David Rothscum Reports on Activism

Dear discontent,

First things first, I do not care what you call yourself, or what they call you. Perhaps you are an anarchist, a socialist, a conspiracy theorist, a truther, a birther, a tenther, an environmentalist, a peace-activist, a left-wing extremist, a fringe lunatic, a right-wing extremist, whatever it may be, I hardly care, I will call you a discontent.

It's very possible that you bash in the brains of other discontents, because they belong to the wrong group of angry disenfranchised radicals. And, since you are a product of your environment, if you had grown up in slightly different circumstances, you could have followed the same ideology or had the same job as the person who you fight with.

If your father happened to be a police officer, you could have aspired to be one too, and become the deluded man who is now hitting you with a baton. If you grew up as a white working class man who is unemployed because someone in India will do his job for less, you could have turned into an angry bigoted right-wing conservative. But had you grown up in suburbia and your parents were wealthy, you could have rebelled against them and become a left-wing activist instead.

Having been pretty much everything over a span of about 10 years before slowly settling to become an unorthodox hybrid of various opposing ideologies, I realize that you are a product of your environment. Every discontent wants a better world, but none of them agree on how to reach it. If you are willing to violently engage each other for belonging to the wrong group, you may be active fighting fascism and racism the whole day, but that same tribalist and dominating instinct that gives rise to racism and fascism just manifested itself in the punch you gave someone who said something you disagree with.

You inherently just like to fight, it's part of your instinct. The fact that the guy on the other side wants to make America socialist/denies the Holocaust/denies Global Warming/hates gays/supports sodomy/denies your reproductive rights/kills unborn children is just what you use to separate yourself from them. Hopefully bravery instead of bullying is a part of your instinct as well, and thus you prefer to fight against overwhelming odds instead of ganging up against a minority.

The person who denies global warming is as certain as the person who thinks global warming will kill us all of the accuracy of his own opinion. Both are convinced the facts point towards their side, and those facts posing towards the other side are a result of scientific fraud, which may very well be the case. And being as they are products of their environment, their numbers are changed easily as well by those in power. If doesn't matter what group you belong to, you can be, and probably are, easily used. You are predictable, and part of the status quo. Those in power can effectively use you to manage society, regardless of your ideals and goals.

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