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The TownhallSocial issues

Activism season is back; will it top 2020?

By Rex Liberman 

Memorial Day has come and gone. Winter sports are wrapping up, and football is still months away. The town is hot, it’s summer in the city, and America’s favorite pastime is ramping up again. 

Any day now, the streets will be lined with smoldering barbecues. Legions of fans will parade into parks with signs and bats. A lucky few will even go home with souvenirs commemorating the day’s festivities. Scalpers will take up corners trying to get their piece of the pie, and media crews will document the fun for fans sitting at home, unable to attend in person.  

Records will be broken; heroes will be made. Don’t park too close to the gate, though, or you may get a ball through the windshield. But hey, that’s what insurance is for, right?  

Grab your helmet and your team’s jersey and meet me in the streets. It’s activism season, baby! 

Thanks to the flourishing business of discontent, activism has become America’s fifth major sport. Both online and in the streets, complaining has never been cooler, and picket lines have never been so profitable

It’s a revolution of fears, tears, and character smears—all you need is a bad attitude and a shortsighted understanding of cause and effect to participate. 

For a country that loves its athletics, everything real sports naturally reject have become our country’s new sporting obsession. Last summer saw record numbers of new activist athletes bravely forgo peaceful lives of appreciation in favor of work that actually matters. Namely, screaming at clouds and ridiculing public servants.  

Across the country, the 2020 major league activism season saw teams of leftist freedom fighters breaking the bonds of pandemic servitude. Ironically, the same bonds they themselves demanded. The reason was to protest in the streets for rights they technically already had. The lack of self-awareness was championship caliber, but the complete departure from reality is what really made the season memorable. 

When the dust settled, few people could even recognize this country anymore. But really, what more could you ask for from a protest season? Let’s take a look at the highlight reel. 

Underscored by a global pandemic with a staggeringly high survival rate, it was a season truly defined by the old adage, do as I say, not as I do. There were metaphors wildly overestimated and history books rewritten. Teams of radicals built state-of-the-art stadiums bordering on treason and occupied them for weeks at a time.  

Activists assigned implicit biases to entire populations, despite claiming to hate biases. Then, the most progressive places on this planet were maligned as the exact places fomenting the greatest affronts to progress. It was, without a doubt, one of the most remarkable departures from reality we’ve seen since the Golden Age of public tantrums. 

In addition, enraged liberals burned liberal metropolises to the ground. After enduring generations of failed liberal policies, said liberals decided their futures were best protected by a PED-sized dose of radical liberalism. For an entire cadre of liberal lapdog media, bought and paid for by a ruling class they publicly hate but secretly adore, the fairytale storylines literally wrote themselves. 

Corporate partners of the league deserve a lot of credit as well. They stepped up with a world-class collection of buzzwords, pledges, and hollow promises to cash in on the chaos. Nothing says true activism quite like all of corporate America rallying around you. Truly, there wasn’t a dry eye in the room when all was said and done. 

Sometimes, though, words alone can’t measure the heart of a champion. This was clear in the league’s future stars making mad dashes for free apparel. 

Again, the corporate partners deserve their fair share of recognition. They publicly cheered whilst their products literally flew off the shelves. Like a box full of puppies, everything was free to a good home. 

Instead of condemning the rioting, these same companies rushed to prove their inclusive solidarity with the thieves. Despite being the obvious beneficiaries of free market capitalism, they openly sided with Marxist ideology

Their dedication to the sport of activism begs the question: would big businesses actually benefit more from a system of forced egalitarianism than the people themselves? 

Wait, what’s that sound? Why, that’s the seventh inning stretch music, sponsored by Nike! Okay, all together now! 

Take me out to the riot, take me out with the crowds.  

Let them steal some peanuts and crackerjacks, we’ll just continue exploiting the blacks! 

All in all, this activism season really made you look in the mirror. No, not for honest self-examination, but because everything was suddenly backwards. It was a Herculean effort by politicians and media alike. Some of the top storylines of the season will live in infamy for years to come. 

Governments explicitly tasked with preventing uprisings excused movements like BLM of their anarchist intentions. Companies claiming to fight for democracy dubbed fiery infernos “mostly peaceful” protests. 

