You might think, ok well that’s presuming a lot, that the stupid of the last administration might take a break now that they’ve lost. You might think (second verse, same as the first) that a few of the rabid, frothing, red-hat wearing, bully-bred maniacs would take a breath and stop to consider what has happened. You might. I might.
But sadly no, that’s not how things are working out.
True, the harsh daily blasts, like heavy-grit sandpaper applied directly on the eyeballs of Nero’s latest antics have been relegated to occasional bursts of unpleasantness. But beneath the relative calm bubble up noxious plumes of seething hate fed by the hate-machine of the GOP. (Insert here the traditional statement of incredulousness of how educated, capable adults can justify repeating lies they themselves can’t possibly believe; followed by the now-mundane query about the duty to truth and the value thereof.)
I’m tired. Most everyone I know is tired. Fighting is hard, and four years of fighting, culminating in what we supposed was the vindication of truth/unity over lies/hate appears merely a pause in the muddy, bloody trenches of reality.
Welcome, as it were, to the desert of the real.
Politics has, at least for now, lost any veneer of beneficence. Greed. Power. Venom. The right to murder with impunity. The ability to ensure the repression of people who look different, believe different, represent different, that apparently is the winning mantra of the day. (Insert here the ironic expression of how institutional religion purportedly discourages those traits as evil, and yet goes out of its way to endorse and even mythologize the same behavior.)
It’s hard not to be depressed when you realize there is no “win”, Darth Vader doesn’t die with some expression of remorse, the evil Emperor isn’t cast screaming into a pit. Everyone doesn’t just jaunt off with a renewed sense of purpose and relief to a well deserved rest after the celebration. The remorseless dirge just keeps going after the end credits, when the martial music fades and the audience isn’t left uneasy by the obvious question mark after the closing “the end”.
Nope. Stupid has near-infinite energy. You can’t kill it with fire. You can’t nuke it from orbit “just to be sure”. Even without a leader, stupid spreads, enabled by the noblesse oblige of the good guys who insisted that everyone has a “right” to their opinion. But do they really? Is that really the best policy? Frankly I think driving the stupid underground isn’t such a bad thing. A little taste of the policies that they themselves endorsed.
But I digress.
I’m tired. I’m tired of fighting. But that does not make me any less capable of doing so.
We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.”
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Russian novelist
Well, if there’s one thing I’m fucking good at it’s making people uncomfortable. Truth matters. More than money.