And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see. And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.
And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see. And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.~Revelation 6:1-4
The first couple years of the Millennium were eventful ones for me. My girlfriend and I broke up over the course of late May and early June of 2000, she was having some issues she didn't really want to discuss, but we broke it off on fairly amicable terms and remained friends (It would be nearly a year before I found out that she'd been questioning her sexuality and I'd been on the losing side of the argument. She'd been afraid to tell me) So my suddenly single-again life went a little nuts for a while a few months later when I met my now ex-wife...who not only Rose but a lot of other people in my life at that point genuinely did not like. But still, because she cared about me, Rose came to my wedding that September, along with one of my Bros, Ron, who'd introduced us. Rose got into an argument with my wife that escalated to shouting and came within a polished-fingernail-length of mutual physical violence at the wedding reception, as well as my ex getting a pitcher of extremely cold ice water thrown in her face before half a dozen people broke it up.
Thankfully several of us had some level of deescalation training...and nobody who saw the whole thing blamed Rose, not even my ex's family members. My ex had taken Rose's empathy and kindness as a sign of weakness, and pounced. Oops. She had, as I found out later that evening, rubbed Rose's nose in what she thought of as 'winning' and my ex had made a rather nasty remark about Rose's sexuality. Like the rest of us, she had no idea, but she had malice without having the slightest idea of what was really going on. My ex and I spent the first couple days of being married giving each other the cold shoulder and the silent treatment.
Talk about a bad omen...
It came as a shock to her, seven months or so later when I had to call Rose and admit that yes, she had told me so, she was right. Rose, who rarely ever swore, responded with a very sweet "I fuckin' told you." Then she admitted to me that she had a girlfriend...and when I laughed, told her I thought that was great and all the sudden a lot of things made so much more sense...I could feel her relief over the phone. In the intervening time I'd quit the restaurant job I had, worked at Walmart for a year in two different stores, had a couple of second and side jobs and my college grades had suffered thanks to a shitty home life. Grades were something both my Mom and Rose had always been relentlessly 'on' me to keep up. My ex-wife had descended into a Pentecostal religious mania that, twenty years and a couple months later, has yet to abate, but at that time it was genuinely annoying and harmful to my own spiritual well-being, seeing as we still had to deal with each other.
I was on to a rebuilding phase, working at the college in Petoskey, getting my GPA back up and the divorce would as of that time be another messy ten months or so in the making. Rose and I (and her new girlfriend) hung out a few times and she and I were both in Ron's wedding...another instant relationship that would turn out badly.
My Mom had gotten her BSW degree in May of 2000, but promptly dove into getting her Masters, doing her internship and working, maintaining a six or seven day a week schedule for months at a time. School for me got out, but I was working at the college, so it didn't really. Life found somewhat of a normal ebb and flow as the school year neared, then started.
Until...
Classes were canceled within the hour, though work wasn't, but since it wasn't much more than staff and dorm students (and my Mom stopping by to check on me) we mostly just turned all the cafeteria TV's on the different news channels and kept one eye on our work and the other on the world. Bruce (the big boss of my department) and I stood outside for ten minutes after putting the cardboard in the recycling dumpster. We smoked as I pointed out to him that the solitary set of contrails in that infamously clear blue sky was a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker, and I got a pair of binoculars out of my car and showed him. I'd known from the TV showing airliners filling up the ramp at K.I. Sawyer that nuclear-war air defense orders had been issued, and from stuff we'd trained for but never had to do, what that meant. My Mom had a class that morning in a building not too far from the airport in Traverse City, and had noted Army Reserve troopers, Coast Guardsmen and cops at its entrances.
And nobody knew if there'd be more attacks, or where. You do the math. It's hard to explain the fear to those who weren't born yet or old enough to really feel it. It's harder to explain the certainty and the dread felt by those of us who knew, on some level, what was coming.
Now, I'm not sure if any of that is true, and I don't really care, to be honest.
But that's where it began, I think.
The profound disconnect between what was really going on out there in the world and what was going on in these people's heads.
My ex-wife was exactly one of those Apocalypse Goalpost Movers who I'd been so disgusted by the year before. She was so righteously sure that the End Times narrative was about to unfold right before our eyes, live on CNN. She told me so. I've been getting the same kind of garbage from her since this virus stuff started...except that the narrative has, well, changed....to the point of being unrecognizable by this guy right here who can quote the Left Behind novels and assorted End Times Prophecy books from memory. Funny thing is, the only evidence for anything she's been able to produce is assorted YouTube videos by various internet randos that mostly seem to have a lot less understanding of science than I do...and I'm just an average guy who pays attention.
America is not Social Distancing, people who give a shit, who want to stay alive, are Social Distancing. Republicans, religious nuts and the wealthy are demanding the right to put everybody else at risk so they can get their hair done or get waited on in a restaurant, like they forgot how to cook in their own damn house and don't know the meaning of "Get it your own damn self." Or they're going to church just as if they're not risking meeting their Maker that much sooner by doing so. Never mind that thousands upon thousands of Catholic, mainstream Protestant and even Pentecostal or Southern Baptist churches have moved their services online or found other ways to do what they do safely while social distancing. The same crop of Evangelicals, Fundamentalists and Goddamned fools that seem most convinced that the Apocalypse is upon us appear to be equally convinced that they should be among the earlier casualties.
