Shout It In The Streets (Serpent In The Garden, Two.)

Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world. ~James 1:27

I saw this last night.

Some whacko Republican candidate in my state saying "Her religion is true, and all others are demon-possessed" in effect.

Ya know, I don't give a damn if that's what you believe. This is America, you can believe what you want.

But the US Constitution says that you don't have a right to force your interpretation of Christianity (or whatever this is) on other people.

And nobody's trying to "Silence" you. But here's the thing (and this is where these people have a problem) nobody has to listen to you, either.

And for people that it's really all about them and how religious they are, there is nothing worse than not having a crowd forced to hang on your every word, listen to every half-baked rant, and pay attention to them while having to act like they enjoy it.

No, people like this bitch don't care if it's real. They just want an audience and a paycheck.

And the power to do whatever they damn well please to that audience.

Don't forget that part.

For these fucking people, their religion is nothing more than another excuse to keep people they can't have power over or don't like out while trying to bullshit the world into giving them that power.

For them, the Cross and iconography featuring Jesus is nothing more than scary Tikis to place at the edge of the village, their message not "All Are Welcome" but instead "Go Away! Go away! Fuck you!"

Heaven isn't heaven if everybody gets to go. Religion has no meaning without blood in the streets, the sound of explosions and gunfire in the distance and saints or sinners nailed to the walls.

Except of course, they don't like it much when those sounds come from people who are fighting for their own freedom against armies that murder, rape and steal.

It's funny that so many "Conservatives" and religious nuts only ever seem to break their silence about what's going on in Ukraine and about the horrors committed by the Russian Army when they're praising Vladimir Putin. 

For all too many modern Evangelical Christians, their revolutionary Messiah who fed the poor and healed the sick and rose from the dead has been replaced. He has been replaced either by a gold-plated statue of the latest tin-pot dictator (And that statue was never alive in the first place) or by the latest popular conspiracy theory. Far too many "Evangelicals" only ever want to talk about Jesus when there's an argument and they can use Him as a club with which to beat other people. But the problem with that is, first Trump and now Putin seem to be bigger sticks with which to beat those that they don't like...which is basically everybody else.

And this is the kind of life they want to offer everybody who isn't rich while the Republicans get rid of Social Security and all type of other social programs. Never mind that lots of aged or disabled people, and most retired people period are dependent on Social Security...and thus so is much of our economy especially in places where the population skews older and there's not a lot of jobs and shit.

And it's real damn easy to say "Let's get to work" when your job is to go to meetings all day, sit in an office and wear a suit.

It's a lot harder when you're the 76-year-old Custodian with bad hearing from one career as an Army National Guard Field Artilleryman and another career as a factory machinist who has to clean trench drains all night crawling around on a wet nasty goddamned floor. And dude had retirement from both of those damn jobs. I'm completely not kidding.

Yes, that's right, I know and have known a lot of 70-some and 80-some years old folks who have to work now for one reason or another...often as simple as "They or their spouse needs something Medicare and the V.A. don't pay for." 

(And that's exactly why I worked with that guy for twelve years, too.)

And that's a hard and often sad thing to deal with.

And Rick Scott wants to take that situation and make it worse...and do so mostly for his own goddamned profit.

Fuck him.

He doesn't want you to work hard and feel good about yourself and have a vested interest in your country.

No, his dumb, greedy ass wants you to have to work more so he can charge you more in taxes to make up for all the tax cuts on him and his rich donors and rich friends.

Republicans are coming for your money and your standard of living and they're hoping all they have to give you in return is Culture War bullshit, fanatical Racism and harsh Religiosity so that you'll go and destroy yourself working some hard, menial labor job instead of collecting on the taxpayer-funded Federal benefits that you paid into for your whole damned working life.

And then these fuckers have the balls to say that they're the Party of religion and respect for life?

They're lying to you. They're not that, and they never were.

And too much of America treats this truth as a dirty little secret whispered by a snake in the garden than shouting it from the rooftops and in the streets like the obvious fucking fact that it is.

Fuck that shit. Kick these people to the curb, America.

Rick Scott could live for a thousand lifetimes and never run out of the money he's made in this one.

Most of us will never be so fortunate as to have his problems, he doesn't deserve or need our money, be it Social Security or Taxes paid to cover what he should have been paying all along.

We need to stop giving these fucking people more money and start making them pay their fair share.

It's really that damned simple, anything else is not sustainable.

Tax the fucking rich. 

It's not some kind of subversive idea.

It's our America just as much as it is theirs.

And don't trust the religious people they give money to or the techno-Gnostic conspiracy-theory bullshit they and their lackeys use to make you think you're special and tuned in while they eliminate the entire concept of truth that's all we really have to push back with.

Whether one draws one's certainties from religion or science, in order for one to push back against Power one must have one's feet set on a hard floor of Truth, and one must have the freedom to build and to have and to maintain that foundation. This can only exist in the context of a democratic, pluralistic society. Now I don't give a damn if the truth one uses for this is Darwin's theory of Evolution or that God created the Earth in six days and rested on the seventh. People have to have this, and conspiracy theories, false doctrines, junk science, quack medicine and religious extremism are nothing more than shades of the same effort by forces of Greed and Power to undermine Truth on a conceptual level. 

Part One.

Слава Україна!

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

[Part One Of A Duology.]