Finally, crisis actors in line for massive, empathy-driven paydays glorified criminals into martyrs. It was an all-out race to claim moral superiority in one breath and then subvert it in the next. 

In other words, a movement supposedly rooted in integrity had abandoned it. Meanwhile, fans continued cheering despite the game being fixed. Real transcendent narratives like forgiveness, appreciation, or satisfaction were forsaken in favor of bitterness and rage. The race-baiting spectacle would have made godfathers of the sport proud. 

Worshippers at the wokeness altar needed an endless supply of grievances to justify and confirm their actions. So much so, that they were willing to self-flagellate their own communities with hate hoaxes, racial grifts, and calls to defund the only protection they could afford.  

It was a winning strategy, too. The entire world seemingly took massive steps backwards toward identity-based politics and a corporate oligarchy; both of which will prove detrimental once the mob realizes what they’ve asked for. 

Yes, the 2020 season was one for the record books. 2021, however, has the potential to take levels of self-worth to historical lows while at the same time elevating leftist loyalty to all-time highs. If activism is to endure, it will be thanks to a deeply-instilled inferiority in the hearts and minds of loyalists. 

As the unsatisfied masses trod slowly toward lives of desperate emptiness, needing higher doses of upheaval to satisfy their thirst for “change,” they’ll never reach that elusive sweet spot where the world makes sense and gives them exactly what they want. 

Littered with temptations of status, money, and utopian pleasure, the path of the activist slopes only toward disappointment because they fail to see the inherent goodness in life.  

Soon, they neither live peacefully nor enjoy living a chaotic life, which leaves them only one choice: constantly searching for truth. And what is activism, really, if not a misguided search for truth? 

However, the only universal truth is that life behaves exactly as you choose to interpret it. Searching and fighting for truth guarantees truth must be sought after and fought for, which is circular and pointless. This life must be underscored with love for it to both make sense and give you what you want. 

No, you cannot specify the exact actions of others, but you can specify the lens through which you judge the actions of others. Choose to see beauty, and life will give you beauty. Choose to see a world on the brink of destruction, though, and soon you’ll find yourself sprinting through debris, smoke in your eyes and baseball bat in your hands, wondering why the world yields so much pain and inequality to you and your team.  

If activism is the game you choose, then you’re playing a game of seeking pain. For that reason, it can be called insane. Toppling tyranny sounds romantic to the disenfranchised, but it’s fool’s gold. It only sows the seeds of more seasonal tyranny. That which you resist, persists. 

By taking up arms against their neighbors, activists focus their attention on the exact opposite outcome which they hope to achieve. 

The source of their internal discord comes from not moving in the direction of their desire, which is supposedly peaceful, loving equity. Instead, they move toward the opposite, which is bloated activism and commoditized discontent. 

Nobody can ever make you feel any sort of way about anything; all that matters is your internal reaction to the stimulus. Believing you must fight for wellness implies a shortage consciousness, as if wellness only exists in the form of a trophy that must be won.  

Competition is healthy, and iron sharpens iron, but going to war for wellness undermines every natural law on this planet. It’s like a man deciding he’s too healthy and must return some of his health to the sickly population. Such a notion is obviously nonsensical. 

You simply claim health by choosing it and striving towards it, the same as you choose how to view your “objective” reality. Believe it or not, all resources behave this same way, and forms of resistance like activism actually stagnate the process of becoming more. 

Whether you’re a fan of activism or not, it isn’t going anywhere. But that doesn’t mean it has to become a part of us. Skip the game and choose integrity, then watch how life rewards the decision with goodwill. The activists of the world will continue to abuse themselves as they play the sport of discontent, but you can rise above the ugliness by rejecting the inferiority their game implies. 

You don’t need tear gas for life to bring tears of joy to your eyes.

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Rex Liberman

Writer

Rex Liberman is a Southerner who has lived on the East and West coasts and currently resides in Los Angeles. A veteran of both corporate and blue-collar America, he brings a perspective to social commentary that all people from all walks of life can appreciate. Rex is most interested in the intersection between self-development and politics, and how we can come together by better understanding what drives us apart.

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