So, last week I was working in the break room one night at work, and my friend Aaron showed me this Twitter post, presumably written by some Nazi dumb ass. My mouth literally hung open in shock. I'm not kidding, I was going to write about this, but any time I sat down to do so, nothing worth posting came to mind.
A thought that I had: It's funny how almost everybody in the world will agree that genocide and mass murder are wrong, but then demographics and their environment or whatever changes and all the sudden at least some of those people are like "Boy howdy, where do I sign up?" when some fool starts advocating for ethic cleansing, genocide, and mass murder.
But, it's hard to get a complete post out of that.
Then, came the Trump rally in Huntsville, Alabama, on Friday night. I read Shaun King's transcript of Trump's comments, calling NFL players "Sons of bitches" and saying they should be fired for protesting (and also that they should hit harder) and I posted about it on Facebook.
"Let's get a few things straight. #1 Trump has just escalated something that didn't need to be escalated. He's effectively thrown the NFL (the owners in particular) under the bus. They are going to have to start backing their players or quite likely face public backlash.
#2 What is this "Our flag" bullshit, while talking to a crowd of his dedicated supporters? That flag represents all Americans and don't you forget it. You want a flag that represents just white people? Go buy yourself a confederate flag.
People of every race and most religions have bled and fought and died for this country, and many of them were immigrants, and don't you forget that, either.
#3 This entire bit is some seriously Third World horse shit, period. If you support this crap, you don't really want to live in America...or at least not any America that this middle-aged former conservative would recognize as such.
#4 For the record, I hate Roy Moore's fucking guts with the fury of one thousand splendid suns, and I hope that motherfucker wins the primary. Yes, Trump has put me in the position of hoping that goddamned son of a bitch wins, JUST because of the hypocrisy of the whole goddamned deal.
That's right, you know Trump is down there on behalf of Mitch McConnell and all those "establishment" Republicans that he and his supporters say they hate so fucking much.
As for the subject matter of Trump's comments. Fuck that guy. Anthony and I spoke about this directly. If he as a football coach, or either one of us publicly or at work said anything of this sort we'd get FIRED.
Another thing, Everybody in this country has freedom of speech and if you don't like that, fuck you. If an employer fires somebody for speaking publicly about this issue or that one or the other one then in many cases, there is legal recourse unless their comments fall foul of their employment contract under certain circumstances that MUST be legally enumerated. Does anybody think the NFL, if it attempted to make good on Trump's threats, would not get sued for it, and most likely lose?
First Amendment cases literally are an industry all their own in the legal community, and from any political or social angle you can think of, too.
Then of course there's the comment about the hits? Really, dude? Workplace safety has been a thing on increasing levels since the New Deal and as knowledge and medical science increases we're going to probably continue to err on the side of safety.
Why? Legal issues, again, entire massive subdivision of the legal community dedicated to dealing with this issue...the term Ambulance Chaser is a thing for a reason.
Ideally, the reasons people would have for supporting the First Amendment or safety regulations would be because it's the right thing to do, but no. This is America, damn it. We have to monetize absolutely everything to the point of ridiculous.
It's the politicization of the game that's costing Football it's fan base, that and teams moving and owners catering to rich people instead of regular fans.
One last thing...trying to force people to be patriotic will absolutely have the opposite effect.
Respect is earned, every action, every day, all the time. Yes, that's hard...and that is exactly the point.
America is hard, you try to cut corners and you get people like Trump an the current Republican party. If you want a better nation you HAVE to be better citizens."
There were a couple of things that I didn't add, because I was tired when I wrote the post and I didn't really want to deal with the possibility of going to bed and then waking up to some kind of a flame war in the comments.
It's not just that rich assholes like Trump don't think African Americans and other people of color should have a right to protest. it's that the sons of bitches don't just want these players to beat the fuck out of each other and hurt or kill themselves and each other...they think that the US flag represents them and they want to be ritualistically thanked by the players for the privilege of entertaining them. For fuck's sake, why not just bring back gladiators if that's what they think? It's not like their howling, bloody-minded mob wouldn't gleefully fall in behind that, too.
In fact, in a gaming context I've written about just that kind of thing happening in a Christian Fundamentalist theocracy that managed to seize parts of the southern US and I made it a part of the setting, and a thing that perpetuated a vast, illegal trade in fight videos which was large enough to help support an attempted reboot of the Confederacy, in a war that they eventually lost as much due to their own corruption as anything else.
