Hollow Man (Left Behind Is A Lie, Part Seven.)

 Proclaim ye this among the Gentiles; Prepare war, wake up the mighty men, let all the men of war draw near; let them come up: Beat your plowshares into swords and your pruning-hooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong. Assemble yourselves, and come, all ye heathen, and gather yourselves together round about: thither cause thy mighty ones to come down, O Lord. Let the heathen be wakened, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat: for there will I sit to judge all the heathen round about. Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe: come, get you down; for the press is full, the fats overflow; for their wickedness is great. Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision: for the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision. ~Joel 3:9-14

"I like people who weren't captured?" We're still on that shit?

"I like people who weren't captured" says Trump, the wannabe-warrior-king who's almost certainly never taken a punch that wasn't scripted in his entire life. Does this goddamned fool think those WWE matches with his friend Vince McMahon were real?!

I like people who weren't captured, says the guy who the only reason he's never been to jail is an army of progressively more skeevy lawyers and willingness to throw endless amounts of money, or at least the appearance thereof, at them and hope they buy into the con.

"Reopen the economy" say a bunch of fucking people who've never worked a real job or worked up a decent sweat that they didn't want to in their entire fucking lives.

You first, assholes. You first. What Chick-Fil-A are you gonna volunteer to work at when they open up for dine-in customers again? Yeah, flip that chicken sandwich on the grill there, Ainsley. Hey Laura! They need some cups for the soda machine! I mean, if they're brave, and so right, why not? Could we possibly see a Fox News Babe working a shift waiting tables at Olive Garden just to prove to the world that it's safe?! I mean, come on, it would be the ultimate "Owning of the Libs" wouldn't it? Better yet, she could donate the tips to COVID-19 research! Make it a win-win for both society and the newfound orthodoxy of the right-wing Cult Of Other People's Death. I mean, if you so fervently believe it's safe, what have you got to lose? If you're right, you're right and you get to go down in history as having both been right and had the guts to go out there and show the courage of your convictions!

*Sound of crickets chirping*

Yeah, that's what I thought.

How come these fucking people are always so brave with other people's lives, or profligate in their spending when it's other people's money.

Conservatives apparently only care about your life until you're born and you cease to be a stick they can use to beat your mother with.

Once you're born, your life becomes expendable, inconvenient to them.

Your money becomes something to take.

But not theirs, never theirs, they're special...or something.

Somehow, for most of the last 40 years these fucking people have been able to con other people into taking all the risks for them, while they pocket most of the profits. If you want to know why they're so desperate to "Reopen" everything, that's why. Their bullshit, like most cults, is dependent on keeping you busy enough that you don't have time to think about what's going on, to consider the effects on your family, your finances, your health, your life...or even your spirituality. In fact, the truth of these matters is that these fucking people, the Fox News Babes, the Republican politicians and the wealthy...they really don't think you have any of those things. If their reaction to this virus crap has taught us anything it's that they see other people as having appeared whole-cloth from nothing to serve their needs, then disappearing when they don't need us anymore. Of course they think we're expendable and they can just get more. Hell, there's people who volunteer to go along with this shit because they think they'll get a little slice, but then they don't and they live lives of quiet seething hatred because of it.

But that's Okay with the privileged and wealthy, because those who believe in their bullshit but then get mad when they don't get anything for it until they kill themselves with Opioids or shoot themselves in the head are still spending money in the right places before they die.

It's funny how Conservatives spent so long accusing everybody else of being the "Culture of Death" but now they're relentlessly going after the people who are simply trying to do what is necessary in the face of the COVID-19 crisis to preserve not only their own lives...and just as often the lives of their children, elders, immune-compromised family and friends, or medical professionals or police officers they know. It's funny to me how nothing and no one that these people ever said they cared about before matters to them anymore.

But did they become this way? Did they become and Independent Fundamentalist Death Cult over time...or were they really always like this, and simply adept at using people in their movement who weren't that way as camouflage? I'm sorry, but I can't imagine Barry Goldwater or Bill Buckley or Chuck Colson or either George Bush or John McCain or even Ronald Reagan talking like this and his administration actually did bungle the US response to the AIDS epidemic.

And yes, they screwed that up in part on purpose because there were people in the Reagan administration that were religious nuts or biased against gay people.

Apparently, there appears to have been at least some kind of a shift in "Conservative" sexual morality.

I will make a note of the fact that in the late 1980's and early 1990's, Donald Trump was a Democrat and self-identified New York Liberal, or at least he played one on TV, operating as at times the very face of the Big City Fat Cats that rural white people like me tended to despise on general principle. And even then, hell, especially then Trump's penchant for the lurid and salacious was legendary. I'm fully aware that this is the case with lots of wealthy people on both sides of the line. I'm saying there was a time when conservative people at least could convincingly disapprove of such behavior, and often did especially when it was somebody on their own side as people like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart found out the hard way.

Now? MAGA Baby, and if the "spoils" happen to include a teenage girl or boy or two, well that's just the way the balls bounce during the old in-out, don't they? Fuck you, I got mine, "Feminism is done, were doing it the right way now." Yes, I kept the misspelling on purpose.

Okay, Genius. "Right way" for what? Tell me something, when was a grown-ass-man putting a teenage girl in a sexual situation ever Okay? I'm not sure about you, but such things have been illegal and more to the point immoral for at least as long as I've been alive and aware of such things.

Modern conservatism is less Atlas Shrugged and more the mutant love-child of A Clockwork Orange and the Turner Diaries.

Maybe we shouldn't let people who can't tell the difference between "Let's eat, Grandma" and "let's eat grandma" and who appear to desire to offend others and think primarily with their dicks, dictate morality or public policy on any matters sexual or otherwise.

And maybe, just maybe, we as a people shouldn't let these fucking idiots turn some part of the United States into MAGAfghanistan so they don't get to implement their shitty sexual and social desires, eh?

If they're so right and they're so brave and so fit to sit in judgment of other people's lives, or even our right to exist, how is it these fucking people can't stand the least bit of public criticism of themselves or their putative leaders? If they're so right, or so righteous, why exactly to these fucking people have to lie about it so goddamned often? If they are so strong and their dogmatic beliefs so correct, why do both they and their beliefs seem to be burning away like a vampire's flesh when exposed to the bright sunlight of public scrutiny?

