Do you know how Delilah Dooks, one of my rescue ferrets, spent her Independence Day? You're looking at it in the above picture. It was a hot and downright nasty humid day, and whether she spent it on my bed in the airflow of my fan or in the ferret cages which each have several fans blowing on them, it's safe to say that Delilah the Ferret spent her day sleeping in weird positions well within a cool breeze, feet occasionally twitching as she chased mice in her dreams.
Why do I mention this?
Well...
Look, I'm a former Republican, I'm a child of the late Cold War era. I've forgotten more about Christian doctrines and Conservative philosophy than most Trump Supporters ever knew in the first place or ever will. I watched Ronald Reagan speak the words "Mr. Gorbachev, OPEN THIS GATE! Mr. Gorbachev, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!" on live TV and cheered. I followed the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in print, on radio and TV for a high school Senior government-class extra credit project. I was not just a conservative but a pretty dedicated Republican, if a sometime swing voter who crossed the aisle to vote for Democrats now and again...including Bill Clinton in my first election and Bart Stupak (my House Rep. for a number of years) then and up until I moved out of his district. I voted for Dole in 1996 in part for his advocacy for the disabled and because he told the racists to get out at the Republican National Convention. I embraced the 'Compassionate Conservatism' of George W. Bush, even as I had reservations about two wars that turned out to be fully worthy of the issues I had with them. I supported the Republican Party right up until I couldn't and the conspiracy theories and the racism and John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his vice-Presidential nominee forced me the fuck out.
And I'm fucking serious, if seven Republican Senators had gone to the Soviet Union to meet in closed session with Mikhail Gorbachev 30 years ago, those seven Republican Senators would have been best off staying in Moscow and never coming back.
Have you ever read the Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis?
That book describes a place similar to the Underworld, where the souls of the damned live, and every so often a bus pulls up to the bus stop. There's usually people waiting, but many of them make excuses and leave before it arrives. Once those who remain have boarded the bus, it flies straight up and arrives at the edges of heaven, where the souls aboard manifest as weak shadows. They are given the choice to remain or return to their dismal underworld, and most will make such a choice.
Few of the shadows remain in heaven to gradually begin the process of entering into eternal life.
The premise of the story is that hell is something we choose. The phrase "Tis better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven" comes from that book.
We live in a time of momentous cultural, environmental and social changes, which continue unabated despite the efforts of conservatives to try to stop them. As I said in my previous article, Republicans are starting to remind me of a French Army garrison on the Maginot Line during WWII. They know the end is coming and at varying speeds are succumbing to defeatism. They know the end, the reckoning, that one thing they've been trying to put off forever...is at hand and likely, the election of Donald Trump at best bought them a few more months...and at worst may be hastening their end.
Without Trump it's "Please clap." With Trump, literally everybody who isn't a white conservative Republican dude is ending up hating them sooner or later, that's hardly a winning combo.
But they've always been able to bullshit their way out of similar messes before. It's not going to be like that this time. A personal encounter here, a poll number there, there are too many little things stacking up that hint to me that the marriage between Americanism and Republicanism is basically over. For the moment, the Republicans have the couch (with its cushions all stuffed with money) but that's not going to last. They're not going to be able to thread the needle this time. I think, for one thing, that the Southern Strategy and Fox News have done their work too well, ably assisted by the Internet and by the various sorting categories of Facebook and Twitter. A lot of people simply don't see the propaganda that keeps Republicans and Trump Supporters going.
The divorce is underway, or at least online profiles stating "Separated" as a relationship status have been posted for each.
Who gets Baby Trump in the divorce, is likely a foregone conclusion at this point.
Honestly, when I do see it, it doesn't inspire me. None of this crap makes me want to be a Republican again. The Republican Party has become the party of small-minded fearfulness and I can't get behind that. It's just not in my nature. I saw on Fox News last night (it was on in the break room at work, briefly) that the Fox News hostesses were all freaking out about gender-neutral terminology.
This is literally something half the world already does, and that a lot of American institutions don't do for actual reasons besides soothing the male ego...but as culture changes, some of those reasons are slipping away as well.
Who the hell finds all this fear and despair and panic-mode bullshit all the time to be inspiring? Is confirming one's biases really that damned important? I've said before that I think some of these people would rather hate than eat. Is this actually true?
Well, I wouldn't say it if I didn't believe it.
If Republicans...particularly rural conservative white people...really have so much going for them thanks to Trump, why do they kill themselves in record numbers with drugs and guns? If hate makes them feel so powerful, why are so many acting like they're so convinced that it's over and all they want to do is make sure they get to scalp some liberals before they die?
The Republican Party has made itself all about Trump. Literally, it's all about one guy that two thirds of Americans can't stand.
SO much winning. I'm sick of it already.
At some point, whether in November or in 2020, Republicans know they're going to get their ass handed to them. Even their efforts to pack the courts, to me smacks of nothing more than a rearguard action against cultural and social change...easily undone simply by the other side taking control of the other two branches of government. Even one would greatly reduce the damage.
But there's just one small thing. It's the difference between citizen and subject, it's the difference between free and slave. You have to show up.
YOU have to vote. It matters.
You have to be the one to sign off on the divorce paperwork. If you want a better country you have to be a better citizen. Things might be a bit rough for awhile, but if we work at it, we will prevail.
Nobody else can do that for you. If it didn't matter, the Republicans wouldn't be trying so hard to stop people from voting. If you want a better country you have to be a better citizen. You have to start now, and you have to show up. Do it today, every day, there is no other day.
This article is dedicated to the lady who wrote this last Tweet. Stay strong.
It is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for the country in return. ~Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr., Supreme Court Justice.
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