When you literally, from a theological standpoint, do not believe that life on this Earth has any meaning, or in any human rights or human dignity except your own, something like that is a possibility. When you make a religion of "Fuck you, I've got mine" and "You deserve what you get" abuse and debasement and treating other people as entertainment rather than human beings is eventually going to come up. When you follow false gospels like Calvinism or the Prosperity Gospel...when money and power become your God...you get stuff like this. You get people who think that their privilege (white or otherwise) is more important than other people's lives. While hurricanes wreck whole regions, seas rise and wars slaughter tens of thousands in places like Burma and Syria...it's funny how the rest of the world seems to have literally become absent from so many American news feeds. I'm not joking, I've yet to find an article about the ethnic cleansing in Burma or aid to Rohingya refugees that originated from an American news agency.
In point of fact, I can think of maybe half a dozen people I know who would know or have bothered to learn about that situation. Fuck, half of Americans don't even seem to be aware that Puerto Rico got wrecked by a hurricane and is in some pretty rough shape at the moment. I've seen literal reminders on social media that Puerto Rico is a part of the United States and we should be doing something about this.
And there are a couple of Puerto Rican ladies on my Facebook feed, who I know from the ferret groups that are, in real time, showing what it's like to be part of the forgotten peoples of the United States of America and yet somehow, they're managing to get information and videos from back home that show the people there are doing the best they can to overcome adversity...
And maybe half of White Americans are losing their shit over Football players taking a knee for the National Anthem?
This is literally, a national case of "First World Problems" as an attempt to distract from the upcoming (and likely doomed) health care repeal vote, from the President's Russian machinations problem, and from any number of fuck ups we don't even know about yet, or possibly even a blatantly transparent power grab against our Constitutional rights.
As of this last nine months or so, about a quarter of the United States of America has basically fallen off the map in a frenzy of celebration of the Self, outright foolishness and theological navel-gazing, while basically half of the population literally argues and fights with that group over whether or not it has a right to exist, and then there's another quarter of the population that seems to make a point of either apathetically sharing pictures of their cats and hiding from reality or looking at either of the preceding groups like "Okay, which one of you is going to make me the best offer?" depending on the day.
Donald Trump isn't so much the problem as he's the ultimate symptom of various sicknesses that have been with this country from the beginning, mostly racism, religious fanaticism and a vacuous sense of isolationism and self-importance...combined with more than a little apocalyptic fantasy and a perverse desire to go out in a blaze of glory that doesn't realize that when civilization crumbles, the pain medication stops coming, and there's no flush toilets or internet connection and no, you don't just automatically know how to live off the land...
...Nor that the land we live on has mostly been ravaged down to the point where, absent civilization to maintain it, it's not enough to support all the people who live on it.
And of course, then you have the attitude of certain far-right Science Fiction authors, which is basically that we could easily solve world hunger...if people would just learn to eat each other.
Or, as I've put it for many years, people think that the "real" world ends at the county line, but somehow at the same time they think everybody outside of that wants whatever they have.
Does that spell it out for you about how bad this situation could get? I'm not joking when I say we have people here who likely make 1930's Germans look like saints by comparison. Hell, the Nazis took notes from American behavior during the Indian Wars and the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow era.
These are the fruits of inbreeding, creationism and white privilege. This is the result of self-esteem being preached instead of self-respect, and the preaching of that which tickles the fancies and scratches the ears instead of that which renews the soul or stimulates the mind. This is what happens when snotty kids don't get an ass whuppin' and don't learn that actions have consequences. They grow up to be shitty adults.
So, as a result, we're down the rabbit hole of madness...thankfully, over half of our population realizes that it is madness and is trying to do something to fix it. These are the people who are taking a stand against the fall of night and trying to preserve our civilization.
That gets difficult when a third or so of our population (including the President) can't or won't even understand the basics of our Constitution and laws...and then there are yet more people who don't seem to want to participate at all.
In the face of the fall of night, apathy isn't an option, you're either lighting a candle to hold back the darkness, or you're not. Freedom isn't free, and guns are far from the only or most productive way to defend it. If you want a better civilization, you have to be a better citizen...and that means not outsourcing dealing with your problems to some con artist who comes along and says "I alone can fix it."
He can't, he won't, he'll just do the best he can to make it worse and see if he can profit from the worsening of it.
Facing, and fixing all these problems? That's our job.
If we can't, or won't do it, then I wonder. If the United States of America destroys itself, will the rest of the world even notice?
After the last few days I feel compelled to ask myself and others "What the fuck are we even doing here?"
Think about that, take all the time you need.
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