I really wasn't planning on spending my senior years under a new form of government-

[islandmkl]

96. your OP has been hi-jacked, triangulated, and suffered from way too many deflective responses...

the ONLY FUCKING REASON we got any 'social' changes was because people put their asses on the line, over and over, and finally swayed not only the public but the entrenched PTB to make changes...

goddam triangulation only stalled things, trying to get the RW Repubs to go along, and thus having things drag out for years...

the fact that some 'social change' events have happened since, pick a fucking year, 1968 - 1972 - 1992 - 2000 - 2008... is because of all the effort that was put in to found the bases for those changes...by people who were not afraid of the power structure, were not willing to accept the slow changes that never would come...not because, out of nowhere, a bunch of Congressmen and a President or two decided 'lets make a major change in some of these things'...

of course, there are people whose myopic view of history precludes their ability to know and understand struggle...

yeah, how many of these posters went through the Viet Nam era THEMSELVES...?...and if any of them don't realize what the clamor in the streets, on the campuses, in towns and cities, had to do with that fucking debacle being brought to a close...well, that explains their comfort in the Third Way/DLC way of things...

it has been said, and accurately, the the Viet Nam protest was just that..a protest...it was not a movement that had any reason to sustain itself once the war was stopped...notice i didn't say 'over'....

and now, we have a fucking 'volunteer' military, which in its initial days was seen as the 'inevitable demise' of the military...and, wouldn't you know, the MIC now has people who can't get out, who can get sent to any godawful place to kill and be killed and maimed, and not too many people are in the streets because...hey, you volunteered...and that's on you...apparently...

the one redeeming thing about a military draft is that, if everyone is eligible, then EVERYONE PAYS FUCKING ATTENTION and instead of being keyboard commandos, they might actually get out in the street and stop all this bullshit...

same for the trade agreements, Wall Street bailouts, Wall Street breaking the economy, NSA spying on EVERYTHING, elections being stolen, corporations taking everything and passing all the money to the top, infrastructure failing while Congress figures out a way to cut every fucking thing that might be of benefit to the average citizen so they can help transfer wealth to the top 1%, a climate that is out of control...and endless WAR, endless killing, endless regime changing, endless growth of the military...and diminishing support for the people who are merely cannon fodder for the industrialists who profit from war...

and on and on....

yeah, 50 or 60 years ago wasn't always so great...but we went out and tried to make things change...

we didn't have the luxury of the internet, anonymous posting, don't-get-our-hands-dirty, commenting-and-complaining-and-acting-like-i'm-really-involved...criticizing those who KNOW what it takes to make this fucking monolith of a society, this cast iron government, this BATTLE between the oligarchs and the common people, this effort it takes to make even small changes...it has never been by taking baby steps and not upsetting the fucking apple cart...

those 'incremental' steps you want to take?....they will have you taking them for years and years and one day you'll notice...well, maybe, but then again, maybe not...you haven't moved one goddam step closer to where you wanted to go...

but, you will have the comfort of the lies they told you....and you can go online and reflect how it wasn't so bad after all, once you got used to it...

an old saying from the anti-war days: "if you haven't been teargassed, haven't had a cop or Guard chase you down the street and have to duck their swinging batons, if you haven't stood up to a line of them and refused to move, if you haven't been sent to jail...well hell...you are just complaining...not protesting."