Reality Bites Back (Opioids Of The Masses, Four.)

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

This was the first thing I saw when I logged into Twitter last night.

You know, if there was ever a group of people in the world that could make the Communists look like the fucking good guys, it's the American rich people. Here we have some asshole that I'd never heard of before last night...and Laura Ingraham...basically saying that they think they should be able to literally starve working people into submission.

First of all, speaking from experience, I have no idea where this asshole got this shit about how military working dogs are treated. A hungry dog may well bite when it's not supposed to bite, for one thing.

Secondly, it's also been my experience that neither dogs nor people are very focused, or much good at doing what they're supposed to do when they're goddamned hungry because you're not thinking about your work...you're thinking about the fact that you're goddamned hungry. Why is this hard?

Keep ignoring reality, and eventually it's going to bite you to get attention.

Too many problems have been "Kick the can down the road for someone else to deal with" for long enough that now they're all starting to morph into Disaster Voltron.

Afghanistan right now, for example. We're literally watching the disintegration of a country set up on the principles of the Bush 43 administration, that was made so interoperable with US that we haven't even left all the way yet and it's already falling apart because (among other things) Afghan logistics and maintenance were largely done and managed by US contractors who are now gone...and again, the idea of "Kick the can down the road" came due and there was no one left to kick the can.

But the fact that we're all going to see how this affects the people who happen to live there makes it a hell of a lot less of an ideological exercise. My guess is a hell of a lot more of those people are going to end up here. 

And the people who created this mess will bitch about that too.

But then here on the home front, there's still COVID-19, and the idea that the Right seems to have latched onto that they can use a big pile of bodies to gum up the works...even if (perhaps especially if) the bodies are their own.

And of course, the fact that whole US industries deal with conditions that are so shitty and pay so low that nobody wants to do the work, and even bumping people up to a living wage isn't helping because unattended problems continue to snowball.

I don't know how the hell people aren't seeing this shit.

Oh, wait, assholes who've lived a mostly consequence-free existence who've never missed a fucking meal nor likely had to eat anything that they didn't want to in their entire fucking lives. Why the fuck is anybody listening to these dumb entitled shits, again?

Well, except for the fact that there seems to be a decent-sized faction of us that wants to keep partying it up even as the world literally burns, ignoring any resulting issues unless we can blame them on people we don't like.

But don't worry, that's when assholes like John Taffer and Laura Ingraham and the politicians they're in a feedback loop with get positively innovative.

I'll bet you MONEY that incoming Afghan refugees get pushed into filling vacancies in hospitality and service industries in a matter of months or years.

And THEN Right-wing politicians will bitch about those people taking jobs that their followers didn't want anyway and Fox News will yammer on about it for weeks at a time. American idiots will (repeatedly) claim that it's some sort of social problem that their waitress is wearing a Hijab.

And people who were there, who went over there and fought, and/or who tried to do the right thing, and who speak up about it or assert that *Wearing* that Hijab is her right, and would have been in 1776 just as much as it is in 2026 will be vilified as "liberals" and "radicals" and some shit like that. This will happen no matter what their actual political affiliations are, because Conservatism, Inc. is predictable and stupid.

And *I* can see things like this coming already.

I mean, seriously, this shit is getting old. 

These are people who have maliciously not maintained what we have, not paying the bills to boost their profits in the short term and their only response to bill collectors and a massive need for deferred maintenance that has to be dealt with RIGHT NOW is to try to burn the house down. Die off so it's not their problem, Downsize, break a piece off and try to split the difference with reality. Peace With Honor, y'all. (And where have we heard that before?) All to avoid admitting that their whole culture war thing was a losing bet to start with.

Or at least it became that way when they got too radicalized, and got worse when their voter base started dying of a preventable disease.

But they can't see that, won't see that, and that's the problem.

Trouble is, say they take a chunk of the Midwest and South and turn it into some little fascist Banana Republic, what happens when nothing improves for them (and it may get worse) because they were the problem all along? (Spoiler: They'll start a war and try and take it out on the rest of us.) My guess is the end result looks an awful lot like Afghanistan...but it'll be over here, instead of over there.

And the people who want to keep partying it up while the world burns literally won't care (if they notice at all) when the fire is right outside their window. In fact, they'll blame that on everybody else too.

This is a conspiracy, ONE BIG DAMN CONSPIRACY!

AND EVERYONE'S IN ON IT, INCLUDING HER!

(Sorry, Obligatory Shawshank Redemption quote.)

Sooner or later, we're going to have to start doing something different.

We The People seem to get this, or a lot of us do, anyway. Trouble is there's a lot of people that want to go back to "Normal" without realizing (or even caring) that normal was pretty damn broken.

The problem isn't and never was Unemployment Insurance, the problem is that whole industries have been allowed to boost their profits by massively underpaying workers.

The problem wasn't something inherently wrong with Afghanistan, or South Vietnam for that matter...the problem was that we tried to instill Democracy with a Mk.117 Bomb and didn't do enough to build institutions, prevent corruption, or support the regimes we installed...and when we got bored we washed our hands of it...and in Afghanistan's case much of America did this as soon as the possibility of a bigger adventure in Iraq came along.

America was not at war, the Marine Corps was at war. America was at the Mall, and therein lies the problem.

If we want a better country, we're going to have to be better citizens.

A hell of a lot of us don't want a country, they want the Killing Fields, but with a Mall.

Because it's too hard to give a shit about people, or something.

We're going to have to start giving a shit or selfishness will be the death of us and no amount of force or money is going to stop it. That's all there is to it. Caring about ideas more than people doesn't work when there aren't people alive to have the idea in the first place.

That's all.

Three.