There’s an old dad-joke that goes something like this: A bear jumps out of the woods, in a rage, and starts chasing two hikers. They both start running for their lives, but then one of them stops to put on his running shoes. “What are you doing?!,” the other hiker exclaims, “You can’t outrun a bear!”
To which the first hiker replies, “I don’t have to outrun the bear. I only have to outrun you.”
I was reminded of that bear joke this morning when I saw the video posted to Facebook by Kristin Mink, who recently confronted EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt in a restaurant about his record of environmental deregulation and open corruption, and urged him “to resign before [his] scandals push him out.” According to Mink, Pruitt walked away.
This comes on the heels of a number of other public confrontations by conscientious citizens fed up with not only Trump officials and GOP leaders, but also with the milquetoast DNC. Just last week, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia because the owner (and her staff) did not feel comfortable serving someone who worked for Trump. (SHS left, posted a “poor me!” tweet in response, and has since implicitly endorsed the mind-bogglingly hypocritical calls for civility from the Right.) Two weeks ago, Trump political advisor (and fascist) Stephen Miller had his dinner at a Mexican restaurant interrupted by a customer loudly exclaiming “Hey look guys! Whoever thought we’d be in a restaurant with a real-life fascist begging for money for new cages?” (Miller quickly scurried away.) And only a few days before the Miller incident, Homeland Security Director Kirstjen Nielson, who spends most of her time emulating Cruella De Vil, took a short break from spreading misery to dine out with her family at a Mexican restaurant, only to run into the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America, who regaled her with a list of her shames, and then shouted “Shame!” “Shame!” just to make sure she got the point. (Nielson also ran. Quelle surprise.)
There is a sizable population among the Left– the real Left, not the DNC— who see Uncivil Conscientious Citizens going toe-to-toe with these bloodsucking, shameless destroyers of democracy and think: YES. THIS. I count myself among that population. I have zero sympathy for craven parasites like Nielson, Sanders, Miller, Pruitt, or their Pumpkin Patron. They deserve to be rudely interrupted, brazenly inconvenienced, and publicly shamed. If the elected representatives of the so-called left want to sit back like school-marms and wag their fingers at the incivility of #resistence, so be it. We’re keeping receipts. And we’re reclaiming our time, one ill-mannered, discourteous, impolite, and profanity-laden public disturbance at a time.
Vox populi ante omnia.
Alas, now we return to the dad-joke.
I worry that we’re being lured into thinking that the Uncivil Conscientious Citizen is “the bear” who is on the rampage and coming after the likes of Sanders, Miller, Nielson, Pruitt, et al. So, it’s worth going back and reconsidering what is common among their stories of public confrontation above. In every instance, they walked (or ran) away. Embarrassed and inconvenienced, yes, but alive and largely unharmed. Now, if you’re the Uncivil Conscientious Citizen, you think you’re the bear, so this might seem like a victory nonetheless.
Only you’re not the bear. The bear is still chasing all of us. And what Sanders, Miller, Nielson, Pruitt, Trump and the whole 1% have realized is that they only have to outrun you.
We saw this already in the ’08 financial crisis. The banks and the traders and the lenders knew that the the Bear Rampage was imminent, but all they needed to do was ensure that they put several million people’s homes, pensions, retirements, and livelihoods between them and The Bear. Same with the still-ongoing Healthcare Crisis. And the Opioid Crisis. And the Tution/Student Loan Crisis. Et cetera. Et cetera. All these crises are just varieties of Bear, and while we’re busy interrupting the dinners of the economic and political elite and shouting at them to recognize the grizzly danger about to beset us all, they’re lacing up their running shoes.
To be clear, I don’t think we should stop publicly shaming the shameful, or organizing no-platform protests, or marching, or taking a knee, or punching Nazis, or tearing down monuments to hatred. Give no quarter, I say.
Trump and the politico-capitalist elite today aren’t smart or savvy enough, nor do they possess enough foresight and political acumen, to engage in the old, 20th C. enterprise of Empire. And that self-interested myopia has given the rest of us an opening for real revolution. While they’re obsessed with the business of CYA-ing, we can mobilize, organize, resist. It’s abundantly clear now that they’re ready to let this whole America thing burn to the ground. They only need to outrun you, after all.
So, we’ve got to make sure that, while we’re giving no quarter, we’re not standing between The Right and The Bear. We will most certainly be outrun, and definitely eaten, if we don’t redirect our attention away from the pipe-dream of an “electoral revolution” or “civil discourse” or “incremental change” and start working on an actual revolution. We’ve got options, even: socialist, communist, anarchist… hell, at this point, we could make a go at another real democratic revolution. That’s going to mean, among other things, creating a situation in which the economic and political elite cannot survive our demise.
If we want to stay alive, we’ve got to become The Bear.