The Day After. (American Revelation X: Prequel.)

Here, have a dollar.

In fact, no brother-man here, have two
Two dollars means a snack for me
But it means a big deal to you
Be strong, serve God only
Know that if you do, beautiful heaven awaits
That's the poem I wrote for the first time
I saw a man with no clothes, no money, no plate
Mr. Wendal, that's his name
No one ever knew his name cause he's a no-one
Never thought twice about spending on a old bum
Until I had the chance to really get to know one
Now that I know him, to give him money isn't charity
He gives me some knowledge, I buy him some shoes
And to think blacks spend all that money on big colleges
Still most of y'all come out confused.

~Mr. Wendall, Arrested Development.

I didn't write anything yesterday.

Not just because it was the middle of my work-week and I was goddamned tired, but because no, fuck you. I don't want to. 

It was the 21st anniversary of 9/11. We should be moving on by now, a generation has come to adulthood since. If you were born on 9/11/2001, by the time we got out of Afghanistan you were old enough to be serving on your first deployment in the Marine Corps by the time we evacuated from Kabul last August. 

I slept through it and I'm damned glad I did.

But then I saw this; Vapid Fox News Bitch said "On 9/11 it didn't matter the color of your skin, who you voted for or what your pronouns were, we were all Americans, united, and we had a deep respect for law enforcement."

True.

But, long-term, that wasn't the world even a hell of a lot of Republicans wanted to live in.

Republicans ruined the post-9/11 unity.

And it didn't last very long at all for some people, like the Sikh gas station owner who got shot because some prejudiced idiots thought he was a Muslim and shot him. Or for one of my Air Force bros...by then a Michigan Air National Guard Lieutenant with a Criminal Justice degree...who actually *Was* Muslim and whose Detroit-area Mosque was vandalized...and people called him the N-word while he was cleaning up the damage.  

I've written extensively about that time over the years. But it wasn't very long at all before the planning for the next war started, and the social division that resulted from that, then there was the GOP adopting homophobia as an electoral strategy, Abu Ghraib, Hurricane Katrina, and the list goes on.

For every decent Republican, like George W. Bush or John McCain, or even every Republican like Dick Cheney or Karl Rove that wished to treat reality as a logic-problem they could solve, but they had limits, there was one or two crypto-fascists brooding in the shadows plus a couple of Proto-MAGA types who maybe were completely apolitical or who might've even been racist Democrats bitching about Globalization next door. As I've mentioned a time or two before, a hell of a lot of MAGA's weren't even Republicans before Trump showed up. But I'm here to tell you the Venn Diagram of those who bitched about NAFTA in the mid-1990's as middle-aged factory workers and those who wear MAGA hats today as old retirees is a fuzzy circle.

For everybody, Left, Right or Center who gave a shit and tried to make things better (or at least prevent them from getting worse) there was some jackass who saw only a chance to inflict petty cruelties on the undeserving, or desired to prove some idea of their "manhood" or "Power" at the expense of another, or who wanted only greater glory for their "Tribe."

Looking back, you could see how things started to go the way they are now, it's just at the time, a lot of us didn't want to.

And that's before you get to the goddamned religious nuts.

Apparently Doug Mastriano prayed "In Jesus Name" for "MAGA to seize the power."

Seriously? This is America, and you of all people should know we don't do things that way here.

Let me tell you something else, at that point in my life I was in the middle of getting divorced from my mentally-ill Pentecostal ex-wife. 

9/11 did lead to a brief bout of religious weirdness from those fucking people, it's just something most people didn't see. I didn't have a choice.

If it was radical Islamists doing this kind of shit, FOX News would be airing video of the airstrike that took out the building they were meeting in, with full connivance of the government, before the last stick of Mk. 117 bombs even hit the ground and while the B-1B Lancer that dropped the big iron was still visible, receding away into the distance on a wave of afterburner-fire and a vast racket of thunder.

Why is it different when it's vaguely-Christianized New Age woo woo bullshit instead of a bunch of Muslims believing in hokum and wanting to reshape the world in their demented image?

The fake-Christians and their heresies that call Trump king instead of Jesus are far more of a threat, simply because they're here.

For quite a few years after 9/11 and my divorce, I was still trying to make sense of things. I spent a lot of time reading, studying Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, and for that matter trying to argue for basic humanity and common sense in a lot of religious spaces. It was ultimately a losing battle that familiarized me with the concept of hate mail and left my inbox oozing glowing green acidic drool. 

Why read Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thich Nhat Hanh or The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini or Walking The Bible by Bruce Feiler when you can sit on the couch watching Fox News and Tucker Carlson's smarmy, smirking mug, twitching in rage and work up some violent fantasy of your own but then turn around and call that "Christianity?"

And then not even have to think about it.

Why try and figure out your own issues, and maybe do something about them, when it's simply easier to inflict that shit on other people??

And while you get jack shit, or maybe end up dead or in prison and living with PTSD, some rich fuck at the other end of the Pain Chain faces neither risk nor trauma nor various risks of death and pockets a check from the gun you bought before violently acting out.

Republicans rejected the unity of a nation united in grief and loss, of people trying to help one another and fight to make the world better in favor of trying to force their ways on all the rest of us for no better reason than their own profits. Fuck them.

You can have a better world or you can have greed, hate, and lust for power. You cannot have both. One of these things is not like the other one.

If you want the world to be better, you have to be a better person.

Let it be a damning epitaph chiseled into the tombstone of the Republican Party that when a Black man said "Yes We Can" Republicans said "No We Can't" and then in all things, they tried to make that be the truth.

And that's why I had to stop being a Republican. 

Modern conservatism as an ideology takes people, even great people, and somehow makes them less than the sum of their parts. 

I was not taught that way.

And on the Last Day, the Creator is going to ask you not what you were against, but what you stood for. Not who you hated, but what you loved. Not if you glorified yourself, but what did you do for another. 

Did you reach for the stars, or sit hunkered waiting for someone to tell you that your terribleness was righteousness?

You want to get back to better times? What did you do to bring it about??

Grace is freely given, but you have to accept it. Even in apocalyptic literature there is always a Day After.

But you have to have the courage to face it.

Remember that.

We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev...Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
~Ronald Reagan

Last Year

Слава Україна!

And so tomorrow, as we take the campaign south and west as we learn that the struggles of the textile workers in Spartanburg are not so different than the plight of the dishwasher in Las Vegas, that the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of L.A. we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people, we are one nation. And, together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story, with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea, Yes, we can. ~Barack Obama