Antimatter Family (Left Behind Is A Lie VI, Seven.)

From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

~From Cormac McCarthy's The Road (Book.)

...

Cassian Andor: Kino. Tell them what to do. It has to be you. Come on, Kino. You do this every day. Tell them what to do.

Kino Loy: [presses PA system] My name is Kino Loy. I'm the day shift manager on Level Five. I'm speaking to you from the command center on Level Eight. We are, at this moment, in control of the facility.

Andor: Is that the best you got?

Loy: How long we hang on, how far we get, how many of us make it out, all of that is now up to us. We have deactivated every floor in the facility. All floors are cold. Wherever you are right now, get up, stop the work. Get out of your cells, take charge and start climbing. They don't have enough guards and they know it. If we wait until they figure that out, it'll be too late. We will never have a better chance than this and [looks at Cassian, knowing he said it] "I would rather die trying to take them down than giving them what they want." We know they fried a hundred men on Level Two. We know that they are making up our sentences as we go along. We know that no one outside here knows what's happening. And now we know, that when they say we are being released, we are being transferred to some other prison to go and die, and that ends today! There is one way out. Right now, the building is ours. You need to run, climb, kill! You need to help each other. You see someone who's confused, someone who is lost, you get them moving and you keep them moving until we put this place behind us. There are 5,000 of us. If we can fight half as hard as we've been working, we will be home in no time. One way out!

[Repeats it multiple times as he leaves the command center]

Andor: Come on! Let's get out of here!

~From the series "Andor" S1 E10 "One Way Out."

...

I believe in no God, no invisible man in the sky. But there is something more powerful than each of us, a combination of our efforts, a Great Chain of industry that unites us. But it is only when we struggle in our own interest that the chain pulls society in the right direction. The chain is too powerful and too mysterious for any government to guide. Any man who tells you different either has his hand in your pocket, or a pistol to your neck. ~Andrew Ryan, Bioshock

I saw this bullshit on like Monday. "Nuclear Family Month" WTF??

But I didn't get to write on Tuesday because I had to come home, take a nap and then drive downstate to take my partner her art, art supplies, and whatever else I could fit in the car. Her mom decided at the last minute to come up for the kiddo's Middle School graduation, which is today. Momma Werewolf wants to hang the paintings, fix some cracks in the sculptures and in general decorate the place. 

My partner also still had to work yesterday (so it was a quick trip) though she's off today. For my part I'd already debated going but I asked kiddo if she wanted me to be there or if she'd rather have money...and naturally she wanted the money.

It's not yet comfortable or especially practical for me to stay down there for 3 days especially not with other people also showing up (Plus her mom and I didn't get along all that great 20 years ago) and I have ferrets and stuff to do at home so it was just easier to unpack the car, hang out for a little bit, then come home.

You can take a lot of things away from a man. Cigarettes, the gym. You can take his freedom, his legs, but not his feelings. Not his feelings. A man loves a woman. Don't matter what kind of man he is, if he loves her, he wants her. He wants her body. He wants her to want his. So you say to him, "you can never make love again. You will never touch her in that way again. This is the last time. The last time. Forever." If that's not cruel and unusual punishment, I don't know what is. ~Augustus Hill, from the HBO series Oz, S1.E2 "Visits, Conjugal and otherwise."

And then I slept most of yesterday, anyway, apparently being more tired than I thought I was.

So, anyway;

"Marriage Is Between One Man And One Woman."

I've been hearing this shit for like *30 years.*

Pretty much since people ever considered the idea in this country that *Anybody Else* should be able to get married, it rapidly morphed into this:

"God Made Adam And Eve, Not Adam And Steve."

You know, the good old-fashioned Nuclear Family, which I was raised to think of as some kind of an ideal. 

How I was taught it, that's considered husband, wife, two kids, generally presumed to be Patriarchal, White, and immediate family only. Dad works in a factory or some physical job and served in the Army at some point (The Navy and Marines were vaguely considered gay, none of this foofy Air Force shit and nobody even noticed the Coast Guard or the reserves unless there was a disaster.) Mom is a Housewife. The son plays (American, duh) Football, the daughter might be a cheerleader or some shit if she does Athletics at all. Church on Sunday very much implied. What they do the rest of the week doesn't really matter much.

