But that the dread of something after death...

My country, 'tis of thee,

Sweet land of liberty

Of thee I sing;

Land where my fathers died,

Land of the pilgrims pride,

From every mountainside

Let freedom ring!

~American patriotic song.

Over the weekend, Trump attacked Ilhan Omar on Twitter again. I'm just sayin' it's getting to the point where this reality show really sucks.

Listen, I'm here to tell you that there's at least some of these people that just aren't going to be happy until Americans end up shooting at each other over their bullshit. I'm serious, Trump is a serious problem, but he's not the cause of this mess. The fact is that we have...and always have had...far-right elements who see their fellow Americans as more the enemy than any foreign dictator. We, as a country, need to put a stop to this shit right now. Why? Because we've gone from mostly ignoring those people and treating them as fringe kooks to having a President that gleefully fans the flames because he likes conflict.

We're at a critical inflection point here, as Mayor Pete said in his speech yesterday, we're in one of those spaces between chapters. We, as a people, know we have a lot of problems and we're very rapidly sorting down into two camps. Simply put, there's those that want to do something about the issues we face, and those who don't.

Those who don't...are awash in creepy obsessions, fear, and hate. I'm sorry, but it really creeps me the fuck out that Fox News has mentioned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over 3,000 times in recent weeks.

That is some real creepy stalker shit right there.

"This country was founded on the ideas of justice, of liberty, of the pursuit of happiness." Yes, all Rep. Omar is doing here is pointing out the obvious, something that most people of good conscience believe whatever their political orientation. I believed this when I was a conservative, and I still believe it now that I'm not. But you know, we have a lot of people in the United States of America that are not people of conscience, and while it's tempting to say they're all on one side or the other...that's not true. Now I'm not drawing a moral equivalence between the two, problems are worse on the Right than they are on the Left, but the point here is we all have a lot of work to do.

I just had to delete a Facebook post because a friend of mine was being an idiot and talking stupid about the Notre Dame fire in Paris that so many of us have been watching this afternoon. I'm just sayin' even if you're an atheist (as my friend happens to be) so are a lot of French people that just lost a major cultural treasure and symbol of their country. You don't have to believe to recognize that a thousand years of history just went up in smoke, likely due to some mundane cause like an electrical fire. We all should stop and reflect on our mortality at such times. Even things that stood for a thousand years can fall...and it may be for no reason that we will ever know or understand.

Just like, fundamentally, you don't have to agree with somebody to see them as a human being, or to recognize that they are part of a great tradition that has shaped no small part of human history and to which we owe a great portion of our modern world's existence.

A huge part of our problem in America right now, is people who are too small to get past their own personal issues with stuff.

Racism, religiosity, and shit-headed fear of the unknown all stem from the same things, lack of compassion, lack of curiosity and lack of empathy. It's the same shit that causes somebody to say "let it burn" when somebody else's cultural landmark goes up in flames.

I hate to tell people that we need to start doing better than this, but it's the truth. We as a people need to stand up and tell all these small-minded bomb-throwers to sit down and shut up, and be prepared to back it up with an ass whuppin' if we have to.

Parliamentary procedure, Quiet sabotage, Strongly worded letters, talking them out of it in private, and all that kind of stuff has its place...but it's not going to quiet this mob that both extreme ends of the political horse-shoe are slowly working up. It's not going to reign in the rage that seems to dominate some people's lives.

And that's sure not going to stop the Russians from perpetually stirring the pot, in an effort to try to get us to destroy ourselves. We have to put a stop to that crap, too.

I don't know what idiots started giving these people a platform, but it has to stop. A not-small percentage of American conservatism is literally morphing into a death cult of angry conspiracy theorists right before our eyes, people who literally reject the truth they can see with their own eyes in favor of the words of some guy with a bad suit and a worse haircut on a TV screen or a website.

It has to stop.

We'd better stand up, get to work and start trying to find a way to deal with America's addiction to anger and outrage and racism and shit-headed nihilism before this ends with America's next war being between its own citizens, and that is the truth. I'm not sure how America can be saved when roughly one in four of us simply doesn't believe in America anymore, much less lofty concepts like democracy, freedom, justice and pluralism. But we have to try to find a way.

We'd best acknowledge that we have a lot of work to do...and get after it.