God of Hate (Empire, Three.)

Ruby, are you contemplating

Going out somewhere?
The shadow on the wall
Tells me the sun is going down

Oh, Ruby
Don't take your love to town

It wasn't me
That started that old crazy Asian war
But I was proud to go
And do my patriotic chore
And yes, it's true that
I'm not the man I used to be

Oh, Ruby, I still need some company. 

~Kenny Rogers; Ruby, don't take your love to town.

Earlier this week, I saw this.

US Army Soldiers walking through a shopping mall in Poland, being harassed and insulted by some American idiot that was dropping racial slurs and talking stupid. (And then he presumably posted this shit online somewhere.) 

They studiously ignored him, but you can see from the tension, if you watch the video...that this could have gone another way. Having been an Airman myself, if it'd been me and my bros back in the day, it would've taken all of them to keep me from curb-stomping that little punk ass, and I'm not joking.

I'm a veteran. I'm very well aware that there's a segment of the US population that gets off on treating members of the military and veterans like dirt. 

I'm also particularly well aware that white conservatives have a shameful history of abuse toward non-white members of the military and veterans.

I've written about this before, most recently just over a year ago in fact;

In February of 1994 I was a young Security Policeman in the United States Air Force. The local university was having a Black History Month event at which a few Tuskegee Airmen would be speaking. The higher-ups thought it would be a good idea for the local Bomb Wing to represent, so a bunch of us got told to go get our dress blues and drive into town for this thing. 

Hey, I thought, easy duty!

So I spent a fair amount of time that evening standing at attention while some old black dude talked about having been one of the Red Tails of the 332nd Fighter Group, a no-shit hero whose unit never lost an escorted bomber to enemy air action over Nazi-occupied Europe, only to come home and find out that little if anything had changed. Segregation was still in effect and all that. This guy talked about how he'd drive from Chicago down to Mississippi to visit family and how the Jim Crow bullshit started at Cairo, Illinois. Yes, the 1950's, the good old days of the Negro Motorist's Green Book and segregation. You know, what the MAGA's are talking about when they say "Make America Great Again." 

These people were honest-to-god heroes and came back to an America that didn't want to let them use the goddamned bathroom same as everybody else.

Think about that for a second.

That's America's history. 

You have to acknowledge the bad along with the good. You don't really get to pick just one or the other. If you think the more recent panicky bullshit about transgender people and bathrooms is some kind of novel or new thing, well, it ain't.

I'm very serious when I say: If you don't think this is a problem, fuck you!

But suffice it to say that people like the Colorado Springs mass-shooter's dad who'd rather their kid be a murderer than a gay man are not the least bit uncommon. 

Hate is some people's real religion.

I mean, I don't get how an obviously drug-using former porn star with a violent mentality gets to claim to be a Mormon either. One of these things is not like the other one. But, there's a lot of people like that motherfucker out there.

For some people, the cruelty really is the goddamned point...of everything.

Heaven isn't Heaven if everybody gets to go, America isn't America if everybody gets a slice.

And as a former Christian also, I'm here to tell you that some people design their entire religion around this mental construct.

Heaven doesn't feel like Heaven to them if they don't know for a fact that somebody else is going to hell. No, the Word does not actually say any of this or support this kind of view. Jesus preached about the Underworld and Sheol (which is a place of nonexistence where the souls of the truly evil people were sent to be destroyed.) The modern folk-Christian idea of Hell has more to do with Dante's Inferno than it does with the Word.

In point of fact, Christianity was just one of many neo-platonic cults that...spoiler...offered people a relatively free and easy way to get to the more blessed aspects of the afterlife.

So yeah, this shit has nothing to do with the Bible, it's pure Gnosticism.

And because these fucking people are not getting their way politically and/or socially, the time is going to come, and soon, when they will resort to violence (at least, in a more organized, systematic fashion than they're already doing) in order to try and create a political system that reflects their shitty beliefs.

They want to live in the Empire from Star Wars, and call that shit "Freedom."

And they're willing to hate, and yes, to fight their fellow Americans...including the United States Armed Forces...if that's what it takes to get what they want. They see the Black soldiers walking with the White soldiers...and the restraint of both in the face of stupidity...as weakness.

Then they look at a goddamned mess like Russia where most of the country still lives like they did 100 years ago, and they see strength. 

(Even as these same people denigrate the Middle East where it's nothing for the same family to have lived in the same neighborhood since before America was America...but at least most of them have some of the same stuff we're used to. And I still remember a Muslim friend of mine telling me that he thought so many Americans hated Islam because it discourages racism, forbids drinking alcohol and mandates charity...all on a scriptural level.)

It's not just that they "like" authoritarianism or fascism...it's that they only "like" a certain kind of it. And they see everything else as weakness. I'm afraid to ask what an American Far-Right version of North Korea would look like...but that shit is what these assholes think they want.

They're wrong, but they can and will only find that out the hard way. You can't tell these fuckers anything.

And by then, it'll be too late for somebody. People will die. And don't you forget it.

That's the part that gets me, I remember when regard for life, and for the existing social order (if only because it was the existing social order) was a thing conservatives collectively had. Now they don't care, and they're perfectly well willing to Kamikaze themselves for something as vague as hurting somebody else's imagined feelings.

The Right-wing "god" is a god of hate...because that is these fucking people's most important value and thus what they construct their entire worldview around in any modern sense.

You simply cannot run a society on hate.

It's time to step up and stop this shit. Either you believe in civilization or you don't.

If you want a better country you have to be a better citizen. ~Stonekettle.

Two

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

...

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. ~Yoda.