I woke up this morning to find that Trump had apparently seen yesterday's "Mourning in America" ad on Fox News last night (I guess it aired during Tucker Carlson's show) and proceeded to have quite the meltdown about it.

Too damned bad, I say. There is no right enshrined in the Constitution or the law that says anyone may be free from criticism, in fact it quite explicitly says the opposite and specifically endows us with a free press to make such criticisms and Donald Trump or any member of any political party that doesn't like that can go piss up a rope.

No one has a right to not be called out or criticized because of who they are and sure as hell nobody has a right to endless conveniences or profits on the backs of others or at the expense of other people's lives, nor to endless consumerism when people are dying, supply chains are stressed and hell, whole industries may disappear simply because there's no way they can really function in the kind of slimmed-down socially-distanced world we might just have to live in for a few years and you know what? If they can't find a way to adapt or didn't save up for a rainy day, preferring shareholder profits over preparedness..,well then maybe they need to go. Personally, I'd rather not live in a world where cruise ships or golf courses or Karen's right to go to Applebees and get waited on is more important than people's lives.

But then, I've never been afraid of change. I might not like it sometimes, but it's a part of life. My entire generation will never have the power or wealth that our parents did, simply because there weren't enough of us for Capitalism to restructure itself around keeping us happy for money.

And in fact, capitalism hasn't done too bad of a job adapting to our changing requirements and technologies either. I'm pretty sure Generation X and the Millennial generation and whatever they're calling the next one down this week will be fine. But ya know, we're going to have to adapt more, because these fucking people refused to.

But you have to be alive to adapt. As I understand it, things in death and the afterlife become rather static. I have no particular fear of death, but I have no desire to light myself on fire for capitalism or rich people's profits, either.

Trump and conservatives can take their "Warrior" talk and jam it right up their own asses. This is a virus, not a war. More people dying does not actually fight the virus, trying to go back to "normal" doesn't work when normal stopped being normal either six months ago or four years ago...depending on how you want to look at it.

If they wanna be the big happy warriors, let me offer a modest proposal.

Conservatives fucking love a leader who leads from the front, who gets his hands dirty, who goes into the field with his men.or who even makes a modest show of appearing to do so...and especially if they talk a good game, besides. Why the fuck do you think Douglas MacArthur was so popular? It wasn't because he was a good General officer. Hell, the main campaign he fought on his own, his way, the way he'd been trained...he got his ass kicked up between his shoulder blades by the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy trying to defend the Philippines and it wasn't even a close run thing. After he got evacuated to Australia he got a more capable battle staff to do the planning for him and for that matter the American way of war changed, but he still talked a good game and new how to stage a good photo opportunity and for that matter he was massively popular in places like the Philippines in part because of his Biblical allusions and messianic complex.

Y'all wanna prove how tough you are Mr. All Go No Quit Big Nuts Warrior President Sir? You wanna prove you're right? DO YOU?!

Make yourself a fucking deal, set it up. Hell, Advertise the fuck out of it.

Hell I'm sure you have some fast-food franchise owner or some greasy spoon diner guy for a donor somewhere. Tell them to open that shit up. Tell them you'll fucking be there at their Burger King, Habib's Shawarma Shack, a Red Robin or Sammy's Steak Pit or whatever and tell the whole damn world you'll be there to put on a white apron and a pair of non-slip work shoes and flip the first damn burger that somebody orders onto the grill. Hell, get one of the Fox & Friends Babes to hold your coat while you do it. I bet there'll be people lining up 'round the block in their MAGA Hats and Trump swag just to be seen. I would not doubt that some of these people would fight each other and get their buddies to put that shit on YouTube just to be the guy that could say they got served that first burger or steak or two cooked personally by Donald Trump. Carry it out to them personally and you'd probably make somebody's life, much less day.

You want to be that guy, that's how you do it.

Show some physical courage. Give a fuck!

I mean, fuck, dude, showing that you can grill properly has got to be worth a couple points electorally, especially in the South. I can personally vouch for it that if you can show you make good barbecue, that'll throw states like Illinois right back into the swing-state category and it'll guarantee Indiana and probably Ohio based on the southern parts of the states alone. and give you nothing to ever have to worry about again in Florida, Kentucky, Missouri, and the Deep South on general principle.

You want to get reelected? You want to go down in history as a great man and save the fortunes of the Republican Party from your own fuck-ups, lies, misdeeds and stupidity?

There's a very simple solution.

Just once, be that guy, show that you are the man you say you are. Show you got some guts!

Open up a place. Be like, Hey, Corona, I'm here, you wanna take a shot at me!?!

Work a fucking eight hour shift like most of the rest of us have to and walk out of there with your head held high and some grease on your shirt and a "Fuck this place" attitude like the rest of us have every goddamn day five days out the week for most of our fucking lives. Certainly, unlike most of us, you'd do it to the sound of people cheering.

But...

Democrat that I am, guy that's always hated your fucking guts since 1989 that I am, I know I can say that, and can I say it with a clear conscience.

Because you won't. Because you're not that guy.

And deep down, you know it too.

I refuse to die for other people's money.

But the difference between us, Mr. President, is that I do not refuse to work for my own.

I will however, be perfectly fine with socially distancing until this virus shit is over, because I do give a damn about other people. I don't have to like this mess, nobody does, but we are all in this together. Until we all realize that, things will only get worse.

Left Behind is not a lie because of the bad writing or dubious theology, it is a lie because spiritually it denies that one truth. It allows a person to say that they are Godly while leaving the Self on the throne of their soul. It's a lie for the same reason that MAGA is a lie, because it scratches the itches and tickles the ears of the gullible even when it would be easier, safer, and better even for the ear-tickling false prophet if they told the truth. When people preach false doctrines, lies become The Truth to them. Do that long enough and you can't tell the truth no more. But neither God, nor the Universe, nor whatever else is out there has to agree, and it doesn't.

You want to bend the universe to your will? You gotta be that guy who can show people they have the chops to fucking do it. That Donald Trump is not that guy has made our world worse. That there's no there there is everybody's problem. That he has convinced a bunch of fools that he can do no wrong may kill us all.

Sooner or later, we're all going to have to face facts and decide whether we believe in truth or not. We all face our own valley of decision.

It really is that simple.

Part Six.
Part Eight.

