Light and Darkness, Part Two.

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still. 
~Ronald Reagan

"Go back where you came from!" Trump basically Tweeted this morning, referencing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tliab. Of course, the problem...as is usual with this particular racist line of insults...is that three out of four were born here, and thus come from here. The only one who didn't, Ilhan Omar, came here as a refugee with her family when she was Two and had no capability to have control over her own circumstances whatever.

I spent most of my life as a Republican, I grew up in a moderately conservative family. I've said it many times, that if at any point along that way I'd have talked like Trump routinely does, I'd have got my ass beat, either by family or friends that actually cared, because we all knew that type of shit was wrong.

But I spent most of my life as a conservative. I've seen shit like this. There are plenty of damn reasons that this kind of crap used to be strongly opposed and reacted against when it came up. It was, at one time, considered to be policing our own. Some things are not done in the better places, we don't tolerate that kind of talk here, etc. I can remember when talking like this crap meant the end of one's political career...even as a Republican.

In my own life, I've about come over the table at people for this kind of talk. During a gaming session I once pulled a sword on a guy for derogatory comments directed at the only female player...who, being Native, was also the only person of Color...at the table.

And everybody else who was there later said they were glad I did what I did. 

Conservatism used to be about judging people by their capabilities, moral character and contributions...not by the color of their skin or where they came from. I had it drilled into me from multiple vectors...nearly all of them at least "small-c" conservative by today's estimations...that one did not judge people by their color, by their culture, or by their national origin. Insofar as criticism or judgment of such was acceptable it was usually related to specific acts or cultural things most people found to be abhorrent...Female Genital Mutilation in Somalia and some other African countries, for example. I should add, that such criticisms 20 years ago could be pretty bipartisan. I should also add that 20 years ago, Republicans could reliably be counted on to support religious freedom across the board.

Tribalism was something we mocked and attributed, rightly or wrongly, to illiterate savages like the Taliban in Afghanistan.

This is what I came from. No, I have not always been as supportive of LGBT people, or the non-religious as I am now. But I, when I first registered to vote as a Republican at 18 years old, damn well knew better than this garbage.

And now, what's left of the Republicans *Are* the people who practice tribalism, and they're fast becoming illiterate savages that literally resemble the fucking Taliban in more ways than one. A Republican candidate for governor in Mississippi is under fire for throwing a fit about a female reporter having been assigned to his travelling press group. He called it "Leftist intimidation." Wait a minute...women having jobs is "Leftist intimidation?" 

Sorry, but even at my most conservative and most religious I always understood that most households needed two incomes to survive decently...and if a woman's education, inquisitive nature or natural talents led them to a career in journalism...I was fine with that, or at the very least recognized that it was not for me to say what somebody else did.

Oh, right, this asshole is of the same bullshit persuasion as Mike Pence, that is he thinks he should not be alone with any woman other than his wife. He wanted the female reporter to have an assigned male chaperone.

If that sounds Islamic...specifically like something that would be required in Saudi Arabia or Taliban-era Afghanistan...that is because that's literally what it is. Allah Akbar, motherfuckers.

Except...that analogy has a big gaping hole in it. In that the United Nations recently ranked a teenager in Bangladesh as more likely to live to 50 years old than one in America.

And why might that be?

Well, for starters, Americans who are able are now going to other countries to get their medications because the cost of things like Insulin have become too high. This is personal to me, as I'm at serious risk of becoming a diabetic later in life due to a family history of exactly that. My Dad, a diabetic from childhood on...died from complications of diabetes, and other relatives on both sides of my family developed it much later in life as well.

Unless something major changes, in a few years here, I could be one of those people walking out of a Canadian drug store, grocery bag raised in triumph. Health care should simply not be an entirely for-profit enterprise. 

Right here, in plain sight, America is morphing into the Conservative Venezuela...because too many of us think it's more important to give rich people more money than it is for even we, ourselves, to have a decent quality of life at a level that we can afford.

