our demands for a general strike
every successful strike needs demands; otherwise, you don't know when you've won
rise up through the cracks — by flightlessblrbs
i often think the most damaging cult in the world might be the united states.
this country is built around white men stealing shit and killing people who won’t submit to their delusional belief of superiority. our nation is based on a pile of lies, which, by now, you cannot unsee, unless you pluck out your own eyes and shove them into your ears, for good measure. these absolute shit-gibbons built an entire ass legal system to make sure no one could check them, and here we all are, walking into the midterms (with their racism and their cheating right out in the open), still believing in the superiority of our government. our stockholm’s syndrome is truly something to behold. anyhow, these are signs of a cult:
absolute authoritarianism without accountability: the united states regularly violates international law and commits human rights abuses with impunity on the global stage.
zero tolerance for criticism or questions: in fact, the united states dares you to call them out on it, and when you do, some three-letter agency stalks you like you’re an enemy of the state for demanding a humane government that doesn’t develop adversarial relationships its own people.
lack of meaningful financial disclosure regarding the budget: when has the united states pentagon ever passed an audit? why do billionaires buy our politicians, rig our representative democracy, steal our tax dollars to enrich themselves, then hold themselves above the law— and bail out the very people who abuse the system?
unreasonable fears about the outside world that often involve evil conspiracies and persecutions: how many times have we been told we “they hate us for our freedoms”? how many times have you been told that the united states is uniquely “blessed” by a divine power, casting aspersions about the worthiness of our global neighbors? how many times have you been asked, on loop, to fear some cultural outsider whose state-sanctioned scapegoating is then used to further entrench a surveillance state?
a belief that former followers are always wrong for leaving, and there is never a legitimate reason for anyone else to leave: think of how the united states treats people in the country who try to organize a better life— how they either find themselves dead, imprisoned, or run out of the country for the audacity of calling the united states on its bluff of being some beacon of freedom.
abuse of members: our politicians allow our kids in public schools to get murdered, our politicians deny us healthcare while giving it to themselves and allowing profiteering off our deaths, our law enforcement executes us in the streets, our government allows our economic system to exploit workers, our government criminalizes homelessness, our government criminalizes people’s bodily autonomy, our government racially profiles and systematically executes our Black neighbors, our government breaks treaty after treaty with First Nations, our government believes men deserve more pay and more rights and less accountability than any other gender, our government sends our children to fight wars under false pretenses to enrich insiders, our government treats gender-expansive people as sub-human, our government lynches Black people, our government abducts people off the streets and puts them in concentration camps, our government threatens journalists, our government tear-gasses community organizers, our government actively covers for the perpetrators of a decades-long child rape and sex-trafficking ring.
records, books, articles, or programs documenting the abuses of the leader or group: scores of documentaries have been made, trees felled, ink shed, and blood spilled to document the serial abuse of agents of the united states government. such criminal behavior is rarely, if ever, met with accountability— and those who demand it face state-sanctioned annihilation.
followers feel that they are never able to be “good enough”: our politicians grift off our hard labor, insulating themselves from the hellscape that create in our daily lives, and then have the audacity to say that, if we’re struggling, we’re not working hard enough and deserve our suffering.
a belief that the leader is right at all times: the united states is one of the most heavily propagandized countries on the planet, and they intentionally starve the people in this country of quality education, accurate history, and access to learn additional languages, because they don’t want us to be able to know the truth of how much harm the united states government perpetrates at home and abroad.
a belief that the leader is the exclusive means of knowing “truth” or giving validation: in fact, we are encouraged to be suspicious of education, of travel to other countries, of socializing with people of culture, of cavorting with labor organizers and community mobilizers, and of any evidence, gathered with our own eyes, ears, and hearts, that might challenge our country’s narcissistic image of itself.
i’m not saying this to throw in the towel. i’m saying this to snap us out of the mass delusion that this country wasn’t born through fascism. while the nuance is palpable, this isn’t the problem of a single party but of a system bought by billionaires, rigged by criminals, and armed to the teeth. that you haven’t been experiencing this until quite recently yourself doesn’t invalidate the suffering of your neighbors. i’m also telling you this because one cannot simply vote one’s way out of a cult.
i’m also not saying “don’t vote,” btw. do vote, please, in numbers so large that the cheating couldn’t be more obvious. because it needs to finally be obvious to people just how rat-fucked this situation is for them to imagine mobilizing outside the system that has been weaponized against us, from cradle to grave.
what i am saying is that we must begin preparations, immediately, to be able to hold a national strike, for as long as it takes, when it becomes clear (at long last) that these people don’t give a good goddamn what regular people want.
our demands, because there is no successful strike without demands, need to be something like this:
(1) the removal of an illegitimate and lawless executive branch with a bipartisan group of governors who temporarily serve as replacements and hold the government steady until the united states can hold free and fair elections— observed by our international peers to prevent interference, (2) close the concentration camps and free all those who have been unjustly imprisoned by white supremacists, (3) restore the VRA and pass an LGBT- inclusive ERA, (4) prosecute and seize the assets of all the billionaires, corporations, and government officials who colluded in the coup and absorbing that money into a treasury with direct public oversight, (5) release the trump-epstien files and give every last one of them a life-sentence for crimes against humanity, (6) end the war in iran and stop arming a genocidal state, (7) prosecute every perpetrator of war crimes and human rights abuses in international court, (8) shut down all data centers, (9) demilitarize all law enforcement and funnel the money that went to creating a police state into services for vulnerable communities and people impacted by climate catastrophe, (10) universal housing, healthcare, childcare, education, and income— funded by taxing billionaires out of existence.
i’m not a founder of some revolution. i’m an exhausted middle-aged community college teacher, who is tired of seeing the communities i love and teach and organize alongside be eaten alive by the united states government.
you and i are not disposable.
this abuse must end.
unless, of course, you want your water drained, your sons sent to war, your trans kids in jail, and your daughters’ periods tracked by a twisted gay billionaire with an antichrist fixation and a penchant for genocide.
then, by all means, kick the can down the road to your children and children’s children, who will have even less rights and access to livable life than you and i do.
we must be the adults in the room.
but that requires leaving the cult.
Universal rent strike, mortgage and student loan payment freeze. General strike next; my reasons for suggesting this is that demanding that people miss work, for as long as it takes, unless you are entirely ready to feed them (and their children) may be more hardship than people are prepared to endure....yet. Also creates a gap in which to prepare relief efforts.
Yes to all this and a strike would do the trick but until we are angry enough to accomplish a successful strike and willing to make the hard sacrifices that would be required then I suggest we also organize focused boycotts, starting with Amazon. Our power is economic.