Fire In The Shining City (Left Behind Is A Lie, Part Six)

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still. ~Ronald Reagan

There is a new Lincoln Project ad out, called "Mourning in America" the title a play on words recalling the "Morning in America" theme of Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign. The ad ends with the question "If we have another four years like this, will there even be an America?"

The only answer that springs to mind is "Not if the Trump Supporters can help it. And they'll attack you with Biblical-level invective for even suggesting that anything is wrong. We have almost 70,000 dead, and what are these people complaining about, but the measures that have prevented that total from being 700,000 dead. People are dying, and Republicans will get mad at you for pointing it out, while not a few of them appear to revel in the chaos and death even as the group tries (and fails) to put on an air of sober seriousness.

A fire has broken out in the shining city, and most of the cult of the Shining City On A Hill is either actively trying to spread the flames or charging the fire department for the water.

I saw this, this morning on Facebook, my friend Rob posted it, and the words above the picture are his own.

This is not the Christianity I went to church to learn about.
This is not the Christianity I hold in my heart.
This is not the Christianity that helped lepers, sheltered the homeless, and fed the hungry.
This is not my Christianity.

And I'm getting close, REAL close to stepping away from this Christianity, Lord help me.

Lord help us all, brother.

I can feel your pain because as I have written, I was there, in 2008, when conservatism embraced racism and the howling madness of conspiracy theories out of hatred for Barack Obama and too much of white American Christianity went right along with it. Then, as now, I owed my life and much of my spirituality to Black people, It was an African-American pastor who helped me find sobriety. Something he said stuck with me. You have to love life and yourself more than your Sin if you want to stop doing it. A lot of these people just don't. It's not even that they're not sorry, or unrepentant in the classical or biblical sense of that word. It's that they see nothing wrong in the first place, because deep down on some level they believe the universe is all about them.

For myself, I cannot imagine the idea of trying to use a pandemic as just another way to try to get what you want. People are dying, ain't you got no soul?

It's a virus, it doesn't care about your shitty politics or what color your skin is or who you are, either, and it will claim you just as anonymously and insidiously as it might claim your political rivals, or take you instead of them.

You can believe it won't happen to you all you want...until it does.

But then for myself, I cannot imagine what Trump thought would happen when he embraced the optics of looking small and petty right in front of Abraham Lincoln, either. I mean, how the fuck else did Trump think he was going to look?!

The people who are left in what remains of conservatism see themselves as the protagonists of reality, they think nothing bad is going to happen to them, and they think you should have to clap and cheer at whatever they do. The fact that we're all up against this virus shit doesn't matter to these people. The visible truth that it affects them and constrains their lives along with the rest of us is, however, something that this movement of greedy bastards, mentally broken authoritarian followers and narcissists is utterly mentally unequipped to handle.

It's like they finally opened their eyes at some recent juncture and realized that Reagan's shining city on a hill had other people in it, and at that point they all decided that it wasn't a shining city on a hill anymore, and when this virus flared up like a fire in the night, they decided to start fanning the flames and making it worse.

And why not, I suppose? The nature of America, that long arc of history and morality that bends toward justice does not favor a cult of injustice and immorality and self-worship. It is for this reason that I think these people are going to try to break off a piece  of America for themselves.

In these people's code, anything that inconveniences them or their imagined status or their wealth or that requires them to pay more in taxes or even indirectly support people or things they don't approve of is "Socialism." That's why they seethe with resentment at the thought of a working person being on Unemployment, typing away at a blog post with a sleeping ferret in my lap in my own space with the scent of a citrus and sea salt candle filling the air. They would far rather than I have to dress in ragged clothing and go beg for bread in the street, just to flatter their egos and reinforce their perception of their own place in the world, because it's not about Christ or Christianity or conservatism and it never was, it's about hierarchy and power and whiteness. If they can't be top dog with no one ever allowed to speak against them and get to dole out whatever the rest of us get like Trump doles out favors in return for support, they don't want it anymore.

Basically, these fucking people think that America hasn't been America since 1964...or perhaps more appropriately 1954 and the Supreme Court's Brown Vs. Board of Education decision. America isn't America if they have to share it with black and brown people, and whatever authoritative or paternalistic language they try to polish it up with, that is in fact what these people's problem is. In their view, Ike and Tricky Dick and Gerry Ford and Ronnie and either George were nothing but traitors for not immediately driving everybody else back to the fields and the ghettos and out of the public sphere and trying to bully and browbeat the rest of the world into being our bitch.

These are people who would burn Ronald Reagan's shining city on a hill to the ground just to sell the paving stones for scrap value and use the rubble from the walls for reclaimed land to build a seaside golf resort. Then they'd wall it off, put up a gate, declare it was for rich people and/or white people only, and then call that a nation and set it up as a giant tax shelter with a mercenary armed forces.

And they get a lot of lower-class people to go right along with them based on the hate and racism alone. Abraham Lincoln believed that slavery was America's original sin. It is to our misfortune that the spiritual descendants of those he defeated rose to take over the party he catapulted to national power.

But America was not built on class, race and wealth, not Constitutionally or legally anyway, and when this country was founded, the world was in fact still rife with monarchies and slave societies and it was a vast level of exception to the rules that a nation would arise where even some of the people got to determine their own destiny. That's why over time, the term "American experiment" arose in the first place, more often than not since 1776, we have been the finders and the innovators and the pioneers.

But just the same there has always been some of us that fully embraced a parochial, savage backwardness too, an a primitiveness of thought rife with superstition and fear of what they have always believed deep down to be a dark and demon-haunted world, and the embrace of a harsh, punitive religion has always been part and parcel of whatever compacts of life such people observe. I don't use the example of primitive people dancing around a fire because I think it's funny.

I use it because right here, in one of the most advanced and technological world powers that ever existed that contains multiple literal world-cities on the level of ancient Rome itself, we have half-literate, superstitious people who would be perfectly well at home growing opium poppies in the mountains of Afghanistan so long as they could beat their wives and hate the group or tribe that lived over the next hill. Government isn't supposed to help, in these people's world, it's supposed to show up once a year with guns and trucks and force some of their sons into the Army, or show up to take its cut of the Hashish and Opium harvest and disappear the people who look at it wrong. Like I said, there ain't no practical difference when it comes down to it between these Trump Supporters and the fucking Taliban. Color, culture and religion may be different, but they're the same fucking people.