Sounds like something out of a 1950's Cold War Anti-Communism brochure...and not by accident either because that's exactly the kind of political and social environment where the bullshit fucking term even originated. Anybody else including aged relatives, blended family (be it through adoption or step-siblings or whatever) elders and extended family, was only adopted in grudgingly and under pressure, a process only being completed culturally when I was a kid in the 1980's.

If this kind of imagery invokes thoughts of air raid sirens, cold bright flashes from over the horizon as the power goes out, and the distant rumble of jet engines as bombers sortie to hit back and fighters launch on air defense missions to protect whatever's left, well...that's kind of what the whole idea was behind it in the first place.

[Nuclear IBCMs have been launched]

Airman: You know what that means, don't you? Either we fired first and they're going to try to hit what's left, or they fired first and we just got our missiles out of the ground in time. Either way, we're going to get hit.

Airman Billy McCoy: So what are we still standing around here for?

Sergeant: Where do you want to go?

Airman Billy McCoy: Well, how about out of here for starters? I've got to get my wife and my kid!

Sergeant: We're still on alert, Billy! No one leaves this facility. Not until the choppers get here to take us back to Whiteman and to the shelters...

Airman Billy McCoy: [cutting him off] Are you kidding me, man? The bombs will be here before the choppers will! Listen to me. Listen to me, man. The war is over! It's over. We've done our job. So what are you still guarding? Huh? Some cotton-pickin' hole in the ground all dressed up and nowhere to go?

Airman: He's right!

Airman Tommy: What about Starr and Boyle?

Sergeant: What about them?

Airman Tommy: What are they doing?

Airman Billy McCoy: Yeah, they're 60 feet down, sipping on some cold beer and whistling "Misty"!

Airman Tommy: Well I'm going down there!

Sergeant: You can't go down there! That elevator is secure!

Airman Billy McCoy: Do you hear yourself talking, bozo? 'Cause I hear you saying that we've got direct orders to be sitting ducks!

~From the TV miniseries, The Day After.

Throw in some good old fashioned American hypocrisy and Keeping Up With The Joneses for good measure. My partner's family was like this (I know the town she's originally from well since it's the next one over from where I lived until we moved to California) and it's taken her (and them, for that matter, or at least the ones that want to) 40 years to start untangling the damage. And that kind of environment...you know, the one that's left millions of us Gen-Xer's and Elder Millennials stuck with addictions or needing therapy or both, isn't good enough for some of these fucking people?? Oh, fuck off, what's wrong with you?!?!

Nowadays the Right would be crying about a Black actor playing Airman McCoy, a doctor being one of the other main characters, and the several strong female characters in the series.

The actual message, including the deaths of several characters from causes due to social breakdown, and the "Is there anyone there?" at the end of the film, answered only by a Morse-code message during the credits, would be too subtle for These Fucking People.

There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft....When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. ~Baba, from The Kite Runner.

Or maybe they just don't care.

Because the whole damn thing is simply a Death Cult...social and otherwise.

The Nuclear Family simply wasn't Nuclear enough. Or, as people like me, my partner and the kiddo demonstrate...that shit all too often doesn't survive the pressures of the modern world much less the Male Narcissism Epidemic that's an ongoing problem and (as far as I can figure) has been getting worse for 20 years. Yet at the same time the people who sort this shit out have managed to survive, to grow or even to thrive in spite of all this shit!

And maybe that's the fucking problem, from a "Conservative" perspective anyway.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. ~George Orwell, 1984.

That anybody else has the capability to get away from their bullshit, much less the freedom to thrive or the will to survive in spite of adversity sticks in these fucking people's collective craw every damn day.

More to the point, the fact that the same people who came up with the often problematic systems that me and my partner grew up under also recognized the dangers and limitations of the world they'd created and came up with or allowed to be released various art, such as movies like The Day After that reflected such would have the New York Post comment section calling people like Ronald Reagan "Woke."