And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine. ~Revelation 6:5-6
When the rest of us exist at all, to these fools, we're seen as leeches, takers, and various ambulatory appliances, that it, when we're seen as possessing or worthy of life at all.
Gee, can't you feel God's love and a thrilling sense of "Let's Roll!" as these motherfuckers consign our parents and grandparents and immune-system compromised neighbors to the grave and every working person not protected by a conscientious state government that they can reach to as-unsafe-as-they-can-make-them working conditions?
It really does seem like, since I left it, Conservatism has morphed into a cult of cruelty and death...but cruelty and death is for other people, of course. The slightest consequences for their bullshit couldn't possibly be a real-life example of Action = Consequence, it's the End Times, or some vast Left-wing conspiracy against them, or something something Gazpacho BUT I CAN'T GET MY HAIR DONE!
How the hell was I ever one of these fucking people?!
We have, laid out right before us, a fairly obvious path to getting Trump and Republicans out of power and beginning the long process of digging out of this mess and getting things headed back in the direction of progress. We have the obvious means to drive what remains of these little fascist fucks underground again.
All people gotta do is vote for Joe Biden, and there's more people lining up to do that, by far, than are open Trump supporters or voters. Indeed, even the nature of such people has changed since 2016. As I've said before, it's overwhelmingly the nebbish-looking old people.
Instead, I had to deal with a bunch of "Progressive" women nattering away in the comment section of a friend's post about how they just couldn't vote for Joe. I can't stress this hard enough, Joe inherited the Obama coalition like twelve seconds after he declared, just by showing up. Joe has the kind of track record for not putting up with bullshit that's exactly what we need right now. Joe is damned well running on a progressive platform that's basically the mutant love child of Obama/Biden 2008 and Bernie Sanders in 2016, and that's not good enough?
Yes, there's a sexual assault allegation from some time in the 1990's making the rounds. But also yes, it's mostly pushed by bitter Bernie Bros and obvious Russian bots, and how in the fuck did this not come up in 2008, or even, ya know, like a decade before that? I'm willing to give the lady the benefit of the doubt, and it should be investigated, but at the same time I find the whole thing suspicious, especially considering that Republicans have been flailing about for months trying to find something, anything, to take a swipe at Uncle Joe since they can/t run on the economy or against Comrade Bernie like they were hoping.
And again, Republicans will not just tolerate far worse, they'll embrace it. Look at Trump for fuck's sake!
It sounds dubious on the face of it, and instead of dealing with this rationally or considering just how hard it might be to assemble a winning political movement and beat Trump in about six months time, these fucking people are grasping at whatever straw they can to sabotage themselves, reelect Trump and make their own lives far worse.
Listen, if you want a progressive government, better social services or sexual assault taken seriously, we are going to have to stop electing Republicans in this country. We have to WIN first. We have to start somewhere, and likely will still spend years digging out from under this fucking Trump mess. I did not start out in favor of Joe either, but he's the best we're going to get.
Broken government and the collapse of the United States might get you some little progressive republic in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic states, Minnesota or on the West Coast and maybe in Hawaii.
Don't ask what'll happen to kids, people of color, and women in places like Alabama or Idaho, though. Don't be surprised when there's wars of ethnic cleansing in Florida and Texas, or if somebody tries to nuke Chicago. And don't ask what conflict will do to the virus curve. Republicans don't care, we're supposed to.
Sure, ya'll might get some kind of woke socialist republic out of it, but it'll be a lot more likely to be an equivalent to Colombia or Zimbabwe than say, Denmark. In other words, you'll spend fifty years getting back to what we had in 2015 instead of slogging through four or eight years of hard shit to come out in a better position in 2024 or 2028. MEDICARE FOR ALL IN 2070 doesn't sound like much of a plan especially when Republicans are preaching Medicare For Nobody in 2021 and actively trying to use a global pandemic to kill as many people as they can in 2020.
It's not actually that hard to preserve civilization, here. All you gotta do is show up and vote for the party that's trying to keep our people alive.
Instead of doing the responsible thing, even if it might be distasteful, even if it might save the world, a lot of fucking people seem perfectly content to join Republicans in burning the world down around our ears. I mean come on, people, what the fuck?
Instead, Jesse Ventura and Justin Amash...two dudes who are each in their way both pretty damned smart, who should both goddamn well know exactly what's at stake here, are "exploring" Third-Party runs for President.
Literally everybody's life is at stake here, and we've got people who are still obsessed with the finer points of political theory or making whatever moral stand makes them feel good.
We need to stop that shit, because if we don't I am here to tell you the people picking all these hills to die on in assorted political infighting today run the risk of creating a situation where people are literally having to die on actual hills named for their height in meters in actual armed conflict in the near future, in the middle of a pandemic, when food and supply chains are already stressed now.
That's not just the future Republicans want, it's the future they're actively trying to create because they think they'll win or at least that when they're dead, the rich old white guys will still be rich old white guys and you and I will be dead right along with them. The MAGA base is essentially being offered no more of a reward than having their boot on somebody else's throat before they die. But for too many, that's enough.
Everything else is expendable. It was never about Christ, it was never about conservative policy or social morals. It was ever and always about power, for the very few. That is what "And hurt not the oil and the wine" means.
That's what we're up against. Your move, Greens, Libertarians and Progressives, your move.
And we live in a country where what's in a holy book shouldn't matter to anybody who doesn't want it to.
And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held:
And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? ~Revelation 6:7-10
Part One.
Part Three
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