And if they can't shoot or shout the rest of us down and force us to abide by their ways, they want to break America so that they can have their own little primitive banana republic in some part of what's left of it. They'd rather squat in their bunkers with their Bibles and guns and shit on their own shoes in some Apocalyptic hell than live in the world we live in now.

And the people at the top of this mess would rather spend their days rat-fucking their imagined political enemies on the slightest pretext and use the pandemic to leave the working classes broke or dead, and the middle and lower reaches of the upper classes reduced to penury and then make everybody else pay to eat out of their garbage cans.

I frankly don't know how the hell these assholes keep getting people to follow them. I don't give a goddamn if you give me somebody to hate, if I can't eat.

But we have people who build their entire lives around hate and resentment and think that they should be served by everybody else, or at least everybody that they think is less than they are. I'm sorry, but I can't imagine a more anti-Christian thought process or way of living than that.

I'm sorry, but at this point if you can't see the need to drive Trump and his supporters and Republicans from power because it's a prerequisite to fixing this mess, I can't help you and I have no particular use for you. Go sit on the couch, read the Communist Manifesto or something and get out of the way. People are dying, if that's not more important to you than scoring whatever ideological points make you feel good about yourself (or worse, securing your own wealth and power) then you're a threat to humanity and pouring gasoline on the fires of the shining city right along with Republicans whatever you may claim to be.

If you still need to be "inspired" to vote for some kind of candidate who isn't trying to kill you or starve you out or who wants everybody that you love to die of disease, I'm not sure what's wrong with your brain but you need to get it fixed. Isn't saving the lives of other people inspiring enough for you? When did "Let people die, because it inconveniences me just a little bit" become an American value?

That's not my values.
That's not what I was taught.
Nor is it what I swore to defend.
That's not my America.

If it's yours, you and me, we're gonna have problems.

Light has no fellowship with darkness.

It was right here, in the waters around us, where the American experiment began. As the earliest settlers arrived on the shores of Boston and Salem and Plymouth, they dreamed of building a City upon a Hill. And the world watched, waiting to see if this improbable idea called America would succeed. More than half of you represent the very first member of your family to ever attend college. In the most diverse university in all of New England, I look out at a sea of faces that are African-American and Hispanic-American and Asian-American and Arab-American. I see students that have come here from over 100 different countries, believing like those first settlers that they too could find a home in this City on a Hill—that they too could find success in this unlikeliest of places. ~Barack Obama

That right there? What Obama said? Not to mention what Reagan said in the pull quote up above? That's my America.

And if I have to fight for it I will. Be ye warned. I grew up as a conservative and a Christian in the era when Reagan's ideals held sway. I was taught that America is a melting pot and a pluralistic country and I believed this and signed up for this set of ideals as a Republican. To keep it, I had to become a Democrat. On balance, nothing of value was lost there, if this is what Republicanism has come to.

America was once believed, by many Americans, to be the world's New Jerusalem. Republicans have turned it into a nest of vipers.

This must change, it must be changed, or millions of people are gonna die if we don't get our act together soon. To change it requires action and political engagement, not just big talk, Progressives, and yes I mean you.

If stopping mass death doesn't "inspire" you, then fuck off. You're no one's ally and we can do the mission without you. But without you, it will be harder. Politics and survival are messy. That's life. Deal with it.

Because if ya don't, well the Republicans, who have already found their new Lord and Savior, are going to be perfectly content to burn the shining city...and the world...down around all of us.

We're all going to have to step up to put this fire out.

Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: and so the Lord, the God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye have spoken. Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate: it may be that the Lord God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph. ~Amos 5:14-15

Part Five.
Part Seven.

Rejecting Grace (Left Behind Is A Lie, Part Five)

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 3:16-18

I saw this a little bit ago.

Reopen Arizona nuts sang Amazing Grace to close out their pro-virus rally, and the host encouraged them to hold hands or touch each other. I wasn't going to write anything again today, after taking yesterday off. Then I saw this mess. Sorry, but I gotta say something.

In the Bible and Christian theology, the Grace of God stems from the death of Christ on the Cross, His sacrifice being given for all of humanity, in effect, as a substitutionary atonement, and His Resurrection in turn becomes our resurrection as we are all given Eternal Life because of it. Eternal Life stems from compassion, not from selfishness. He who must gain his life must first lose it. He is no fool who gives up that which he cannot keep, for that which he cannot lose.

In effect, it's the ultimate "If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can even imagine."

But that requires holding to a certain set of principles, even when it's not convenient or fun or easy. You have to at least try to be the better person, all the time, even when there's no benefit in it, hold to the Truth even when you have to acknowledge that you might not win. That's what those three brothers in ancient Babylon did. But if not, let it be known unto thee O King...

You can't just follow the Truth when it's convenient, you have to do it all the time, because it's the Truth...otherwise you don't believe in it. That is the message of Daniel 3. God didn't have to save those dudes, they said so themselves. Sometimes when you know that the only thing between you and Eternity is a half-rusted steel door, you gotta kick it open and charge in anyway. Duty is duty, respect is earned, by every action, every day. Sometimes we gotta do hard shit, and if somebody doesn't make it, well you gotta settle up after. But that requires actually believing this stuff and belief in the afterlife and having faith in something greater than yourself. It is in that way that a group of men and women, a city, or even a nation can become greater than the sum of its parts.

More to the point, I think social distancing implies giving a certain grace to other people. We don't know why might have this virus, anybody might, including you. We all have to give a little, so that the greater whole might survive.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now am found
Was blind but now I see

Was Grace that taught my heart to fear
And Grace, my fears relieved
How precious did that Grace appear
The hour I first believed

Through many dangers, toils and snares
We have already come
T'was Grace that brought us safe thus far
And Grace will lead us home
And Grace will lead us home

~Traditional Christian Hymn by John Newton.

That's basically the total opposite of the ME! ME! ME! attitude of Donald Trump, the Reopen protesters, and the Trump Supporters.

Notice the sign? These fools are singing Amazing Grace, while touching each other just to spite social distancing, and while somebody's holding up a sign calling Arizona's Republican governor a Democrat and a douche-bag.

I'm sorry, but the same people that taught me the words to Amazing Grace also taught me that name-calling and profanity were wrong and should be avoided. Most of the serious Christians that I know, or ever have, do not often use foul language and many try to avoid using it at all.

