To be, Or not to be.

When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women, when it does not listen to the voice of conscience, it turns against humanity and society. ~Pope John Paul II.

Last night on Fox News, some idiot called Greta Thunberg "Mentally ill."

Apparently, the entire incident was offensive enough that Fox News itself issued an apology.

Let's unpack this a bit, though.

No, seriously, don't look away, conservatives.

Why is it, that people destroying the environment of the very planet we all live on, the only planet we can live on, the very place our species and every species we are even aware of was born...and people hoarding money to the point where 400 individual humans have hoarded wealth to the point where they've beggared half the planet is somehow not considered mental illness or even wrong...but some young kid who is trying to save the planet we all have to live on immediately gets tagged as "mentally ill?"

You tell me, conservatives, how in the fuck does any of that make sense?

How is this mess not being considered utterly sociopathic right on the face of it?

What are you going to do when the Earth starts to warm at a faster rate, and the oceans rise and probably even a hell of a lot of your fellow rich people are among the swarms of refugees headed inland because oh, hey, everything they owned and derived their wealth from was in some nice, wealthy coastal city, the one that the tops of its skyscrapers are officially being designated a maritime navigational hazard?

Do you really think you'll be able to fund a crash Faster-Than-Light space travel program with your own resources in the amount of time you have left? Where are you going to get the mathematicians and physicists you need? You know, scientists, the people your pet politicians have spent years disparaging, diminishing respect for, and cutting their funding?

Or do you think you're just going to have to break down and build a spaceship out of bricks of $100 bills?

No, seriously, don't look away and stop waving your hands around. What is the end goal here?

What good does any amount of money do you if the planet we all live on becomes uninhabitable?

And no, the fact that you'll be dead by the time things start to get really bad is not an out. Don't you even give a shit about your own kids? Grandchildren? How your own name is gonna be remembered in the history books?

What exactly do any of you people even give a shit about?! Clearly, your own families don't even make the cut.

How much money is enough?

And speaking of disasters, apparently Trump spent at least part of his disaster of a UN General Assembly speech fear-mongering about Communism and Socialism. Never mind that of the people he's talking to, a substantial number live in and represent countries that lived under Communism and probably survived living under it themselves, and yet more live in countries (and I'll grant there's some overlap between the two) that have adopted or retained some socialistic elements in how they live and run their countries. God Bless America, we've hit the point where our idiot President is literally trying to Mansplain shit to the rest of the world...that the rest of the world lived through and we didn't, mostly because we were on the other side of the fucking ocean and developed nuclear weapons before the Soviet Union did. God DAMN but I am sick of these fucking people.

Not to mention, I'm 45 years old and I was not quite 16 yet when the Berlin Wall came down, and Communism fell faster than a row of dominoes on a card table in an East Berlin apartment block.

So much for domino theory...when push came to shove it literally worked the opposite from how "Conservatives" said it would. By the time I actually buckled down and got my driver's license a couple months late...there wasn't a Soviet Bloc anymore and Germany was well on the way to being a united country again. Not too long after I registered to vote, the world got the fall of the Soviet Union as a damned near literal Christmas gift.

Fuck these motherfuckers, not one damn person should be ranting about Communism almost 30 years after it even ceased to be a real thing. For fuck's sake, even the Chinese aren't really Communists anymore!

What's wrong with you?!

I feel like we're at some sort of a tipping point here, when you have somebody like former [Ohio] Republican Governor John Kasich also supporting Greta Thunberg, when suddenly talk of Impeaching Trump is a thing again, when Boris Johnson gets his ass handed to him on a plate by the UK Supreme Court and his suspension of Parliament is declared illegal and fucking Benjamin Netanyahu loses an election in Israel...all in the same week or so? Yeah, I think we may just have hit the point where people are getting tired of the Far Right's bullshit.

But that's only the first half of the story, isn't it?

First, it'll only get worse, as they start to lose these people first are going to rant about the End Times and the Rapture...and then they're going to try to bring them about by brute force.

Second, It's going to come down to a fight with these people, both politically and otherwise. I rather suspect that in the end it's going to be far less along "Party" lines than, at the end of the day, between those who believe in life and those who don't. Perhaps more properly it's going to come down to a fight between those who believe in human (and other) life and those who believe in the supremacy of ideology.

Yes, fundamentally people are going to have to fight wars for the right to be alive...against those who think that the deaths of other people proves some kind of philosophical point.

Perhaps in the end it'll end up that the real divide is between humanists and ideologues.

I mean, seriously, what the hell good are your bloody ideas without humans to put them into practice, and a functioning world in which to see if they work?

Some people seem to have this belief that ideas or ideologies are somehow things that exist apart from humanity and the natural world in some sort of perfect, splendid isolation...and then they usually try to force their idea of "perfection" on the rest of us.

And it rarely if ever works, or does anything more than make trouble.

Fundamentally, what modern conservatism is about is simply trying to beat the rest of the world into some kind of submission towards its shitty ideology...no matter how contrived and unnatural that ideology may become. Let it fester long enough and this shit becomes the kind of "We had to destroy the town in order to save it" logic that got us that war that Donald Trump skipped out on.

History has shown that doesn't work, and that people don't appreciate having their lives or their towns, much less their planets sacrificed for some idiot's ideology.

Maybe that's what should be engraved on humanity's tombstone, either by unknown aliens or by the intelligent descendants of cockroaches and ferrets and rats that rise up as the next intelligent species on the Earth:

"In the End, they became so Free, that only ideas mattered. It was then, that they destroyed themselves. Do not be like the humans, and forget to be humane."

It's time to stop worrying about where these people get their shitty ideas, and start doing something about them. If humanity is going to survive this stupid bullshit, we're going to have to start caring about other humans, and yes, we're going to have to put those who won't in check.

I'm not asking you to like Greta Thunberg, I'm asking you to look around you and see what's going on in the world, and do something, while we still can.

If you won't care about other humans, care about yourself enough to think ahead and look at your own survival instead of listening to what some old white man in a bad suit tells you.

Is that so hard?