Another glass of Chardonnay, Mr Guevara?

Apathy Jack writes:

... or Why I’m Not Much Of An Activist Anymore

I’m tired these days. Every so often, I get in a mood to change the world, but before too long, the crushing weight of realism forces me back in front of the television.

When you think about it, it's no wonder that we failed so miserably in the world-changing stakes. I found a chant sheet from my activism days recently. One of our chants actually started with "One two three and a bit..." for fucks sake. And then they got really bad.

I remember the old student activist group I belonged to: Trust fund babies who had their fees paid for them, protesting that the common student couldn't afford uni. That's true, but I was one of three people in the whole organisation that actually had one of the student loans we were railing so vehemently against. Another one was my brother.

Another group I used to belong to had, as an official position in it's national structure, a Maori representative. In the entire national body, we did not have a single Maori member - nor, from my little research on the matter, had we ever. A pack of honky hippies paying lip service and then going out armed with little more than "One two three and a bit."

One of my favorite out-of-context lines is the relevance one of Anthrax's lyrics has always had for me in terms of the political activists I hung with:

Difficult for me to get a grip on what you mean
When you stick your fingers in your ears and create another scene
You always step into the traps set perfect in your path
Busy going crazy over whose knife's in your back.

We were trying to change the world, but the main argument seemed to be that our parents had given us everything we had ever wanted, so the po' folk should be given the same treatment. Any questioning of the party line was met with reactions that were either the metaphorical equivalent, or – and I’m not kidding here - the actual occurrence of, activists sticking their fingers in their ears and walking out of the room to avoid the argument. The Marxists were so busy fighting the Trotskyists who were so busy fighting the Maoists that the Capitalists just wandered past the scuffle and sat in the throne.

But hell, since my days as an activist, I've always maintained that the best way to turn someone into a right winger is to expose them to left wingers for long enough. I would rather have lunatic left wingers in charge than lunatic right wingers, but I'd rather have sensible right wingers in charge than the lunatic left. I am a left winger, and I will always be a socialist at heart, but the left wing is just too myopic and delusional to properly run the world.

Defeatest, I know, but that's what comes from being defeated.

I wonder what's on television...