Well said, good citizen Mr. Cormier. Very well said.

I hear echoes of Kerouac here, and even more so of Thomas Wolfe, (who was a spiritual mentor to ole TiJean).

This is nothing more than the black pot castigating the black kettle for being black.

This article is constructed from the SAME brand and degree of 'unreason' as this author is complaining about.

ICH's "views expressed" disclaimer notwithstanding, one wonders what factors went into the editorial decision to publish this quintessentially bigoted (self-biased) diatribe? What value did the ICH editor think this bigoted diatribe adds to the discussion?

I'm sure no big donor, but I have sent Mr. Feeley what I can afford. Reading this article sure the heck makes me want my money back.

I agree ..

I'm trying to figure out a person who calls herself or himself "peacemaker" telling us "there will always be battles".

Seems odd ... No?

Although I do like to post comments here and there, and I have been reading ICH for maybe 15 years, I don't think I've ever posted a comment here, nor do I often read the comments here. I'm not really sure why. This is one of my most favored sites.

I do know that ICH is among the best material aggregators out there. The spectrum of points of view that one encounters here is always informative.

If 'troll' type aggression is occurring here, it would seem to me to be a testament to ICH's effectiveness in presenting this spectrum. There are, after all, highly organized forces operating that do everything they can to prevent people like Mr. Feeley from being effective in their efforts.

Mr. Feeley is certainly justified in taking any measures he feels are appropriate, but I think he should take it as a compliment if his efforts are being targeted by opposing forces. Efforts to produce just common civility in public forums are always appreciated.

Thank you to Burma Shave for these very thoughtful comments. I certainly do not "miss the point". I simply had not read his comments when I wrote mine.

I could not possibly agree more with his premise here. We lack a 'Basic Message' that can resonate with the Common People. We are too deeply committed to our ideologies, like Identity Politics, etc, to bother ourselves with fashioning a Basic Message that will appeal to people who at present may be in a confused state of consciousness, and may therefore not agree with us.

The object of this 'game' is to get people on our side, not to subjugate them to our will. The Left is so immersed in our own self-contradiction that we are blind to the obvious. We labor for 'consensus' among ourselves, even as we have given up even trying to communicate with those segments of the citizenry that do not currently agree with our point of view.

We hail the sanctity of consensus even as we hold the beliefs of our fellow citizens in contempt and disregard.

I applaud these comments from Burma Shave. We lack a Basic Message that can win people over to our cause.

Mr. Dolack:

Thank you for this thoughtful essay. You present many interesting ideas, but I don’t think you really get to the root of it.

The means of communication are the means of power. We can juggle all the jargon we want, in our discussions of ‘building a movement’, but if we do not address our relative lack of ability to communicate with the citizenry, our Adversary, who controls our nation’s mass media, will always prevail.

Politics is a numbers game, and the numbers are VERY large. Playing by the ‘democracy’ version of the rules of this game, the object of the game is to get the most people on our side. In order to get people on our side, we must be able to communicate with them.

Our Adversary communicates with virtually the entire population of the citizenry, for an average of almost 5 hours every single day.

The power that these mass media impart to our Adversary is not merely the ability to foment propaganda and lies, (which is an IMMENSE degree of power in itself), it is the power to shape who people are. Their power lies in the programming they choose to present. In the commercial messages. Etc. Etc. They have the power to not merely control what people think, they control what people think about. They control not merely what people think about, they control what people WANT.

Our task is no less daunting than to develop some means to compete successfully with the immense power of these mass media.

If we fail in that task, we will simply fail, period. We will remain perpetually under the power of our Adversary, under the power of our nation’s Ruling Elites, who have complete control of our means of mass communication.

I have been circulating an introduction to a plan for addressing this daunting task. I don’t have any way to attach it here. If you (or anyone) would like to see it, please email me and I’ll send it along.

Thank you again for this deeply thoughtful and eminently well-written essay.

Raymond Zwarich
Bent Birch Farm
63 Webber Rd
Brookfield, MA 01506
774 449-8030
rzwarich@gmail.com

This article is clearly the product of a lot of thoughtful input from many people whose ideas and experience are deserving of our respect. The article claims in its title that it will present “ideas for going forward”, but it only points us toward an objective, it does not outline any specific ideas for “going forward” toward that objective.

The article is an admirable effort to define comprehensive policy program proposals that progressives would support. It does not, however, address the question: “How?”, except in the most general and non-specific way.

Surely we all know that it is one thing to walk through the toy store, with empty pockets, picking out every item that we think would fulfill all our desires, but surely we all also realize that filling our pockets with the currency required to acquire what we desire is a prerequisite task to actually HAVING what we desire.

We think we know WHAT policies are needed to make the world a better place? Fine. But HOW do we acquire the political power to implement these policies?

After over 3000 words spent defining WHAT, defining the policies we would desire, we get a couple of hundred words that lay out only very generalized ideas about HOW to go about attaining our policy objectives.

In the article’s ‘Conclusion’ section, it states:

“As just a few current prominent examples, why couldn’t the energy generated during Bernie Sanders’ campaign for president in the U.S., Jeremy Corbyn’s victory as opposition party leader in the UK, or Podemos’ electoral attempts in Spain come over to sustained, militant commitment to suitably refined and improved programmatic ideas of the sort we propose in this document?”

C’mon, folks…..Is calling for something as broadly general as a “sustained, militant commitment” a sufficiently useful proposal at this point in History?

The article goes on:

“Why couldn’t a program like what is offered above, but adapted and improved, attract all those 5 million people [Sanders supporters] and many more, in the U.S., and do comparably well elsewhere in the world, attracting aroused constituencies to contribute creatively to plans for on-going mass activism?”

“Contribute creatively to plans for on-going mass activism”? That’s the ‘plan’? How? How are “aroused constituencies”, once attracted, going to “contribute creatively to plans for on-going mass activism”? Through what mechanism? Through what process?

It’s the ‘how’, folks. Not the ‘what’. We got plenty of ‘what’. We got ‘what’ comin’ out the ole wazoo.

Who has ANY ‘how’?

The article touches only briefly on the principle problem, which is that the full power of the mass media is aligned against us, but does not address that problem other than to propose yet more toy store solutions that we have no currency in our pockets to acquire.

The article points out that we have a rigged political process, and a mass media owned and controlled by our adversaries, standing in our way. To address that, the article says we’ll just “renovate electoral practices” and “take back communications”. So…in other words, we’ll just fix the cause of all our problems by fixing the cause of all our problems?

Isn’t that what this says? (Someone please correct me if I have read it wrong). With due respect, is saying that really useful?

I’m not meaning to sound unfriendly to the product of so many people’s admirable efforts. I’m rather only wanting to point out that these efforts do not address, in a realistically specific way, HOW we should go about accomplishing the policy proposals they set out for us.

With all due respect, folks, policy proposals are in VERY abundant supply, (with a relative worth to match, according to the laws of supply and demand). Our much more immediate need is to arrive at a realistic concrete PLAN for accomplishing our objectives.

I have a plan…..I have an actual concrete, real-world, step by step plan of action.

When are we, on the American Left, going to table these constant presentations of new policy proposals, and open the floor for presenting proposals for concrete plans of action?

R Zwarich
63 Webber Road
Brookfield, MA 01506
774 449-8030
rzwarich@gmail.com