And yet, it actually gets worse than that, as we've become a nation that abuses children in concentration camps, that tolerates child sexual abuse to an alarming degree, and in fact, has done so for far too long. Alex Acosta, Trump's Labor secretary, just resigned in disgrace for cutting Jeffery Epstein a sweetheart plea deal...as a prosecutor in 2007. Rapper R. Kelly, who was also recently arrested...has been known to be a sexual predator for just as long...and far too few people could even be bothered to care.

And while I'd say a majority of people are mad about the camps, there is a large minority that is vocally against AOC and mad at her for pointing out how terrible the conditions in those places are.

And yet again, our society bends over backwards and contorts itself into ridiculous positions to try to say that both views are valid. 

Listen here, when you've got two thirds of us want to move forward at varying speeds...but forward still...and another third of us that want to slam on the brakes with the aim of eventually going backwards into some imagined and idealized past, that's a problem. We as a nation have been far too generous and given far too much leeway to assholes...and as always happens, the assholes have decided we didn't give them enough. If we continue to enable the assholes, they'll wreck the ship anyway. If we don't, they're going to either have to be defeated or cut loose...or they'll break off some part of America for themselves...and if you think those people will be content with (for example) the Republic of Alabama...you have another thing coming.

Whatever kind of legalistic or religious bullshit they come up with to justify it is just that, a bullshit justification, a proof-text to try to cover for whatever shitty things they want to do anyway, and it should be taken about exactly that seriously, rather than given media coverage as CNN and Fox News do their level best to outdo each other with competing ideologically opposed takes.

No, that's not how this works. The Bible says that light has no fellowship with darkness.

And yet, all too often, it's the Christians who seem to be in some sort of a race against each other to show submissiveness to some form of authoritarianism, no matter how abusive, even to them. For example, this idiot who is saying it's "Biblical" to lose weight when told to even in the rudest and most demeaning terms...when such is not expressed as "Hey, maybe you should lose some weight because eating too much isn't healthy." No, she expresses it as a command, not as a statement of concern.

As I've said before, my ex-wife was rather plus-sized and if I would've talked to her like that I'd have been sleeping on the couch...if she didn't just grab the kid and some of her stuff and leave, right there.

And she was a Pentecostal. I was a "small-c" conservative Baptist at the time and we consciously made an effort to live according to the Word as much as we could.

But one thing was specifically stated right out the gate and that was that abuse was not acceptable.

It's strange to me now, that some kind of a "right" to abuse others seems to be the one thing conservatives will actually fight for. Given that all of us, to varying degrees, have given way to the modern world...it seems a very odd hill to die on.

But that is exactly what they are doing.

Exclusion, Patriarchy, Racism, a seething desire for revenge against slights real and imagined, and a ravening desire to abuse others simply to show their own claimed social "power" have become...not so much the hallmarks of modern conservatism, but simply all that is left of it.

Ronald Reagan and his desire to defeat the Soviet Union, to tear down walls and have America be a shining city on a hill would be no more welcome in today's Republican Party than Abraham Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation would be.

Republicans *Are* the party of Concentration Camps, Russians, Walls, and of condoning physical and sexual abuse and trafficking children for sexual purposes. 

Like I said, the Bible all these people claim to love says that Light has no fellowship with Darkness. It's time to make your choice, and to do so firmly, and to vote accordingly to end this crap. Make no mistake, that is what we have to do if we are to remain a whole country.

Because false equivalency, indecision, malfeasance by conservatives, non-participation in the political process, purity politics, tolerance of bad behavior by powerful bastards, unicorn-hunting by kooky liberals and whatever-you-guys-want apathy is going to end us if we don't.

And if we cease to be a whole country, our enemies will pick us apart and turn us against each other until the next cohort of refugees in the world is Americans fleeing what used to be our country.

And speaking as a former Republican here, I don't see any other end but ethnic conflict and political conflict and collapse along the same lines as the Yugoslav wars if the current Republican program is allowed to remain unfettered and Democratic leadership continues to do nothing.

If we don't reign in this political equivalent of a drunken bar loudmouth he's going to be the end of us. The man simply does not believe in America.

When people as diverse from one another (despite their similar origins) as Justin Amash and Rashida Tliab can agree that we need to impeach that motherfucker...maybe, just maybe, we should fucking do something.

Part 1.


Part 3.