I Voted, For Civilization (Election Day 2022.)

Wlliam Adama: I've been going through Cain's log and from a tactical perspective it's hard to find fault in anything she did. Or that Kendra Shaw did.

Lee Adama: They butchered innocent civilians, Dad. Come on. How can you ignore that?

William Adama: I know that I didn't have to face any of the situations that she did. I had the President in my face, arguing for the survival of the civilian fleet. I had Colonel Tigh keeping me honest, balancing my morality and my tactics. And I had you. Now...you don't have any children, so you might not understand this, but you see yourself reflected in their eyes. And there are some things that I've thought of doing with this fleet, but I've stopped myself, because I knew I'd have to face you the following day. 

~From Battlestar Galactica: Razor

It's Election Day.

I went and voted this morning.

No issues, in, out, the hardest part was walking from and back to my car because the cold wind blowing off the waters of the river and the duck park went right through my knees.

But I voted.

Did you?

If you want a better country, you have to be a better citizen, period.

It's on you, because they won't. It's that damned simple.

Republicans are only out for Republicans, it's a shitty cult of death and wealth, it's an ideology that eventually turns most of the people in it into goddamn Stepford robots for whom the Party Is All. 

I call modern Republicanism the cult of Dis Pater for a reason. Dis Pater was the Chthonic Roman deity of mineral wealth, associated with the Underworld. 

At this point, their politicians only want to steal, their base only wants to fight and very likely to kill, and their donors and elites only want to avoid any responsibility for goddamned well anything.

Democrats might be a disorganized hot mess, everything from far-right-but-not-fascist to far-left socialists right now. And so constantly arguing about what they want to do, or be, that they have to be pushed to do anything else. But at least they can be. If we tell them to do something, they will usually at least try to do it.

And we've all spent the last week watching Elon Musk implode his brand, his reputation, Twitter, and likely his wider organization.

It's a safe bet that when somebody starts off by firing the accessibility, content moderation and human rights teams, they do not have your best interests in mind.

These people are a goddamned menace. If we don't reign in the behavior of wealthy elites...especially but not entirely the "Conservative" ones...all the other problems will continue.

And guess what? If you want to do that, you have to have a functioning government. You have to have corporations that give a shit about their customers and their product, you have to have people who care about their craft, whatever it may be. You have to have people with civic pride seeking to maintain civilization.

It takes a village to make people like Elon Musk realize they don't have the chops to be Peter Pan.

Do you see now why all Republicans want to do is break shit, give more money to the wealthy and talk constantly about giving the land of the United States of America to the oil companies to shit all over as they damned well please?

Do you see why a good portion of the Republican base simply wants to burn down America and die of disease from simple lack of potable water?

There's a hell of a lot of bored, narcissistic white men who think in such a world they're going to be some kind of right-wing Christianized version of Cobra Commander, Osama, Mullah Omar, or Negan from The Walking Dead and wield unaccountable power over some small kingdom.

These fucking people want fascism because they think some armored transcendent State of endless marching soldiers and political rallies that they can reach out and touch will replace the God they don't give a shit about anymore and fill the emptiness they feel inside.

They think such will absolve them of all responsibility for themselves and their fellow humans.

More to the point, when it goes down, as such governments inevitably do, they all think they gonna be the warlord living high off the hog from the chaos, or imposing [their own] order on the world. They don't think they're going to be the catamite strapped to the back of the truck because the last of the women died three weeks ago from some cause that, in even basic civilization, could have been prevented.

And they all think they gonna become wealthy, manage not to die of disease, starve to death or get shot in the back by somebody else who wants the throne, the big damn hookah and the dancing girls. 

And they think they're going to successfully resist any attempt by anybody...be it a resurgent US government or some teched-out New World Order or simply the next gang on the other side of the mountain...to reimpose constraints on their behavior or tell them what to do.

They think they want Mad Max...never mind that, even in that apocalyptic world, people had to impose civilization and rules and those rules had to have teeth.

More to the point, there's damned few people apparently, who have the guts to tell these motherfuckers; "Hey, that's a bad goddamned idea."

There's too damned few people pointing out to Republicans that shitting on their own shoes and calling it freedom will only eventually give them typhus from lack of proper sanitation.

Worse, it seems like there's too damned few people that actually care about these people to tell them the truth, or tell them they need help, or that it won't work out the way they think.

And given their own choice, they've chosen false prophets, false teachers, outright grifters, vapid celebrities and various people who could plainly give a shit about anybody but themselves every goddamned time.

The contempt, the cruelty, is the goddamned point. And really, these people have as much contempt for themselves as they do for the Other onto which they try to project their own sins.

That hurts me to say, because I used to be a Republican. It's not an accident that I quote people like Ronald Reagan.

We need to step up and stop this, because America is defined by us. We The People are our country, not the government, not bullshit celebrities like Donald Trump or Elon Musk...or even Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden. They are there because we put them there, WE vote for them, or give them money, or whatever have you. Period.

For better and worse, Of the People, By the People and For the People.

Those are our founding principles, for fuck's sake!

And pretty often when we have a problem, at base, it's us...not some Other.

That some of us think Putin's Russia or Orwell's Oceana is a good model to follow? That's our fault.

That some of us don't appreciate Ukraine's fight for freedom, much less what we have here? That's on us.

But we can fix it, too. In fact, only We can.

You still got a couple hours, as of this writing. 

If you haven't already, go and vote.

For civilization.

Слава Україна!

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.  The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.  And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan