Take your guns and throw them into the sea! (American Revelation IV, Prequel I.)

In Natal, apartheid is a deadly cancer in our midst, setting house against house, and eating away at the precious ties that bound us together. This strife among ourselves wastes our energy and destroys our unity. My message to those of you involved in this battle of brother against brother is this: take your guns, your knives, and your pangas, and throw them into the sea! Close down the death factories. End this war now! ~Nelson Mandela, speech at a peace rally, February 25th, 1990

The revolution will not be televised. It will be Facebooked and Istagrammed and Tweeted with all manner of petty disclaimers because look at the pretty flames, not the root causes of greed, hate, incompetence and support for all the same by a government ever-watchful for ways to increase its power, and a media and tech industry that looks for the best way to make more money and try and keep Wall Street in their corner even when reporting the truth. All this during a Pandemic, and millions will die because of it.

Last night an area of Minneapolis, surrounding a Police precinct, burned as demonstrators, rioters with little or no connection to the demonstrators, fought with police. All this follows the killing of a Black man on live video by a police officer with a history of violent incidents, many involving people of color. The officer and his three accomplices were fired, they should have been arrested, indicted, and charged by now. Of interest also, Derek Chauvin, the killer, has hired the lawyer who defended the killer of Philando Castile. Even the mayor of Minneapolis has asked why these cops aren't in jail yet.

Does any of this seem fucked up to you yet?

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is openly encouraging his followers to kill Democrats. Not specific people, Democrats in general. How one tells a Democrat from an independent or a Republican at a glance, I quite honestly have no idea. Of course, neither do they.

These fucking people aren't going to stop and ask your political affiliation before they start shooting. Why? Because they don't really believe in that. They will believe Trump said it was Okay for them to shoot people.
They won't be picky about who they shoot or kill by other means, just like that cop wasn't.

And other people will fight back, just like they did overnight. It's human nature to resist.

Given the Trumpist hostility to anybody who does not immediately bow to the golden image when they hear the music..."Democrat" and "Liberal" these days are terms that even get hurled at many Republicans with abandon. Anybody who is not completely 100% in the tank for Glorious Orange Leader is suspect, anybody who believes in facts, or science, or simply wants to preserve even their own life over support of Donald Trump and whatever dumb shit he said lately is considered suspect.

How many Trump Supporters do you suppose can correctly explain or identify Democratic Party beliefs or party platforms or policies, do you think?

And how many of them will simply assume something is bad simply because a Democrat said it, or they think one did? Earlier today I saw a meme that was a picture of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with a quote from a Libertarian on it, apparently deliberately wrongly attributed to AOC. The author appeared to want to test to see if Libertarians understood their own political philosophy. Based on the screen shots from the comment section, almost none of them did.

Does any of this seem fucked up to you, yet?

When I first became a conservative as a teenager, you were at least expected to know what conservatism was, and criticism and disagreements between and with and of leaders were common and flowed naturally.

It wasn't a cult yet.

But it's become that, a cult of grievance and hate and rage of which Trump is merely the current, and by far the most popular figurehead. It started with Newt Gingrich and Charlton Heston back in the 1990's...and while they had their antecedents going all the way back to Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon, and even Gingrich wouldn't last, the NRA switch to culture warring in the late 1990's and the occasional shitty Congressional Republican like Tom DeLay, or political one-note songs like Sarah Palin kept the flame alive until the rise of the Tea Party...and of course by 2015 the Republicans were ready and waiting for somebody like Donald Trump to rise up...and then the Tea Party flooded the zone and made the crazy the mainstream and five years later, here we are.

Republicans aren't just ready to kill Black people, or Democrats, they're willing to make decisions that could cause them to get sick, or could even kill them. Not simply kill them, but slowly suffocate them while they lay in a hospital bed, alone, with a tube jammed down their throats.

Republicans are willing to risk dying horribly, alone, just on the off chance that they might take some Democrats down with them or even simply make someone on the other side angry or sad.

Republicans are willing to continue to follow the Fox News line of "It's no big deal, it's just the flu" even as we've passed 100,000 deaths this week.

That last wasn't something I observed on social media, but rather at work last night from a 60 year old guy who's health is awful.

Does any of this seem fucked up to you yet?

He'll believe Donald Trump and Fox News over his own eyes and ears. And my work not only decided to open back up this week, but decided to call this idiot back. My workplace seems to be trying to do things properly, but at the same time it's not my workplace itself that I'm worried about, it's some of the idiots that work there, the people who sit there zombie-eyed watching Fox News like an ADHD kid watching cartoons. It's the customers we'll be getting back in a couple days, despite operating at around 50% capacity, I'm still extremely worried, and I'm far from the only one.

And it boils down to the fact that conservatives see COVID-19 not as a lethal virus that could kill any one of us, if not all of us...but as a threat to their sense of entitlement, their imagined superiority, their over-hyped social status, their Whiteness, and even their sexuality.

And I guess all that crap is more important to them than being alive. What good is being "superior" if you can't enjoy it because you're dead?

And even now every couple weeks or so, some bunch of idiots marches in the streets or invades their own government's buildings with guns, and the prospect of armed conflict and civil war lurches a little bit closer.

In the middle of a fucking pandemic.

Do these fucking people want everyone to die?

How in the hell can you social distance when you've been shot?

Racism is America's original sin, and its become a cancer that has reached the point where it will become terminal very soon if it is not dealt with.

But some people want that because they want to have their culture wars or ethnic and racial hatreds become things that can be dealt with with bombs and guns and tanks, knowing that the other side will fight back, and that given the disease, it is very likely that the death toll would be much higher. Some people want that because they revere death like a god.

If we don't stop this, and find a way to stop it that doesn't leave those whose only goal is to abuse and dominate others holding the power in this country, we are all going to die. We have to vote them out, and then expect that they will indeed revolt against lawful authority...in the middle of a pandemic! But we have to vote them out, because then their position from which to attack the rest of us will be weaker.

Guns don't protect civilization, civilization protects civilization, speech protects civilization, voting protects civilization.

You have to vote these bastards out like your life depends on it. Because it fucking does.

We cannot have peace with people who do not believe we have a right to exist. But if we have a war, millions of people are going to die and there will be unimaginable suffering.

And worse, that's what Republicans want. They don't want you to throw your guns into the sea and use your vote. They want you to throw your vote into the sea and use your guns to shoot down your neighbors instead.

Show up and fucking vote. Then we'll deal with the next crisis.

If any of this doesn't seem fucked up to you, you're part of the fucking problem.

Part Two.