For Want Of A Nail (Left Behind Is A Lie, Part Three.)

Every one of the thousands at the airport, about to leave for Jeddah, was dressed this way. You could be a king or a peasant and no one would know. Some powerful personages, who were discreetly pointed out to me, had on the same thing I had on. Once thus dressed, we all had begun calling out "Labbayka! (Allahumma) Labbayka!" (Here I come, O Lord!) Packed in the plane were white, black, brown, red, and yellow people, blue eyes and blond hair, and my kinky red hair -- all together, brothers! All honoring the same God, all in turn giving equal honor to each other.

That is when I first began to reappraise the "white man." It was when I first began to perceive that "white man," as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions. 

In America,"white man" meant specific attitudes and actions toward the black man, and toward all other non-white men. But in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That morning was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about "white" men. 

~Malcolm X, letter written following the Hajj.

When I lived in the Dorms at North Central Michigan College, it was the first time I'd ever been in the kind of environment, technology-wise, that most of us take for granted, today, just plug the serial cable into the blue slot on the wall and there you have it. I had a number of friends who were part of the small group of Muslim international students at the school, which was a necessary thing for me, a struggling religious man in a place that had relatively few other people who I could talk to about that kind of stuff. I was on a few online forums, but I found it too hard to sit through things like church services. Most of the few Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christian dorm students knew both me and my ex (She'd done a semester to finish up her degree) and had taken her side. All in all, I'd gained a fairly diverse group of friends, many of whom I'd probably not have been that close to a year or two before, and had a number of one-night stands and short-term relationships with girls that lived in the dorm while I was at it. Those girls included an Atheist (my friend Persephone) and a Witch (Danny, who had boy-short hair to go with a boy's name) and that second one pissed my ex off something fierce. Hell, the Residence hall director, Greg, was gay. Bruce, my boss in the cafeteria was part Native American and an active member of the Little Traverse Bay Bands, the local Native American tribe.

In 2001, 2002 and 2003, it felt like a time of massive change. 9/11 had just happened, the war in Afghanistan was ongoing, opposition to the possibility of war in Iraq had spawned an actual peace movement. I was a part of that not despite, but actually because of my background. There was a lot of stuff happening, and to be honest, a lot of stuff to worry about. But the difference, I think, between now and then is that I do not remember fear and hate being encouraged so much in society. In the months after 9/11 and over most of the decade following, I saw far more of an effort by Americans to understand things like Islam, and the cultures and societies we were...like it or not, right or wrong, engaging as things progressed. Books like The Kite Runner were best-sellers. My friends from other countries got asked questions about what things were like over there, etc. There wasn't a day went by that one of the Muslims I knew didn't get asked some sort of question...in good faith...about their religion. This didn't come from just the liberal students either, but from the more conservative ones also. Americans in general, and American conservatives in particular, had yet to sink into the kind of surly intellectual incurious funk that defines so many of us today, and yet to perfect the art of shitting their pants on command from Fox News.

And not only had the far-right nuts of the previous decade suddenly been nowhere to be found when a real crisis happened, but after a couple weeks the religious craziness after 9/11 had faded into the background as well, aside from my ex-wife, who I'd mostly just ignore. Hell, open racism was a rare enough thing that it tended to be a pretty big deal when it happened.

But...

There were a couple of local incidents in the late summer and fall of 2001, homophobia-based incidents, one in my town, the other in Traverse City. Neither one made much more than the local papers, both of the perpetrators were arrested, one charged with simple misdemeanor assault, the other...a more serious case, with a felony. The second case sparked a small protest, which made the local news and evidently percolated up to the national level somewhere, because Fred Phelps, the infamous pastor of Westboro Baptist Church, found out about it, and announced his intent to stage a protest. This predictably caused a substantial boost in support for the local LGBT community in northwest Michigan. Full disclosure, I'd paid the $2.00 for one of the Rainbow Flag "We Are Traverse City" stickers myself, and put it on my car. By the time Fred Phelps and a small group showed up one cold, gray day in the early spring of 2002 to protest the local gay bar in Traverse City, the popular outrage had been tempered a bit and the Westboro Baptist idiots were studiously ignored by, well, everybody. That said, their protest made the national news, which led to a recap of events, which held national attention for all of five seconds.

There's two important things I should note here. One, Not too long before this my Mom came out to me as bisexual. Second, remember how I said I was able to be online all the time?

I was part of a number of online forums, the social media of the day, including a few Christian forums...more than one of which catered specifically to Evangelicals. You wouldn't think so, but looking back that was a pretty dark and wild corner of the internet. I had nothing much to hide, had private messages forwarded to my E-mail, etc.

My profile pic on a number of these forums was a picture of me, the ex-girlfriend and her girlfriend standing by the back of my parked car with the Mackinaw Bridge and the Straits of Mackinac in the background. Like an idiot, I just thought it was a good picture. My Mom had taken it with my new digital camera when we all decided we were gonna hang out in Mackinaw City one day.

