Look at your women crying
Look at your young men dying
The way they've always done before
Look at the fear we're feeding
Look at the lives we're leading
The way we've always done before
The billions shift from side to side
And the wars go on with brainwashed pride
For the love of God and our human rights
And all these things are swept aside
By bloody hands time can't deny
And are washed away by your genocide
And history hides the lies of our civil wars.
When I got up this morning, I saw this.
Some woman at yesterday's Trump rally saying that she's "Sick of it" and sees a "Civil War coming."
No, you fucking don't.
Oh, you think you see something coming alright, you think other people will be the ones who do the dying and make the sacrifices while your life goes on as normal, and you have a whole bunch of lame ass ideas about how your politics will somehow magically triumph, your side has all the guns, blah blah blah.
None of this works like that. Not a bit of it.
I'd like to start by saying that I'm sick of it too, but from the other side. I've had it up to here with the modern Republican party and all of your culture war Trump-cult bullshit and I say that as a former Republican. The modern Republican Party bears absolutely no resemblance to that founded in a little white school house in Ripon, Wisconsin...a place I've walked through, by the way.
I'd also like to point out that I first learned firearms safety and shooting as a kid, and hunting and prowling around in the woods as a teenager. Hell, some of my first memories were of helping my Dad make bullets for his .57 Caliber Enfield rifled musket that he carried as a Civil War reenactor. It was a modern replica of one of the firearms that was there at the beginning of a long and bloody process literally changed how wars were even fought. That weapon was one of the ones that took us as a species from the old smoothbore Brown Bess to the industrialized killing of the Great War and thence to the vast logistical and technical modern military forces and the new ways of war born during World War II.
My own relatively brief tour of Bosnian peacekeeping had not much more risk than a couple tense situations and a lot of harsh language, but I still had to be prepared for worse, and in point of fact expected it. You want to imagine trying to deal with that? Even for just a few months?
And then, starting six years later I got to see what war did to a couple of my friends, one of whom committed suicide a decade ago because of what happened to him and some other things that had happened since he got back from Afghanistan.
War sucks.
I know what kind of person my friend was. I know how bad things must have been to drive him to that point. If a guy like him can end up in that bad of a state, mentally or otherwise...that he didn't want to be alive anymore? Well, I'm sorry but I think these over-privileged fucks who get all bent out of shape over "Sexual anarchy" wouldn't stand a chance.
Imagine having to walk to work, or ride with somebody else, or take a bus...or even walk, because there's a knocked-out tank in the middle of your street that nobody around even close to has the capability to move.
If you even have gas for your car.
And that firefight wrecked half the houses on your street while killing several of your neighbors.
And the power's out.
Cable and cellular service is out, Satellite service is present, but spotty...and the people who have it...and can keep their devices charged by hook or by crook...are finding that they can turn that into a considerable source of income simply because people want to be able to have 15 minutes to check their E-mail or their Facebook or make sure friends and relatives are OK.
But for the most part social media and shit is being used for official purposes, so aside from basic communication there's less going on there right now. Adjust your economic expectations accordingly especially if you depend on that for some aspect of a business.
Water service has been cut, fresh water is delivered twice a week by a military truck convoy, and the soldiers carry weapons and have a police escort...or in some cases, simply whatever armed civil or paramilitary authorities who can be found that have law enforcement powers and keep order.
Gardening is suddenly an essential skill, not for pretty flowers but for growing vegetables and such so people can eat.
Right now, unless you're at work, you shit in a trench in the yard. You shower under a cheap metal bucket that's had a bunch of holes drilled in the bottom, after using a fire to heat the water in a metal pot.
A few people had generators, for awhile, sure. But now there's no gas to run them unless you're doing something essential and have a permit...or the black market connections and wealth...to get it and the political connections to still get or the criminal ties to forge said permits.
With food supplies tight, not only are people not walking their dogs anymore, but they're protective of even letting them out because some people steal them to kill and eat to supplement their food supplies. Neighborhood stray cats and small game have been gradually becoming more rare as well.
And your previous higher-paying bullshit office job has been replaced by working in a local munitions plant manufacturing 5/56mm NATO Standard rounds by the crate-full, for a third of your previous salary and an extra ration card. If your side cares enough about its citizens to give them one.
Your spouse's job is they're a member of the local defense group, supplementing police and military personnel. They do their duty armed with a hammer. Everybody else is armed the same way except for one person in each section has a .22 caliber rifle, because ammo for it is cheap and available.
Weekly entertainment has more or less been reduced to whatever hard-copy books you have, whatever songs you know the lyrics to, and an enterprising neighbor who allows people that he trusts to come over and pay to watch his ferrets play for an hour or two each week in small, manageable groups. Then he sits there with a shotgun to make sure that nobody tries to steal one of the ferrets and eat it. Because that's life now.
And right now, that guy is the richest dude in the whole neighborhood, because entertainment-wise he's what there is. The feels when "Pet owner" suddenly becomes your profession.
Magazines and newspapers are largely in the same boat, and also subject to the same distribution woes as everything else.
Nobody other than truck drivers and people who have to because of the situation is traveling. Incidentally, those who are are as much of a source of news and rumors as anything else...and they can profit by this.
And if you think you're going to be one of the ones with enough money or privilege or skills you can trade (without going to fight in the war your own damn self) to be exempt from that to some degree or another, think again.
And if you do go and fight, only the connected or their children get into the Air Force or the Navy or sent on whatever foreign deployments MUST be maintained. It's Army Guard green or Coast Guard blues and domestic counterinsurgency...or active duty Army (or god help you, Marine Corps) and conventional combat...for the majority. M1A1 Abrams slugging it out with Russian-built T-72M's in Kansas cornfields and on Texas city streets.
Oh, and as for your fears of "Sexual anarchy" or public or private shitty views on race? Or whatever hang-ups you have about religion?
The heroes of the week, in terms of battlefield valor and public service respectively, are a biracial US Marine Lance Corporal who credits the good things about himself to his Black navy veteran father and his Florida redneck mother, and a transwoman who went into government accidentally, having been an activist and gone into politics from there. But it was pairing her skill at organization and her love of gardening that made organizing a dozen successful food drives in Chicago happen.
Also meet your town's new Pagan mayor, who campaigned on ensuring proper treatment for this crisis's essential workers.
Also, seriously, do you think in a real crisis that demands everything possible be used to ensure basic survival that religion is going to continue to be a tax-haven for those who can lie real good?
Oh, please. Churches and religious groups...those who can maintain enough interest or provide some sort of practical WHATEVER to keep people coming, WILL get taxed.
And, if you want to win anyway, bullshit and conspiracy theories will get real unpopular real fast.
And this may be true no matter what "side" you're on. People end up where they end up for a variety of reasons.
Reality doesn't care about your politics or your prejudices, we've learned this the hard way too.
War is endless, needless suffering and pain inflicted primarily on the conscripted, the innocent, and the undeserving, civil wars all the more so.We as a people should be smart enough to not need to learn this the hard way again.
We really need to stop listening to these fucking people.
You don't get a better civilization, a better society, by gunning down your neighbors.
You want a better country? Be a better citizen.
That is all.
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