Banishment!

In the sixties and seventies, I hung around with a bunch of Folkies who were a bit impressed with themselves. One or two had political aspirations, and it wouldn’t be too far off base to say they walked around with chips on their shoulders and a “hurray for me!” attitude. What made their aspirations farcical was the fact that they did no work to achieve their aspirations. They seemed just to expect that, like so much else in a pampered life, the desired ends would show up on the doorstep soon.

After a few years of supporting radical causes in Cambridge and Boston they quietly returned to college ( paid for by mommy and daddy), went to work as stockbrokers and became much more conservative.

Other friends and acquaintances spent time in the trenches, worked in organizations, volunteered, and worked in community organizations. They took the time to learn their communities inside out – what the needs were, and what could be achieved. Some worked from the bottom rungs up to the top and ran for elective office. They worked evenings, weekends, and holidays. Not much was handed to them that was unearned.

The Hurray for me crowd had had all the political science, philosophy, and history courses. They had read all the political treatises and could bore you with the details. But their idea of political commitment was breaking in and vandalizing the “tools of the imperialists” or satirizing the intellectually impoverished left, rather than supporting local communities. They felt that our friends in the trenches were gauche, plebeian, and lacking in political sophistication.

After years of observing many of these folks, I realized they were not of one political stripe. Perhaps you were thinking I was only talking about people on the “left”. Initially, that was true, but as my life progressed, I realized that left and right were frequently only labels, positions, and talking points. Despite ideological differences, many of us ordinary folks would be uncomfortable living in either of their ideal worlds.

The above point reminds me of what my friend John said one evening after a particularly idiotic argument between one acquaintance who was an overly eager communist and another who leaned heavily to the John Birch Society. He suggested that we ” put all of them in a locked room to fight it out, go to the bar for drinks, and let the winner out in the morning.”

So, that was in prehistoric times. But I notice that the rhetoric is heating up again with the occupants of a number of progressive, regressive, and conservative political camps, and the question asked by today’s prompt was about what superpower I’d like to have and why. I’d like to have the power of Banishment.

Yes! Banish them all to have to work in shelters for abandoned pets, soup kitchens, Food Pantries, local agencies assisting the needy, farm aid, Emergency rooms in poor communities, and a whole raft of social service positions. Please! Have them work at the local level and form opinions based on actual grassroots experience rather than some political polemic. And no, I am not expecting everyone to come out sympathetically pro one camp or the other – just well informed about the actual situation.

And that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.