Well, one day on this site "ChristianBBS" this one Calvinist dude starts popping off with a profanity-laced rant about literally burning "homosexuals" at the stake and threatening anybody who tried to stop him.

Also note that this guy was apparently a meat-space neighbor to one of the staff members. They both lived in Sacramento, California. Given the context of this guy, that seems kind of problematic.

ChristianBBS had both its conservative and liberal groups, its various non-Christians, and its Fundamentalists. It was, basically, a community like any other at the start. The website sold some stuff, and had some kind of stream of ad revenue or something as well, basically just enough to pay a part-time staff minimum wage and maintain the site itself. Mostly they were tech people working second jobs, or people who were married or retired. I should also note this site had a below-board war going on between two camps of its staff. One side strictly enforced the Terms of Service which were quite typical in forbidding advocating for violence and in typical Christian form, banning profanity and trying to maintain a general ethic of tolerance. The other side was a clique of mostly-Southern, very political, conservative Fundamentalists that enforced the ToS very selectively...if at all...and mostly just banned anybody who criticized them if they could. The two sides would tend to counteract each other if you hung on long enough.

The Calvinist dude, AKA "Sola Gratia" was beloved by the conservative Fundamentalist camp. His neighbor was one of the people just trying to do a relatively low-wage part-time tech job while maintaining some degree of sanity. Anyway, I noted the Calvinist dude's thread one evening and looked at it. It was titled, "I DEFY YOU..." [to prove him theologically wrong on his premise.]

To their credit, a very solid majority of people reacted to this whole thing with horror. To their credit, almost nobody tried to engage this asshole on his own terms, most people simply pointed out that it was wrong to kill people, they'd get dog-piled by the Fundamentalists, then the other camp would fight back. I got into it on the second day, mostly trying to talk some sense into the "These Fucking People" camp while trying to support moderation and ya know, following the rules while pointing out that I had multiple LGBT people in my family and couldn't ethically support this crap. It devolved into a decidedly Jesus-themed flame war between the homophobic assholes and everybody else. The thread was reported hundreds, if not thousands of times. It was locked, then unlocked, then locked again, then finally "Conditionally." reopened.

This went on for a week or so, and over that time, the staff...or at least those who had any pretense of doing their actual jobs...just sort of gave up and tried to do their jobs as best they could everywhere else. I seriously do not know what, if anything, this Sola Gratia dude did for a living or with his time but he basically kept this stream of homophobic vitriol up for this whole time without stopping. People did their level best, argued passionately against this shit, or simply declared opposition, or staked out whatever ideological or theological positions, a few even came out. For all the good it did. The Fundamentalists remained in resolute lockstep behind this asshole, and more of them joined. Lots of other people started quitting. So the tide started to turn the other way. A couple of staff members...including that guy's neighbor...also quit. A lot of people defected to other message boards. It turned out that not just that particular situation, but the dynamics of that website had caused pain to a lot of people.

As for those of us who tried to hold on...

Well, somebody took my profile pic, blew it up, saw that sticker and then accused me directly of supporting gay rights in the thread. Yep, guilty as charged, I said. That got me dog-piled, not just on that post but elsewhere on the site as well. When I stopped responding after a week of watching this shit sandwich (mostly because, ya know, life) I started getting hate mail. My inbox started dripping glowing green acidic drool and finally I just went and changed my message preferences, and changed my profile pic to the 410th Bomb Wing shoulder patch, too.

I started posting mostly on the other message boards and more or less ignoring that one, except that references to that shit-show thread were popping up on other boards as well. Several other forum refugees messaged me on other sites, including that dude's neighbor who wanted to apologize to me. She'd had a shot at a much better-paying regular job and took it, because the aggravation wasn't worth it. Finally, about a month after the whole mess started, I went back to ChristianBBS just to see what was going on. I had 300+ private messages, all the exact kind of violent misspelled hate mail you'd expect. It appeared most of the staff accounts were inactive or had been replaced by others, and the shit-show had spread from that one thread to the whole site, homophobia, racism, sexism...with a thin coat of "Jesus" paint...had become the rule rather than being against the rules. There were tons of new accounts, and the previous diversity of beliefs and opinions was mostly gone, in favor of the fundamentalists. I locked my account and left.

Tellingly, the site's owner popped up in a couple of other places in the next couple months to try and defend the change with "But my bank account..." He basically sounded exactly like he didn't think he'd done anything wrong by letting things go to shit. A year or so later, it came out that he'd sold his website to another website for a decent amount of money and that was that. Nobody I knew of ever heard anything about it, or him, ever again.

Thinking back, down through the years, that's just a small microcosm of how we got here.

The moral of the story, is all this bullshit that we're stuck dealing with right now is the same old bullshit that's always been there. The scenery changes, the variables change some, the words used, that's all. If there's one thing I've learned from dealing with a wide range of people it's that people are people, wherever you go. When they can get away with it, people will be angry, fearful, hateful idiots and there's always going to be some slime-bucket looking to monetize whatever they can. To those kind of fucking people, hate works as well as anything, I guess.

