I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost in time, like tears...in rain. Time to die. ~Roy Batty, Blade Runner.
Today, Chuck Grassley didn't just stick his foot in his mouth. He swallowed that fucker all the way to above the knee, offering what he thought was some sort of compliment...as in, making a particularly dumb borderline-racist statement toward a Korean-American judicial nominee..Jesus Fucking Christ.
If there's a better argument for term limits, I haven't seen it.
Chuck Grassley has been in office since 1981, having been elected in 1980 as part of the same Republican upwelling that gave us Ronald Reagan.
Chuck Grassley has been in office since I was seven years old. Think about that for a second. Also, this man has a degree in political science and was an educator. Think about that for a second, too.
Now, about that. If I had thought to say something like this at that age, two things would've happened. #1 My Mom would have looked at me like I was crazy and asked me where I learned to talk like that. And #2 My Dad, who was then still living, would've cut directly to the chase and tanned my hide for talking a bunch of nonsensical dumb shit and then the next time we went to the library...which was pretty often...I might have to do something like write a book report on people from other countries.
Ignorance and talking stupid were things that were not tolerated in my family.
And frankly I don't give a damn if you're some doddering geriatric old fossil of a US Senator or not. In point of fact, citing some lame-ass bullshit claims about economic impact, Chuck Grassley voted against establishing Martin Luther King Day as a holiday...and I remember the first one of those. Though Grassley would later vote for a couple of posthumous awards for MLK, his initial vote strikes me as suspicious in light of his recent comments.
Now I realize this dude was born in 1933 and came of age in the 1950's and honestly I don't give a shit. My Grandparents were all born in the 1920's and still at least picked up on the idea that racism is wrong and at a bare minimum you don't say shit like that in public...and mind you these lessons were being passed on to me when Chuck Grassley was still a new Senator.
I'm serious, like, what the fuck?
I'm fast approaching the era of "Embrace the oldness" myself. My beard is white, I look at a lot of young people...and not a few older people...these days and just shake my head and think "The fuck is even wrong with you?" on a regular basis....and I wouldn't talk to somebody like that, period. Hell, maybe I've just learned not to make assumptions about people nor stick my foot in my mouth up to mid-thigh over it. Jesus Christ. What the FUCK?!
As I've said before, people are people, wherever you go.
I had a doctor's appointment yesterday in my middle-of-nowhere small Northern Michigan town and the doctor who I had my appointment with was from Sudan. You may think about that, for a second, too. We like the same brand of T-shirts, and have a decent number of things in common. He was happy to meet another person who could speak Arabic (though I do not speak it all that well.) Also, no, he was not the only non-white person I saw working there. He laughed when I told him that 30 years ago the racial diversity of this whole area could be summed up as we had like a dozen or so people who weren't white.
Hell, I'm so old I can remember when I found a book of Polish jokes in my grandparents' attic as a kid. Yes, there absolutely was a time when White people were plenty enough racist towards other white people.
And that's Chuck Grassley's world, right there. I'm serious. This dude needs to wake up and smell the 21st Century.
Or maybe, just maybe, We the people should either demand that these fuckers set a maximum age for somebody to be an elected official or just take it upon ourselves and stop re-electing 80 year old Senators. There's literally no reason to keep reelecting people who have simply aged out of the modern world, who have little or no connection to most of their constituents and no understanding of how things work now. It's not 1954 anymore, Chuckles.
Hell, even 1981...or increasingly in geopolitical terms even 1991...is ancient history.
The world we live in shares little resemblance to the world as it was when Chuck was elected to office, not least because of the actions of others who rode the same wave and that could and should be something the Senator could be proud of...if he gave a shit and was that guy but he doesn't and isn't.
And trust me, I get it, it's hard to keep up, Even something as simple as looking for a job has vastly changed since the last time I did it.
But we owe it to ourselves and the rest of the world to try and keep up, simply for the sake of not being unduly hurtful towards other people in a changed world. Note, I didn't say "Changing." It's done changed, that's the way it is. You can't change it back. While people like Chuck Grassley were obsessed with foreign wars and profiting off of financial shenanigans and then making life difficult for the Obama administration, the world passed them by.
Hell, I've done my level best to keep up and especially in coming back to northern Michigan after almost 20 years I feel more disconnected from the timestream, more out of place, than I ever have.
We owe it to our fellow humans to try and keep up, to try to have respect and understand people all the same.
And bare minimum, if you can't do that, you shouldn't be in government.
If you want a better country, you have to be a better citizen. If you want a better world? You have to be a better human being.
It's that simple...and that complicated...all at once. Try to keep up.
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