So You Say You Want a Revolution?

People are growing frustrated with the United States government, especially as it slides into fascism. Young people especially are angry, disillusioned, and demanding change. This is good, by the way. We all should be angry, and we should be demanding change.

Unfortunately, there is a segment of the youth which believes that nothing short of an actual revolutionary civil war will fix things. They describe how wonderful the world will be AFTER this revolution, but they never have any plans as to how one would get such a thing started. Nevertheless, they are very fond of insisting that smaller measures, even in service of helping marginalized people, are not good because they don't bring about immediate, rapid, huge changes. Getting Democrats to stand up for trans people? Putting pressure on local governments to stop ICE from terrorizing our neighbors? Reminding folks that marriage equality doesn't fully exist until disabled people can marry without losing their benefits, and that we should put pressure on lawmakers to fix this? Are all Bad, Actually, because social problems, even if improved upon, will still exist after you do them.

This mindset is, frankly, stupid and self-defeating. Not only does it make the perfect the enemy of the good, it also ignores that wars, even when they are necessary, are nasty, brutal affairs in which many people--most of them marginalized!--die. You cannot have a war without electrical power being disrupted. You cannot have a war without any neighborhoods being destroyed. You cannot have a war without any civilians dying, no matter how hard you work to prevent it. War brings famine. War brings destruction. War brings terror. And again, that is any war, even when they are necessary (and few wars ever are). And in every case, the people who suffer most during war are marginalized people: the disabled, the unhoused, the poor.

I can understand young people in the US not knowing about this side of war. After all, the last war fought on US soil ended in 1865. Our wars all safely happen Over There, in foreign parts where we don't have to see the horrors. Attacks on US soil are rare; the last major one was 9/11, and that was very much an exception, not the rule. War correspondants nowadays are being attacked by armies so that we don't get pictures of genocides or other atrocities. But I've seen photos. I've seen photos of Abu Grahib prison camp. I've seen photos in my history books of civilians fleeing from the US army in Vietnam. I've watched Barefoot Gen and seen a gruesome account of exactly what happened in Hiroshima in 1945. General Sherman was not exaggerating in the slightest when he said, "War is hell."

Comic artist, liberal, and overall nice person Dana Simpson has this to say when wannabe revolutionaries show up from times to time, and quite frankly, I agree with her:

To young folks reading this: It is possible for social change to happen quickly without a fucking war. I can give you a real-world example, from the 21st century even. Hell, it even affected the US.

Think of an LGBT+ person. You probably can come up with several, both famous people and those whom you happen to know personally. When I was a teenager in Alabama in the early 00s, I knew of exactly 3 queer people: Elton John, Matthew Shepard, and Brandon Teena. (All links are to Wikipedia unless otherwise specified.) Then my high school history teacher was fired, because parents found out he was gay after his partner was interviewed on the news. (I'm so sorry, Dr. Myatt. You deserved so much better.) That's right. It was legal to fire a teacher for being gay, in the United States, in the early 2000s. Most people were against homosexuality and viewed it as a threat to children. The last sodomy laws were struck down in 2003 by the Supreme Court. Before that, there were places in the United States where it was illegal to have sex with a same-sex partner. And yes, people checked. To quote the Wikipedia article, "At the time of the Lawrence decision in 2003, the penalty for violating a sodomy law varied widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction among those states retaining their sodomy laws. The harshest penalties were in Idaho, where a person convicted of sodomy could earn a life sentence." Prior to Don't Ask, Don't Tell, enlisted in the armed forces required you to answer the question "Are you a homosexual?" with "No," and if you were found to be lying about it, you were dishonorably discharged from the military. Being openly LGBT+ was extremely dangerous, and public opinion was largely against it in many parts of the US.

And yet, in 2015, the Supreme Court case of Obergefell v. Hodges made same-sex marriage a constitutional right. Most people were OK with queer folks, and knew friends, neighbors, or family members who were LGBT+. Sexual orientation had become a protected class under federal law. How did this rapid change happen?

Queer people organized. GLAAD, PFLAG, the Human Rights Campaign, and other major organizations lobbied Congress. Schools began to form Gay-Straight Alliances (now Gender and Sexuality Alliances). Large numbers of people of all ages came out of the closet, forcing people to confront the fact that people whom they'd known and respected for years were queer. Cities held Pride events. Many of these things had been going on for decades, but they really ramped up in the 2000s and 2010s. The end result was that gay people had gone from That Menace Corrupting Our Children to "our next-door neighbor Steve."

It's even reaching the point that transgender people are becoming the center of discourse, and don't let the news fool you: The reason conservatives are pushing back so hard against trans people in the US and elsewhere is because they are losing. The majority public opinion is basically, "Trans people aren't hurting anyone, so why exactly should I care if someone is trans or not?" There are openly-trans celebrities now. Some of them are not good people (Caitlyn Jenner immediately comes to mind), but the fact that they can be openly trans and still have careers is a huge step forward. Anti-trans laws are a final, last-ditch effort to get us back into the closet by people who have lost the culture wars.

We didn't need a war to get here. Organizing, lobbying, and word-of-mouth can go a long way toward equalizing society. If your revolution can't even deliver the results that peaceful operations can and do, then in the words of the band R.E.M., your revolution is a silly idea.