The difference between then and now, is that some people have nothing but endless exposure to crazy bullshit and violent rhetoric wrapped in a paper thin sheet of conservatism and Jesus. And then you take and add seventeen years more of that shit and imagine what that does to a person's psyche.

Not to mention, most especially among the "conservatives" a kind of fearful idiocy combined with ability to abandon previous beliefs and become outraged at the drop of a hat seems to be being preached as a virtue.

But it's not just that there's nothing else left. For at least some of these fucking people, that's all that was ever there in the first place. Fear, Anger, Hate, and Suffering. It seems to me like Orwell's "Big Brother" could not have asked for a better population to rule than American conservatives...and media-wise, 1984 was chillingly prophetic in quite a few ways.

We've just reached the point where the mad swirl of hate has combined with a natural event to rise up and consume the profits of many of those who've profited off of this mess...and neither they, nor the army of rage-monkeys they've ginned up over the course of the past generation or so can handle the fact that the gig is up and it's all going to come crashing down soon.

This mess we're in gets worse by the day, and I think it's going to come down to armed conflict and the country fragmenting. It's not that I don't think the Democrats or Joe Biden will win. In fact, I think they will. I just think we're starting to reach the point where that's irrelevant.

I had long thought that this would be a conflict over ideology, politics, religion or even sectional identity. But the truth is, I think it's going to come down, on a different level, to a conflict between those who believe in life and truth vs. those who believe only in power, and in keeping that power by any means necessary. Larry Hogan, you'll note, is a Republican.

That matters less than the fact that he's not trying to keep power even if it means trying to weaponize a goddamned virus that could kill us all in the hope that it takes down his political enemies first. At the end of the day, these people don't even care about their own lives. At least Larry Hogan isn't that kind of Republican, and right now, that's enough for me.

The truth is, trying to keep his own people alive could quite literally lead to a firefight between the US Army and Federal Agents. I can tell you how that's going to turn out, both in the immediate term and in the long term. Doesn't work out well for the Feds right away, doesn't work out for the rest of us much past that. Just like the Maryland Army National Guard will have to, everybody, military or civilian, is gonna have to pick a side. Most will go with where ever they live or they're stationed, or who their bros join, and too many will follow the paycheck without concern for much else.

But the ability to ignore politics is itself a privilege, not a right. In America, the Constitution and the ideals of the founders were set up with the intent that you be an active citizen.

If the numbers I keep seeing are accurate, well more than half of the troops don't support the current soup sandwich. But that also means that close to half still do.

And if that ain't a sobering thought I don't know what the hell is.

These Fucking People don't care about anything more than trying to gain the absolute power that they crave over all the rest of us. Basically what they want is for all of us to turn into redcaps, willing to strap on a bomb vest because Orange Man Say So. I mean, these fucking people have thrown out everything else they ever claimed to believe in, why not their own lives, too? That's basically what these "protests" or somebody driving halfway across the country with a car full of knives like some kind of modern day Assassin wannabe, even are.

Now imagine that lady if she'd had the sense to even browse Wikipedia to know what a US Navy hospital ship, vs. an aircraft carrier turned into a museum, looked like.

There's no rationality, just emotion. All the "Pro-Life" bullshit was just another way to break people's brains. That's what the "Mark of the Beast" means, accepting a false system because you lack wisdom.

Yeah, that's the level of stupid we're talking about here, can't identify a big white-painted ship with a red cross on the side that was all over the news a month ago...but she can get mad enough to drive a thousand miles to the wrong city to try to stab somebody.

Get enough of that, and you don't have civilization. All of those evils from the past coming back and fusing into something worse because people never bothered to know anything.

For the common Redcap, or Republican (or, god forbid, Libertarian) every last one of these motherfuckers thinks they're going to come out of this as the king in the castle, the lord in the manor or at least the warlord with the drugs and the money like in some kind of Gonzo version of Afghanistan under the Taliban. Nobody's thinking they're gonna end up dead in a ditch somewhere, or a serf in the fields, or the catamite lashed to the back of the truck.

As for the amoral sociopaths higher up in the food chain, they see that they were able to get people to turn in their brains for some kind of sense of belonging to a tribe, and then turn in their feeling of belonging to a greater humanity on top of that, and they want more.

It's not really about ideology, or religion, these people would preach that the moon is made of green moldy cheese if they thought it would get them what they want. It's not even really about money, that's mostly just a means to an end. They hate and fear equality because it detracts from their power.

That's what we're up against. That's all they care about.

We're going to have to vote these kind of bastards out and we're going to have to fight.

If you're not willing to stand up one way or the other, at this point, take the word freedom out of your mouth.

Our culture has forgotten what the founders knew;
The American experiment is a moral, not just political exercise.
~Chuck Colson

Part Two.
Part Four.