On Yesterday

It would be largely beside the point to write in praise of the teenagers who brought off the massive demonstration against gun violence yesterday.   I found it extremely painful to hear and see them, especially those who have experienced the terror and horror of gun violence because it represents the total failure of the old-new-left that was the great failure and conceited conceit of my generation.  I can't not feel the pain of guilt that we pissed away every chance to really change things in such stupid ways.   By now, if the old left and the old-new left had any prospect for working, these children should never have experienced the terror they did.   All of us who are older than they are, are guilty of that.

What does someone of my age have to tell such people as the brilliant and too wonderful to be considered merely heroic Emma Gonzalez whose six minutes of silence said more than all of the theorizing of all of the scribblers and babblers of the old-new-left combined, and meant more than all of it?   The tears that forced was worth all of the angry screaming of all the bored, affluent vandals of the old left and it has the potential to do what all of that histrionic self indulgence never could accomplish.

It came to me while thinking about it this morning that this is the first chance that a mass movement of what might be considered a left, has had to throw off the dead hand of Marxism which has damaged the left since the late 19th century.   Marxism is completely and totally discredited, as discredited as Nazism is.   If this movement can avoid being hijacked by them I think it has far more of a chance to make change than any movement since the Civil Rights movement, to which Marxism never was anything but a hindrance and a burden. 

As well I would hope they can keep their movement from being hijacked by the competing theorists who were almost as much of a damage to various movements of the so-called left in my lifetime.  Nothing but equality and what will produce a better life for all, nothing that doesn't directly enhance the chance of producing a peaceful, decent life for all is worth considering, regarding people as "the masses" as some physical phenomenon or resource has proved to produce the opposite and just about all pseudo-scientific theorizing of the kind they love at the Left Forum will produce the opposite, most likely as it is rejected by "the masses" who seem to realize that there's nothing in it for them. 

Consider what worked in the past, the efforts of the Civil Rights movement, especially of the really effective groups and individuals,  people like Diane Nash, groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and learn from what didn't only not work but which destroyed change, much of it from Marxists and their allies.  Learn from that, never look at any of it in a romantic, cinematic haze.  Don't watch the movies and TV programs, they all lied.