And those same people taught me that unless I had a good reason not to, that I should obey the law, and in turn we have legal processes in America for changing the law, and for protecting those who expose evils and injustices that happen under color of authority.

None of those seem to involve fighting with the cops, if I recall correctly.

It's funny how Blue Lives Mattered, until they didn't because White ninnies who are driven by their desires and wants, obsessed with convenience and afraid of change decided they wanted something.

And they can't be bothered to extend the slightest bit of grace even to people whose jobs it may be to keep them alive, whether they be cops or medical professionals or Democratic and non-insane Republican politicians.

Social distancing, as many people including medical professionals and public health experts feared, has become just another culture war battleground to the Tribal Republicans.

These Fucking People would rather call J.B. Pritzker, the Jewish governor of Illinois, a Nazi because he's trying to keep them alive. I'm fucking sorry, but I used to be a conservative and that just doesn't compute.

Democrats and at least some Republicans are doing their level best to try to keep their people alive, and getting nothing but crap for it from Trump Republicans.

I guess there really are people out there who will fall down and worship the statue when they hear the music, or dance around the fire shouting "Unga Bunga" before they go out and try to find somebody to throw into the volcano to placate their primitive fire gods.

Meanwhile Trump, his cronies, and most Federal elected Republicans are doing nothing but trying to use this virus shit to shovel more money into their pockets

At least as I was given to understand things it's hard to spend money when you're dead.

The thing is that the grace you give to others, either spiritually or by social distancing comes back to you. Or doesn't, as it were, in that you don't get sick. What you put into life, eventually comes back around. As you sow, so shall you reap. I for one find it appalling that conservatives and supposed-Christians are the ones rejecting this basic core belief of not only Christianity...but in fact any decent religion...immediately on the first time in living memory that we as a people are put to this fairly simple test.

They are rejecting grace, in favor of some golden image, in favor of some harsh legalistic system that obviously does not benefit them, because they associate social distancing, much less Unemployment Insurance, with being of the other tribe, or being weak or something.

As an aside, I know what I've done, you can think I'm weak all you want. Come at me and you'll find out otherwise real quick.

What's worse is, I'll bet you money that when they get sick, they will want that grace that they denied everybody else to be shown to them anyway. In a spiritual sense you cannot do this, you cannot reject grace for others while expecting to get it yourself. As you sow, so shall you reap. God is not stupid. That's how you end up in hell.

The vast majority of us are being asked to do very little in this mess, stay home, find other ways to do the things you do, don't go out as much, get it your own damn self. Stay home and fuck your wife instead of going to the strip club, etc. You can still get dinner from a restaurant, is being expected to take it home and eat it with your own knife and fork really so damn hard? You can still cut your own hair, get a Pornhub subscription, and order even non-essential stuff online. This shit is hard and inconvenient for everybody, it's not just you, it's not about you. Most of us ain't being asked to do shit but adjust a little.

A minority of us, emergency services, essential workers, and health care professionals, are being asked to shoulder a crushing burden. The rest of us get to stay home and do what we want, and in my state get paid pretty damn well for doing it. I'll take that over people who think social distancing means to shut down the break room any day, and if that offends your ideology, fuck you. Self-interest and basic survival tell me I need to stay the fuck home, and wear a mask if I go to the store or any other place where there's people around.

If I am to expect grace myself, I have to give it to other people. Service before self. If the only thing between me and eternity is this mask I'm wearing and the fact that there's fewer people around, bet your ass I'm going to take that option no matter what the laws and procedures say. If even George W. Bush gets that, then what's my excuse if I don't?

We rise or fall together.

And we are determined to rise.

Together we rise, or none of us do.

Rejecting grace because you think it will hurt your political opponents will only cause you to hurt yourself.

Part Four.

Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple.  “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written: “‘He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.”

Jesus answered him, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’

~Matthew 4:5-7

Part Six

Beast Of War (Left Behind Is A Lie, Part Four)

Two days past eighteen
He was waiting for the bus in his Army greens
Sat down in a booth in a cafe there
Gave his order to a girl with a bow in her hair
He's a little shy so she give him a smile
So he said would you mind sittin' down for a while
And talking to me, I'm feeling a little low
She said I'm off in an hour and I know where we can go
So they went down and they sat on the pier
He said I bet you got a boyfriend but I don't care
I got no one to send a letter to
Would you mind if I sent one back here to you
~Travelin' Soldier, The Dixie Chicks.

I sit here, day by day, watching things get worse, I feel like it's impossible for me to articulate how I feel or what's going on in my head to anybody who doesn't share some of my life experience, but I swear, I will try.

Yesterday I watched far-right thugs scream at Michigan State Police Troopers and menace my State's senators from the senate gallery. As the virus ravages the entire country, I know, state by state, this keeps happening as some on the far-right, and wealthy conservatives in particular are violently opposed to the social distancing measures and partial economic shutdowns that have been vital to saving so many people's lives. They know they can't reopen the economy, they know there's no fucking way mass death would not destroy things even more than the virus has if they did. They know this.

It's not that they don't care, they care very much.

Not that people will die, mind you, these fucking sociopaths consider that part of the cost of doing business. They count on it, truth be told. Death and misery used to drive their profit margins in the days before a workplace accident could get you sued into oblivion. It's for that same reason that we had sixty years of labor struggles before economic collapse and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal encoded into custom, law and the social contract a whole shit-ton of things that every single American of all political stripes and every color and creed takes for granted today. Like the Unemployment Insurance that's enabling me to go on living much as I always have, and maybe even a little better truth be told, so I can contribute to the economy and do my part to keep something going, at least.

But they want the deaths.

And while I'm at it, throw in a hundred years of Civil Rights struggles, following the Civil War. American Capitalism as it has existed for my whole life couldn't make it without People of Color, or women, or LGBT folks being given more of a stake. These fucking people hate that. Hell, Pot Heads are a pretty big driver of the active parts of my state's economy right now! And oh yes, these fucking people care very much about that. Not the guy who's screaming at the cop while wearing a pot-leaf shirt...but the people who put him there.

It is utterly impossible to overstate how much Republicans in general, and wealthy hard-right social conservatives like the DeVos family in particular, hate and resent the idea that Americans, and people of all colors and creeds especially are sitting at home safely social distancing, happy and well-fed and able to eat whatever they want, have sex, practice their own religions by social distancing, smoke weed, etc. etc.

