been at this earth-wide rodeo-ing so long, and with so little durably effective opposition, that any set of progressive policies aimed at more then amelioration look like bath houses for sadistic blood sports. So re-taking the planet from the present management seems not only wildly daunting, but full of hideous choices.

Once you see that every corporate scam has taken hostages, millions of hostages, and has formed millions more human shields around themselves, one ends up realizing any road ahead -- I mean any road that runs really ahead, not just sideways into more of the same old shit, only worse -- will bulldoze huge masses of entirely un-culpable folks. Oceans of innocent blood will be spilt, and sweat poured out to no end, and all inevitably pitted against each other -- such is the harvest of our interdependent civilized integrated world.

Try to find a metric for carving that up, you would-be Benthams and Rawlses! Try weighing existing US wagelings against third world wannabe wagelings; or letting in more undocs, vs. letting more plants run away; or stripping more forests, vs. starving more peons.

These are not necessities that a proper pro-little-people cosmopolite can readily make, without a demonization kit to be used on one or the other set of mortal souls. My point? Ain't got one today. I had a stomach for it yesterday and I'll likely have one tomorrow again. On the world-historical scale, I don't stay Buridan's Ass for long.

But on occasional moments like now -- at the bottom of my mind's basin, the earth's present free-for-all commercial setup just makes me shake my head in grimbletudination.

These are not choices we face here and now -- they're ways to condemn ourselves to spiritual hell. But even as I write these last few words -- some weird Miltonic echo of Satan's up-against-it rally-hoo on that last day in heaven, facing that grotesquely overawing and charismatic Jesus battlewagon, lifts me up and back into the struggle.