“Apparently the secret to staying alive is to be an obnoxious asshole to everyone.”
Some of my peers were saddened about the passing of liberal/mainstream feminist Gloria Steinem (who was once involved with the CIA associated/anticommunist Independent Research Service as a young person). It will always frustrate me that people like Steinem have always been the face of feminism; that said, i am far from surprised. i have to remember that how people perceive and/or support feminism isn’t necessarily anti-patriarchal. If one is going to imagine a world free of gender-based violence and full of gender equity, they must also resist capitalist notions of those very things. They must actively work to resist capitalism itself. Replacing men for women in a system that still favors institutional oppression across the board is not going to resolve anything; what it is going to do is uphold the currently existing hierarchical paradigms, with a different face.
Instead of the need to recreate more Ms. magazines or ‘girl bosses’, we need to advance the legacies of those who were on the front lines of the liberation for colonized and oppressed people- the Combahees, the Carlotta Lucumis, the Ella Bakers and June Jordans of the world.
Also while not surprised (for obvious reasons) it still frustrates me how many others who have passed (like Janie Bradford, Michael Wright, Curt Bedeau (aka Curt-T-T) and Cassandra Wilson) don’t receive as widespread of coverage.
But i digress…
Well, not really, because to this point about being acknowledged (and the degrees to which said acknowledgement is acceptable to the status quo/mainstream society); amid a conversation we had about the passing of public figures, a friend said, “Apparently the secret to staying alive is to be an obnoxious asshole to everyone.”
This is a statement i see echoed often, and one i struggle with. My response to her: “Assholes die too, all the time. Isn’t Lindsay Graham dead?”
The one thing which is inevitable for us all, regardless of what class status or area of political marginalization has been societally placed onto us; regardless of where we were hatched in the world… We are all going to leave this earth. Because a person you don’t like hasn’t been snatched up by the grim reaper at the time you prefer does not mean they’re not going to physically transcend.
We have to be mindful of the varying conditions as to why someone might actually leave: environmental conditions (aka lack of access to fresh air, water, etc.), genetics, tragic accident, lack of holistic medical care, genocide, sanctions and blockades- there are a bevy of reasons as to why this is a thing. The recent spate of deaths due to cancer could be a combination of things i named above.
This idea that ‘the bad people should die first’ doesn’t sit right with me, because it largely encourages us to evade responsibility in creating a better world. The concept of society being improved if right wing people were to somehow disappear is not only problematic, but ahistorical, as it discourages people from wrestling with the fact that apathy or inaction are larger culprits to the larger struggles we face. Similar to the ‘girl boss’ argument; it was assumed that if Kamala Harris were president, things would be easier- but for whom?
If she were president, cop cities would still be constructed in African and poor communities. Imperialist violence would still be imposed upon countries working toward socialism (or at the very least, nationalizing resources). Israel would continually enact violence onto Palestinians (with the economic assistance of the U.S.). Haiti would still be reeling from continual neocolonial policies imposed by the U.S. and Europe.
For whom would a Harris president be better for?
Who is ‘bad’, and who is ‘good’? It’s not often we think of these qualifications as being constructs of individualist morality we have been conditioned to accept as the correct position.
The proposition that ‘the bad people’ should die before the ‘good’ ones is another construction. Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro and First Combatant Cilia Flores were abducted by the current U.S. administration on January 3, 2026; while echoing imperialist talking points, liberals and right wingers (and some who claim ‘leftism’) call Maduro a ‘dictator’. We must wrestle with why someone can, without question or research (because let’s keep it real, most people who do this are not doing deep research) bestow the title of ‘dictator’ onto someone, while simultaneously claiming to protest U.S. imperialism. it’s again, ahistorical.
Frankly, all one needs to do is read, in full, the memo penned by Lestor Mallory (the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs at the time of the memo’s writing), in which a plan was laid out to destabilize Cuba by establishing a blockade, which persists to this very day. This same energy was given, to varying degrees around many other parts of the world, over the course of many years. Does one not think the same objectives exist for destabilizing Venezuela? Does one think the Monroe Doctrine has simply dissolved?
Or is it just that you’re upset the administration you didn’t like abducted them?
Does one think that when Trump finally shuffles off this mortal coil, that things will be better? We have an example as to why this is not the case: war criminal Henry Kissinger left in 2023, and the damage he caused still has far-reaching consequences.
The anger at these politicians is also selective, because right wing Mitt Romney was mourned upon his death by (again) liberals, right wingers and people who claim to be leftists, simply because he opposed Trump on particular policies. The Spice Girls (who claimed ‘Girl Power’) praised neoliberal, racist and anti-union Margaret Thatcher. And when Joe Biden goes (and it may be sooner than later, given he (apparently) has metastatic prostate cancer), people will continually praise him upon his death, despite his very well-documented history of covert and overt racism and white supremacy (since his time as senator), his support of destabilizing democratically elected governments (Ukraine), his upholding of the blockade on Cuba, Palestine’s genocide being on his watch, his construction of the ‘1994 crime bill’ (signed into law by Bill Clinton), which still has ramifications today, and more.
He will be praised because his political experience was not considered to be egregious, unlike a Trump… because he was not considered to be right wing (despite his very real right wing policies).
We cannot control when people die. But we CAN control (on some level) the world we want.
The true secret to everyone staying alive is to actively change the paradigm we’ve all been conditioned to accept.
Overjobbed and Underworked 