They want you to die, if possible, they want to profit from your death, and lots of these fucking people hate that capitalism itself requires for its own survival that other people get a share. Capitalism as they see it, should be for them. Non-wealthy white conservatives can be the people who get a little share, who get to be the government officials and the middle management and the cops and the soldiers and stuff, everybody else...including not-sufficiently-conservative-enough Whites gets serfdom or sharecropping at best, and "Eat shit and die" at worst.

Hell, Scott Walker came right out and said it. To These Fucking People, "Social Distancing" means shutting down the break room and making you stay at your work station. I bet if they could, they'd chain you there, and give you a bucket to piss in. The way people like Betsy DeVos and Scott Walker see it; All the ideologically-wrong people, and people who (whatever their politics) worked their way up within living memory are the people who are making money off of the pandemic. Or the people who will bow to public pressure, or give customers what they want instead of putting a gun to their heads and telling them they'll eat their moldy bread and thin gruel and like it.

And there's people in my state that are like "HELL YEAH! Sign me up!" and I'm sitting here like "What the fuck?"

And there is a non-zero chance that I know at least one motherfucker who's been to one of these stupid "protests."

You'll notice that for all the noise they're making, these "Protests" are only in general attracting a few hundred to a couple thousand people at a time. And that's exactly why these fucking people are so freaked out. The last thing they want is for people to see Democratic or Progressive policies work and make their lives better. The Republican narrative of Sol Que Put (Save himself who can) and the authority that they feel it gives them is suddenly in jeopardy because guess what? New Deal democratic policy is probably the only thing right now that's keeping the bottom from totally dropping out of the economy, among other things.

When people are hungry, or stressed, or things are going badly, they don't vote Republican.

There are no hordes in the streets and mass protests of people demanding we reopen the economy. It's a few hundred idiots blocking access to a hospital and some idiot screaming at a cop who doesn't even care. I have a family friend who's a retired State Troop. Bob at some point did a tour as a State Police Academy drill instructor, and after that he was always the guy who's job it was to break in the 'Cubs', the new Troopers. His mother once got pulled over and tried to drop his name to get out of it. It turned out the Troop, who'd been one of Bob's students, took particular glee in writing that ticket. I have some idea from what kind of person he was what kind of training those guys get. If Cannabis Shirt there knew what he was potentially screwing with he'd not have acted like that. More to the point, social distancing is pretty damned popular with those of us who don't wanna die, right now. I quite suspect that  Cannabis Shirt guy set himself up for a lifetime of free knuckle sandwiches from random people, getting pulled over by the cops, and public mockery.

Funny thing, but these fucking people don't seem to even notice the rest of us, much less care what we might do. And I'm serious as a heart attack when I say this, but these fucking people collectively have a paste-up stereotyped image of the rest of us, liberals. moderates, never-Trump conservatives, non-Christians and People Of Color alike that hasn't got one fucking thing to do with reality.

They basically think they're going to kill us, and we're just going to roll over and take it. In their fantasies, they're the protagonists of reality and everybody else shoots like the Imperial Storm troopers in the original Star Wars trilogy, or begs for mercy, or tries to run away. Granted, they also have a whole bunch of beliefs about themselves that have nothing to do with reality. They think they're some kind of righteous Christian Warriors, manly, virile, somehow anything but some fat middle-aged guy screaming at a cop who in damn near any other circumstance would've fucked him up. More to the point, these fucking people see decency, politeness, restraint and hell, obedience to lawful orders and rules of engagement as weakness. Why else do you think they lionize murderers like Eddie Gallagher or lying shitheads like Mike Flynn?

And they're so snowed under by the constant barrage of Trump bullshit, that that's all they can see. I'm fucking serious, none of the Trump Supporters I know anymore can give you an actual reason why they like him. Many will just say that they do and that's that.

There's no way to argue with that. You have to let it run smack into reality and let them take the consequences and see for themselves...and be aware it may take multiple times of this.

The smartest thing anybody could have fucking done here was send in an Army National Guard rifle company and watch these fuckers piss themselves when facing down armed soldiers, disarm every last one of these assholes and then send them the fuck home wearing big fucking signs that say "I am a moron." Send them their weapons back via FedEx or UPS since they don't like the postal service. And send them cash on delivery and disassembled. I'll bet you ten bucks 90% of these goddamn fools who could come up with the cash to pay the FedEx guy wouldn't know how to reassemble them. More to the point, it'd be a lesson on living in what the kind of world they think they want is really like. Of course "Do this now or we shoot you" is what they imagine themselves saying.

They simply cannot imagine that authority and force go both ways, because they're stupid, and because stupid people on the other side tend to let these motherfuckers commit crimes and violence before responding appropriately.

If you let people do stupid shit, they're going to keep doing stupid shit. Well guess what? In the case of this COVID-19 shit, that could kill us all by itself.

But complete idiocy never stopped people from doing dumb shit before. And that's what the rich assholes are counting on. These fucking people want to bring about an apocalypse on the off chance that they can come out the other side having erased the gains others have made for the past 170 years and manage to preserve their own power.

So the letters came from an army camp in California, then Vietnam
And he told her of his heart
It might be love and all of the things he was so scared of
He said when it's getting kinda rough over here
I think of that day sittin' down at the pier and I close my eyes and see your pretty smile
Don't worry but I won't be able to write for a while

I cried
Never gonna hold the hand of another guy, too young for him they told her
Waitin' for the love of a travelin' soldier. Our love will never end
Waitin' for the soldier to come back again
Never more to be alone when the letter says, a soldier's coming home. ~Travelin' Soldier, The Dixie Chicks.

 In this series, I've written about my own certainty of what would happen and my nagging sense of dread that I felt after 9/11. I knew...I knew from personal experience and what I'd seen with my own eyes what would happen.

I saw photos and videos of BUFFS flying lazy orbits in a clear blue sky over Afghanistan, just waiting for somebody to call in a strike. Somewhere there'd be a tactical control party with Air Force security forces troops, Marines or Special Operations...or fuck, maybe some of Massoud's Northern Alliance guys protecting it that was gonna call in a strike on some bunch of illiterate goons with AK-47's. RPG-7's and the odd mortar here and there and within a few minutes a couple of A-10 Thunderbolt II's would come screaming in, fire off a couple of Mavericks from about ten clicks away and maybe dart in low and strafe the position with their GAU-8 30mm Cannons for good measure. Or maybe a couple of sticks of Mark 117 bombs would just fall out the sky and blow these bearded, drug-addled goat-fuckers and their position straight into Allah's arms and wouldn't that be an awkward conversation you'd like to be a fly on the wall for? 

