Killing America (American Revelation, One Shots, A Rolling Series.)

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.
~Linji

This is not normal.

This is not normal?

How is this not normal?

I used to be a conservative.

All my life, there's been at least a few nuts who were determined, against all odds, to believe that the entire world was against them and all they could do was amass an arsenal and hope to go out in a blaze of glory.

It's a hell of a shitty set of life choices to make, but this is America and there's no shortage of paranoid stupidity.

Oh sure, there might be other variables, but one constant was always the same. They wanted to shoot people.

I swear, it's like a bad bit of code in some people's mental programming. Plug in any variables you like, but the result it spits back out is always going to be -1.

They were going to shoot people when The Commies Took Over nope The Ravening Black Mobs from the cities turned up nope The Soviets invaded nope The New World Order (TM) took over nope THE END TIMES! JESUS IS COMING double nope and if He was you'd want to shoot Him, too OMG Terrorists! nope OBAMA!! *Frothy Spittle-flecked Rage* nope When Trump tells us we can kill all the people we don't like.

And when that doesn't...on multiple counts actually can't...happen, these goddamned fools...of whom there are more now than there were when I was growing up, by at least an order of magnitude, will simply move on to some other reason to constantly entertain and regularly beat off to fantasies about murdering their neighbors. Most of whom are white, not many of whom are the promiscuous hippies they imagine, and most of whom have guns too, and a good number of us actually know how to use the damn things.

But every few months or so, one of these goddamned fools goes out and kills somebody anyway.

And the reason Trump can't tell them what they want to hear isn't some legal or moral reason, it's because Trump is a simpering coward. These fucking people have assigned a godlike status to somebody who simply, on all counts, does not fucking deserve such a thing.

The right-wing Jesus is, on all counts, a complete and utter fraud.

But at the end of the day these fucking people don't care.

This is America, there is no problem these fucking fools think they can't shoot their way out of.

Somehow, the fact that people might resist or shoot back never occurs to them.

And they're always surprised when it happens.

No, don't ask me why. I'm not flexible enough to stick my head up my own ass to possibly discern these people's "logic."

In Buddhism, there's a story about how a Monk came back to the temple, babbling excitedly about having met the Buddha on the road. The Master, upon seeing this replies "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!" Why? Because the person the monk met on the road was not the Buddha, but merely a reflection of the monk's own desires.

And flawed human reasoning filled in the rest.

Trump might not be a very good Right Wing Jesus.

But he's an excellent false Buddha for the Monk to find on the road.

Donald Trump is nothing more than a meme into which these people have poured their desires, hopes and insecure fears.

He doesn't really believe much more than that anyone who is against him is bad, he should have money and power, and that somehow, deep down, everybody else is a total bastard just like he is.

Of course, in that way he's not too much different from what a lot of these people are really like. Come on, you don't think Marco Rubio Tweets out random Bible verses because he really believes this stuff, do you?

Kyle Rittenhouse killed two people, one of whom was just walking down the street, because people tried to disarm him and he panicked.

His mother drove him so that he could go and do this. Apparently the words "accessory to murder" for her and "Life Without Parole" for her son, likely under hellish conditions, never entered her thought process.

I'm so old I can remember when conservatives thought that killing people (at any stage of life) was wrong.

Evangelical Christians are raising money for Kyle's legal defense, and Trump personally defended him when asked about the subject this evening. Kyle is well on his way to that trajectory of "Make a rap album when he gets out of jail" and if he gets hit with a standard life sentence, he'll be out in 20 years, maybe a little less...and make a soft landing right into whatever's left of the wingnut welfare system.

It's pretty much an insult to the people that are, ya know, dead because of his dumb ass.

In Portland, Oregon, after months of attacks and terroristic threats from these fucking people, one of them finally got shot, and these motherfuckers spent all weekend making it sound like it was the worst thing ever.

I'm serious, these fucking people are fucking weak.

We can beat this shit, all we have to do is show up, and not back down. They'll fold. The entire basis of their paradigm is that they need to have political power and the power of the State behind them just to feel like men.

Just like, far from having faith as the basis of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen, modern Evangelicals demand the entire Universe exist for their own gratification and shout their claimed beliefs back in their face at all times.

Nothing is ever about what they say it's about. It's stupid.

All we gotta do is show up, hang on, and not back the fuck down.

And we'd better, because if we don't things will only get worse.

Stupidity is killing America.