Rafe is so proud of himself. He got awards for this: Workers True Faithful–Anarchist Freedom. He submitted it to a contest for the Citadel Youth Brigade’s new name. WTF-AF won second place. The winning entry added CYB to the acronym WTF-AF, for WTFAFCYB. Try pronouncing it for giggles.
WTF-AF CYB
Woke True Folk as Fuck. The high priests of a century long effort to bully the rest of us into living under a benevolent dear leader who will make everything fair. It’s Acts 2:44-45 at national scale and enforced by an authoritarian Uncle Sam,
And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.
Rafe is a tease. I may or may not add him to the character book for prior posts describing Primaris Solenne Vexton Ulyth. I haven’t decided. Rafe is a type to me. He is the perpetual hemmeroid suffering, constipated, paranoid, angry young man whose biggest demand is the civil right to a lifetime supply of energy drinks and Oreos. Rafe’s arrest record is punctuated with Battery LEO at a string of battles with Blue Shirts. Because punching cops is the true path to a Socialist utopia. He’s Woke True Folk as Fuck.
Rafe is addicted to three words, grievance, fear, and unforgiveness. So say he, he is systemically oppressed by pretty much everyone else. We are the reason he is so miserable. It’s our fault that the bodega he buys energy drinks and Oreos from doesn’t deliver. Now that I have you worked up about Rafe I’m going to drop him and go all academic on you. You are welcome.
Sweet Bitterness
Rafe and his peers built an identity and a community around three words—grievance, fear, and unforgiveness. There is no soothing him. We can’t placate or apologize to/with him. Nothing we do or say is sufficient. We, the royal we are systemically and generationally evil oppressors. The world would be better if we were destroyed or mayhaps dead. Mao was a piker who should have tried harder. Marx was a fake, facts.
Beginning with Marx, Engels, Proudhon, Bakunin, Goldman and others, the final solution rooted itself in three words—grievance, fear, and unforgiveness. The world can be explained through a simple binary split: oppressor and oppressed. Oppressors are evil on their face. You don’t want to be an oppressor. The oppressed are the heroes. Who is oppressed? Everyone with tremendous need and no ability. The oppressors are at the other end, tremendous ability and minimal need. The oppressors are supposed to voluntarily supply the needs of the oppressed cuz that’s only fair.
It’s been a little over a century since the Bolshevik’s overthrew the Tsar. Yah Yah. They didn’t overthrow Czar Nicholas II–he abdicated. Moving on. 109 years or so of promises that this time, the revolutionaries will get it right. This bunch of zealots will finally bring about a system of distribution so everyone gets their fair share of energy drinks and Oreos. And those evil MAGA people won’t escape the gulags ever again.
Try Harder
Well… the claim goes, those people before us did it wrong. They didn’t try hard enough. We need to try harder, to be truly WTF‑AF. Is their failure — and as many as 148 million dead — hard enough? Apparently not. Because this isn’t politics anymore. It’s a pseudo‑religion rooted in the gut. A belief system so deeply embodied that its adherents show up at St. Peter’s gate with a protest sign, a megaphone, and a demand that he kiss Mao’s ring. St. Peter, shockingly, is unmoved.
And here is where the rest of us are — taird. Not tired. Taird. The way the word sounds when spoken by someone from Appalachia who has worked a double shift and still has to feed the animals. We are busy with life. We are raising kids, paying bills, loving our spouses, keeping the lights on. And while Rafe and his friends scold us, tell us we’re bougie, we’re oppressors, we are the root of all evil… we stopped caring decades ago.
The catbox stinks because it needs cleaning. To be honest, we care more about that than your damage to store windows. Excuse us while we take care of the catbox and clean some kitten accidents off our carpet. But . . . the Revolution? Meh.
Three Word Curse
The socialist zealots once promised a classless paradise. The promise collapsed into a vague assurance that all your failures are someone else’s fault. What remains is a pseudo‑religion of grievance and fear. The scolds measure our moral purity by who we denounce and how loudly we denounce them. Fealty comes with a diet of anxiety—you fear failing to measure up, that you might be too bougie. The vision metasticized into a permanent posture of being “agin it”.
The thing is, the three words are all yin 陰. They are consumptive. To build an identity and community around grievance, fear and unforgiveness is to attach ourselves to words that eat our light. It is an iterative loop that with each trip around the cycle a little more of our health is consumed.
Trump 45 and 47 are not the issue. Both his Presidencies are symptoms of exhaustion and frustration among the rest of us. A handful of Congress and a powerful minority in the Executive Branch used our attachment to grievance, fear and unforgiveness to enslave us in the name of Democracy. We perpetrated and unforgiveable and existential sin in electing Cheetoh Satan. That we care more about cleaning the catbox than about another round of scolding from people who think breaking store windows is a sacrament? The evilist, evil, evil, sin EVER!
Next Gen
We are at a generational turning point. The noisiest, most zealous scolds who are angry at us that we don’t share their grievances, their fears, and their dedication to shouting a long list of accused sins, these are fading out of the headlines. The orthodoxy of the scolds is falling out of fashion. Dem yungins are pushing back on my generation and our idyllic vision of a People’s Revolution.
Yes. My feed is curated to ensure I stay engaged. So it’s not a good measure for what is the vox populi. That said, women complaining about the lack of gentlemen, of men who are courteous to women, is outpacing the feminine scolds who accuse us of generational, existential, and systemic mysogeny. “YOU RACIST!” doesn’t land like it once did. The orgasm of transgender ideology we suffered through with HRH Obummer and his bag man Biden is absent from my feed. Proof of nothing, yes. But also, IMHO a hint of where things are going.
I’m not a prophet. My crystal ball falls into fits of uncontrollable laughter whenever I ask it to predict the future. It thinks that question is the funniest query ever. That said, change is in the air and it doesn’t bode well for the WTF-AF. The future broke up with them.
Liminality
Liminal is a word I’m not familiar with. Simply, it’s a fancy way of saying “in-between”. That’s where we are. In between paradigms. The old way, rooted in grievance, fear, and unforgiveness, is losing power. On the way demagogues are filling social media and the news with self-revealing rhetoric about the dangers of Fanta Fascist.
It’s a bit scary. Because the likely candidates to run for office after Trump are either younger zealous scolds or crusty old men who should retire to Belize and be quiet. I hope this grand story echoes my own pattern—things get bad, maybe really bad, and look like they will get worse. Then the way forward becomes visible.
This country isn’t dead yet. We are at a crossroads where shouting about what’s wrong doesn’t win elections or improve things. I have hope for our future. Change like this means times like these where what used to be dies and what will be arises.
In the Meantime
The rumbling in Washington DC is entertaining but a little abstract for me. It feels like Imperial Rome. It’s in the part of the prayer that says, “serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” These things are in the part of the prayer that says, “the strength to change the things I can change”—give grace first until doing so becomes unwise. Search around this space to find out what I mean by that. Next, serve those who can be served as opportunity arises. Treat others the way you wish to be treated. Find your people and fellowship with them. Last, pick a spiritual path and stick with it.
Empires and emperors come and go. The life of the peasant hasn’t changed substantially in millennia. This brave new world has technology thought to be science fiction when I was a kid. But we still work to earn money to buy our ration of cheese, build families, and look forward to our sunset years commanding the TV remote and barcalounger.
From out of the liminal space where I get my words comes Rafe, upset that my answer is KRISCHIN and says nothing about the dystopian nightmare he imagines to be our fate the longer Salmon Voldemort still has a pulse. Yeah ok, zoomer.