Finne says, in reply to me:

'Maybe you've been living on another planet up until yesterday. If we can even talk about an "America" as some kind of generalized identity of people who identify themselves first as "Americans", one of the first things we would notice is that many of them are profoundly anti-democratic. Listen to them. They mostly trust the police, either don't vote because they don't care about "politics" or do vote because they "do care", buy more shit than anyone could ever need and then either don't care about the environment and the people that died so that they could buy that shit or "do care" and turn off their bathroom lights sometimes to "save energy". They love states, desire repression, work at jobs they hate, and then sometimes one of them just want everyone to "chill out", wants us to remain complicit in the destruction of the earth and the theft of our lives but make sure no one is angry about it.'

'Finne,' here's a good rule of thumb for organizers:

'Don't let anyone put their head higher than yours, and don't put your head higher than anyone else's.'

Alienation from one's own is often the first step of radicalization.

But understanding that you're no better or worse as a human being, when all is said and done, than those ordinary folks, is often a second step.

Americans have had a split consciousness from day one. Most of my ancestors were Scot-Irish, who settled on the Pa-Ohio frontier from 1760 to 1810. They were fierce democrats as opposed to all kinds of European feudal authority, especially the Brits. They were dirt poor, having lived in prison or holes in the ground, literally, in Ulster, and a log cabin here, all the deer they could shot, and whiskey from corn, was heaven to them.

But a good number of them, not all to be sure, were also among the best Indian killers and slave catchers, even though a good many also shred their blood to end slavery. One of the worse things that happened to them, and a good many others, too, was learning to think they were 'white,' the true secret of their ongoing subjugation to their rulers up to today.

But a rant against 'Americans' full of 'shoulds' and 'oughts' and 'musts' doesn't help you or them.

One conclusion I came to many years ago, was that there wasn't anything special about me, which meant if I could come to understand these things, there wasn't any reason many others couldn't also, especially if I talked to them as one of them.

Of course, some cases are harder than others. As Mao Zedong once put it, 'Everyone can change, but some people die first.'

The task is for the militant minority to find the ways to unite the many to defeat the few. Let's get on with it.