It is said that only true romantics can become revolutionaries. I believe this, as one does not fight so passionately and relentlessly unless they really know what love is. Love for their land, love for their people, love for their culture and values, and the urgency to protect those things that mean very little to Western imperialists and their sycophants. I started writing a post about privileged, spiritless people last night, those who look for another flag to wave on a whim, looking for a specific, satisfactory way to live as long as it suits their wants and desires at the expense of others.
And then Fidel Castro died.
As divisive a figure as he was, much like Ernesto Guevara, or Ahmed Ben Bella, I tend to believe that severity is a stage one arrives at when they are pushed towards it. Those who don't know suffering, and not just their own, but of others, don't know truth. Nor do they know what that can trigger in a person. Here was a man who brought down Fulgencio Batista, the US puppet, who had allowed his country to be reduced to a brothel and hunting ground for Western pedophiles and criminals. Puppet leaders like Batista, and those who support them, are not romantics. They do not know true love, to see their land and their culture as sacred, and to stand up to the evil consistently imposing itself on all that is sacred in the world. Castro expelled entitled Americans and their supporters from Cuba, dodged their endless assasination attempts on him, and sent Cuban doctors to assist in South Africa, subsequently helping to end the apartheid that had been endorsed by the United States. In retaliation for protecting his country, the US imposed a vindictive embargo on Cuba, leading to a long and cruel punishment on a people who chose sovereignty over slavery.
It's another loss for the minority of true romantics left in the world. Those who fight against the status quo, know the true meaning of freedom, of love, of death, of sacredness. One by one, true romantics, true revolutionaries have left us, leaving in their wake an ongoing battle that they had fought for most of their lives. Times are different now. What these people have left behind after years of defying giants, are now left in the hands of a weak, passive, narcissistic, pro-American generation, who readily adopt capitalist values to replace their traditional ones.
If Seneca suggested that all cruelty springs from weakness, where then, does weakness come from? Lack of self awareness? Absence of wisdom? Excessive freedom? Because one only needs to observe the state of America and its inhabitants to see the price people have paid for "freedom". And there is a difference between absolute social freedoms, and the freedom I believe in, that of which is self-determination. How does an individual or group achieve freedom in a society that bases itself on consumerist values, controlled by corporations and old white men? Endlessly speaking of freedom does not make freedom a reality. It makes it an illusion, a zealous marketing campaign that helps a country project an image of absolute power and leadership to the rest of the world, dangling this fantasy from a high horse - don't you want to be like us?
There was a meaningless article I read a few days ago, titled As a US traveller, I sported a Canadian flag patch under Bush. Time to dust it off. The title alone made me roll my eyes as I scanned the Guardian front page, and like many of the shortsighted op ed pieces on the site, it does beg the question, why is there so much unsophisticated nonsense on a serious news site? The writer, a twenty-something white female based in New York City basically shares her embarrasment of the previous Bush administration, which had compelled her to lie to others on her travels by pretending to be Canadian. She was fine with the Obama years, she wrote, but now with Trump prepared to take office, she, like many other privileged white Americans, are desperately hoping to move to Canada because, "would you like a president who boasts of “grabbing women by the pussy” or a prime minister who actively calls himself a feminist and encourages others to do the same?"
I don't get people like this. Maybe you should ask yourself how much you love America and the freedom you keep going on about when it's convenient for you, and if it's something you would fight for, regardless of who its leader is. Consider also, are you part of any of the targeted minority groups that will be feeling the actual consequences of white nationalist ideology? Those who can't just pack up and book a flight out and re-settle in a different country with more white people? In times of hardship, pack up and look for another flag to wave around, another label to stick on yourself so it can define you instead of having your values define you. When things are going great and to your liking, stay and call yourself a proud American (or any other nationality, really).
Imagine having these sort of weaklings in your society, reaping the benefits that everyone has helped establish, and then looking for another stable, developed country to move to once your own falls on hard times and needs all the help it can get. But this is the mentality of those with no strength of character - their existance is only valid if they can associate themselves with all that is powerful, white, western, mainstream, beautiful, wealthy, convenient.
Weakness resides in all of us, for different reasons, in different circumstances, and it can develop within us based on our life experiences and how we learn from them. But true romantics are not made. They just have the soul of a spirited poet, a learned individual, a devoted parent, a courageous fighter, a compassionate child, innate and unshakeable, all at once.
Here's to the few true romantics, the true fighters now gone, who defied their aggressors and occupiers, and knew what true freedom meant - that it is something in your soul and in your mind that nobody can ever take from you.