Cannot swords be turned to plowshares? Can we and all nations not live in peace? In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war? ~Ronald Reagan.

SO, Woke person that I (being a former Reagan Republican) am, and having been a Republican back when words meant something and this shit wasn't a Death Cult; I'd like to propose a change in terminology to include such people.

Because the America I was taught about is all about inclusion and being a melting pot, or something. Chalk it up to basic politeness or a desire for exactitude in terminology (Oh, those "Liberals" that obsess about what words ya'll using oughta love this one.)

We'll call it the Antimatter Family.

(Antimatter, of course, being more destructive than mere Nuclear fission or fusion.)

"Marriage Is Between One Man, One Woman and/or his Sex Robot, his Side Piece(s) plus all his Bros whose 'approval' he must maintain, and the Republican Party."

If that sounds more creepy, restrictive and Totalitarian than anything George Orwell ever came up with?? Well, good, it kind of is.

And far worse, the destructiveness is (And the male narcissism) in fact, the point.

Melting pot? 

Yeah, melt this crap down; Like the Terminator at the end of T2: Judgment Day.

John Connor: We're not gonna make it, are we? People, I mean.

Terminator: It's in your nature to destroy yourselves.

~From the film Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

And of course, now even a lot of the people who helped create this mess realize how fucked it is; But that means one gets voted off the island, as Candace, Marge, Meg, Tom and Tucker have already found out, or worse, right, Chuck??

And the funny part here is, lots of the soft-handed bitches who keep driving this bullshit off a cliff can't even own their own bullshit if it doesn't get them resounding applause on social media.

That's just it, too. 

The far-right's "Second American Revolution" appears to be dying off mainly cuz it didn't get these chuckle-fucks as many Heart emojis and Like reacts on Facebook as they thought it was going to. They're finding out the hard way they can't simply make the rest of us Hate like they do.

And without that, there's no glue to hold the rest of the project together.

In general people are tired of this bullshit, and none of these idiots bothered to even think through what they were going to do in such a case, except to try to each protect their individual political power. The modern Right is less a movement, directed towards a goal in the traditional sense, than a horde of Zombies all trying to at the same fleeing survivor, but as soon as a rat scurries by, or whatever, they get distracted and go after that instead.

We've got to take the neighborhood back. We've got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It's right around the corner. It's standing on the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't where you is go." I don't know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with "why you ain't…". You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they're moving ahead on this? Well, they know they're not, they're just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you're just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out. ~Bill Cosby, the "Pound Cake" speech.

I can't even talk the way these people talk, anymore. There is no higher thought process.

I'd argue there is no thought or process at all, simply a desire to reactively destroy anything this shit touches, like Antimatter.

The whole idea of this "Nuclear Family Month" shit is some kind of bullshit reactionary opposition to Pride Month, but they made it sound about as celebratory as a 1950's psychology seminar put on by a bunch of Republican doctors, you know, the kind that used to consider "Smoke filtered cigarettes" to be solid medical advice.

And some people look at this horseshit and call it "Greatness."

Yet they can't even handle it if somebody tells them "No."

All that "Left Behind" crap was a lie, These Fucking People would have to believe in God or something other than themselves first.

I know I say this a lot, but either you believe in freedom or you don't.

Either you're willing to fight for it, or you're not.

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Nebuchadnezzar spake and said unto them, Is it true, O Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, do not ye serve my gods, nor worship the golden image which I have set up?
Now if ye be ready that at what time ye hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer, and all kinds of musick, ye fall down and worship the image which I have made; well: but if ye worship not, ye shall be cast the same hour into the midst of a burning fiery furnace; and who is that God that shall deliver you out of my hands?
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, answered and said to the king, O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in this matter.
If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king.
But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.
~Daniel 3:14-18
Six

I don't usually deal with those big words because I don't usually deal with big people. I deal with small people. I find you can get a whole lot of small people and whip hell out of a whole lot of big people. They haven't got anything to lose, and they've got every thing to gain. And they'll let you know in a minute: "It takes two to tango; when I go, you go." ~Malcolm X.