For all the goddamned good it ever did anybody.

This has been life for some people for...what...going on nineteen years now and we're still there and they're still fighting and the standard of living for all too many Afghans has improved only incrementally...yet that's still a hell of an improvement over what life under the Taliban was. These wars have created so many veterans...and modern medical science and casualty evacuation made sure so many of the wounded survived...that the Department of Veterans Affairs and its medical system (underfunded by the Republicans who got us into the wars) can't handle it. You know how many free meals that I've gotten that I wanted to throw back in the face of whoever decided I should get them? All of them. Don't call us heroes, give us decent health care. Don't tell us how great we are, get better diplomats and politicians so nobody gotta go to war in the first goddamn place. I never saw combat, but I saw what it did to my friends who went over there.

War. Sucks. 

Anybody who'll ever tell you anything else is a fool, a liar or a sociopath

Those fuckers up there menacing my state's Senators, they ain't no heroes, they're the goddamned Taliban, only without anything I can recognize as religion. Fuck, to be honest I'd take the Taliban over these guys. At least if you got captured by the Taliban you'd get a fucking toothbrush.

And I've known Muslim people for most of my life. Hell, I've met people from Afghanistan. Comparing these motherfuckers to the Taliban is insulting. For the fucking Taliban.

And no, I don't believe their claims of religiosity either. People who follow the Old Ways don't act like this. I'm not joking when I say that I'd take the word of the most hardened member of the Haqqani Network or the Taliban over "Phil Odinson" and let me tell you why.

I was against the Iraq War. Not least because I felt like it wasn't necessary and we should probably finish what we'd started in Afghanistan first. I more or less by default ended up in the rather short-term peace movement that came about because of opposition to that war. I was far from the only conservative who was one of those people at the time, too. It made for some strange bedfellows. One of the people who I'd managed to drag along on my opposition to the war was my conservative Evangelical partner for whom I'd later move down here. But anyway, I was taking a class on nonviolence that semester, and so were a couple of the Muslim students that I was friends with. One of the other students was a Marine Corps veteran who had also been a boxer at some point. We all made an interesting contrast to the more typical hippie type student who had this kind of class...or this particular professor. Jim Norgaard taught a slew of history classes, ranging from fairly straight world history to kind of out there crunchy stuff like "Celts and Nature" or this nonviolence class I was in. Because of that course I went to several peace protests, and briefly met Michael Moore once. Anybody wonders why I don't like the guy, there you go. 

Anyway, when major combat operations began over the 19th-20th of March, the mood was pretty bleak and some people took it really hard, even though there wasn't much hope of cooler heads prevailing anyway. A couple people got really mad.

One of them, though...

There was this kid, Ikram, who was from some of the wilder northern parts of Pakistan, Computer nerd working on that kind of degree, quiet, one of the more devout of the small group of Muslim students. He didn't really socialize much, but he was more or less attached to somebody who did. Her name was Sondra, a cute little black girl from the Detroit area who was the only American in the little Muslim student group. She was one of the people in my nonviolence class.

He didn't take the whole situation well, and was angry enough to want to fight about it, though he looked like the type who'd never been in a fight in his life. He got into a shoving match with this other kid, simply because the kid had a brother that was in the Army who was deployed over there. Me and Sondra broke it up, talked the other kid out of turning him in and then spent the rest of the night talking Ikram down and trying to get him to calm down and ultimately extracting a promise from him that he'd talk to Cliff, the school's mental health guy, and not get into any fights.. I'll be honest, I'd seen some people pretty damn mad, but I'd never seen somebody that damned angry before. Somehow, the story did get out, nothing came of it, except a brief "holy shit" moment the next week from the rest of the class directed at me and Sondra. They were proud of us I think, but didn't make a big deal of it.

Ikram pretty much went back to his quiet self after that, and for the rest of the semester at least he didn't cause any trouble. He told me later, in one of our few conversations, that honor demanded he keep the promise that he made to us even though sometimes he didn't want to. After the school year was over he went back to Pakistan, and from what I heard later via Yahoo messenger from some of the students who talked to him he'd decided to continue his studies somewhere else. I don't know how that turned out.

But I do know that we could reach that kid, and he kept his word.

I'm sorry to say this, but I don't have much faith that a lot of Americans could do that, especially racist assholes like Phil Odinson.

They are determined to go out and fight somebody, or more likely just shoot some unsuspecting innocent person in the back and call it a great victory, or blow up a police car with an I.E.D. or try to kill somebody in an ambush. I've spent fucking years, deliberately going after this shit from a conservative viewpoint, because I know that's the only way some of these people will hear it, and it's getting to the point where I don't want to try anymore. I'm tired, tired and angry, because no matter what, if you talk to these stupid rage monkeys, five minutes after you leave they're right back at it. 

I'm angry because these fucking people are being egged on by once fairly typical conservative talking heads like Laura Ingraham. I mean come on, Retweeting VDARE? What the fuck? 

Here's the thing about those Burmese workers, notice the "faith based organization" bit? Those people are Burmese Christians or Rohingya Muslims, basically exactly the kind of people that you'd think Betsy DeVos, Jerry Falwell Jr Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson would be all about bringing over here. Christians and conservative non-Christians, and they'll do nasty low-wage work that white Americans won't do? Seems like that is exactly the kind of "Transformation" that conservatives would want...if they believed in any of the things they said they did. I mean, seriously, I'M not a conservative or a Christian anymore and I'd be fine with it. I'll talk Bible stuff or Islamic theology with these people all day. Somebody just might learn something! Good chance it would be me. Yeah, I'll admit it, I care about knowledge for a selfish reason, I like to learn new things, interact with people who don't necessarily agree with me...so long as there's a good-faith effort on both sides...and encounter different cultures. That makes us all stronger. Republicans used to get that! Those were the people who taught me this stuff! America is a melting pot! In a different era, the Iowa Republican Party and, say, either Bush GOP would have damned well made sure to send people to speak at their churches or Mosque, get them to start the process to get their citizenship and do its level best to turn both groups into loyal Republican voters while actively using the Muslim ones as a stick with which to beat Daesh and the Taliban, and it would almost certainly have worked. 

But that's not who they are anymore, and the world is probably worse off for it.

It's like I once told one of the cleaning contractors at work...you're a Republican, right? If whether or not Michigan went blue or red in a Presidential election or your choice of Senator got elected or what have you might come down to a few hundred Syrian refugees who just got their citizenship in Detroit, or a couple hundred Lebanese folks in Grand Rapids who've been there forever...well, you'd want to cultivate those people as your voters, wouldn't you?

And cultivating Republicans of Color is important, because that's how you get more of them, new ideas, stronger. I told him, and this was in 2018, that Republicans like John James were important, because hey, the "Left" would have a harder time calling ya'll racist if you'd run a Republican rainbow nation ticket, wouldn't they? I told him about how African Christians tended to be...well, to be honest, more conservative in a lot of ways than even really exists in the United States. 

We've been having these discussions for years.

He's not stupid, he's from the next town over from the one my Mom lives in, and we know a lot of the same people all over the state because his company also contracts for a lot of the same restaurants that I've worked in at different times. He's not dumb, he knows right from wrong, and he's never come off as being particularly racist.

That said, he'd definitely kind of sheltered in a very-rural America sort of way.

Because this guy is a fairly serious politically-conservative mainstream Christian (Reformed theology and serious enough that he was just as mad about Sarah Palin as I was in 2008) I put it like this. "Make it so that anybody who accepts Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior can join the Republican Party regardless of race or anything, same with any non-Christian religious person who can accept being around that, and treat them all the same, and have a consistent morality. Don't pull this racist crap they're throwing at Obama. Do the opposite. This guy talks like he's a Republican some of the time. Use that. Hell, use Shrub there as an example, but cut out the dumb mistakes and get us out of Iraq, and you'll hardly ever lose an election again. Run on, not against the health care stuff and ya'll could be the next FDR and there ain't shit the Democrats could do about it."

He got it, when I put it that way.

Politics is supposed to be a game of addition, not subtraction. 

The GOP used to understand that, and used to do this this whenever they thought they'd have a shot at cultivating a constituency, Arab Christians in Michigan and Ohio, Cubans in Florida, Koreans and Vietnamese in California...and it often worked. Where in the fuck do you think they got Darrell Issa, or for that matter, Justin Amash?

Oh, wait...

But it hasn't been about any of that for at least a decade, and for all too many Republicans that were below the radar in my time, far longer, or it never was about Christ, or conservatism as a philosophy at all. Like I said, that's not who they are anymore.

One Friday night at a football game
The Lord's Prayer said and the anthem sang
A man said folks would you bow your head
For the list of local Vietnam dead
Crying all alone under the stands
Was the piccolo player in the marching band
And one name read and nobody really cared
But a pretty little girl with a bow in her hair 

~Travelin' Soldier, The Dixie Chicks.

Now they'd rather kill you because they've bought into the ideas of far-right rich people who think everything is a zero sum game, and if they simply kill you, there will be more for them.

And for reasons I can't fathom, there are people supposedly on the other side who are willing to help them with this.

And for what? So that you can be further back in line when the questions get to "Who will be eaten first?"

I'll never fucking get it. I'll never get how so many Americans became so...anti-American, I guess. I have no other way to say it. Is your own freedom...or ours...really worth so little? Is it just that much more important to be "right" or feel good about yourself than it is to live in a functioning country with a functioning government or even to have your own life and freedom?

I don't know when or how this is going to go down, but I can give you an idea or two of where it might start, and who's going to start it. The thing that actually scares me is that the Anti-vaccine bullshit, MAGA, and an End Times narrative completely emptied of any reference to or reverence for God or Jesus appear to be slowly melding into a new religion, with Trump as its presumptive god, racism as its redemptive son, and whiteness as its holy spirit. Then they'll want to have a holy war in the middle of a pandemic, just like the fucking Taliban started a Jihad in the middle of a civil war. 

And it'll be a war of 20 years or more just to contain it, because teaching people to have a brain in their heads or that peace is preferable to war or to love thy neighbor instead of wanting to shoot them is just too goddamned hard. It'll be Afghanistan in Appalachia and Najaf in Nevada if we ain't real damned careful. Arc Light strikes on the Blue Ridge, Wart Hogs rolling in with Mavericks and 30mm cannon shells on the deserts of western Washington, HC-130 Hercules and P-3 Orions backing up Coast Guard cutters hunting for pirates on the Great Lakes and all..

And I fucking guarantee you they'll kill and persecute Christians right along with everybody else. And the innocent will die with the rest of us. Like I said, war sucks.

And there's people, supposed "Progressives" and cowed Republicans, that are just going to stand there and let this happen?

The cruelty, death, and evil are the fucking point. But when the real shit happens, lots of Republicans and most of their donors are probably going to start looking for non-extradition countries to go to.

Something is coming, I think Republicans are going to try to bring about the destruction of the United States either actively or passively, so that they can break off a piece for themselves, in the middle of a pandemic. There's too many Americans against them for them to succeed at taking the whole country. Though like I said the real architects and beneficiaries of this will do their best to be as far away as possible when they might be at risk. Whether this happens after the election, or even before it, I cannot say because I do not know. It's just this feeling I have.

These people would rather face the apocalypse than equality and rather burn the world than pay higher taxes or see Brown people get a fair share. Chances are excellent that they're going to lose the election, and they'd rather all die than face the consequences of that...just so they take us with them. The thing is, all they have to do is say "Follow me" and at least a few million people certainly will.

If we've learned anything in the last 20 years it's that a few hundred guys with AK-47's and I.E.D.'s can tie the United States Armed Forces in knots for damned near 20 years. Now instead of the Haqqani Network, the Mahdi Army or the Taliban, imagine it's the Boogaloo Brigade or the Trump Apocalypse Army.

Conservatism is far more now the Turner Diaries than Atlas Shrugged, let alone the Bible.

War. Sucks.

That's where this is headed if things don't change. Yeah, most of these idiots won't last five minutes, but the ones that do will learn fast, combat is about as Darwinian of a learning environment as it's possible to have.

Because an Apocalypse is what these people want, and they're going to get it if we don't ALL stand up and stop them first.

And if we want to even try to prevent that apocalypse it's going to come down to a fight eventually.

I wish I could tell you something different or better than that.

But I can't.

Part Three.
Part Five.