What's Next?
I spent a good 30 minutes or so this morning debating what I wanted to write about. There were a lot of options. The other day, I’d written about abortion and how Roe v. Wade seems to be on its last legs. I fully expect abortions to be illegal in a lot of places very soon. That is if we are able to read the tea leaves of how the justices questioned the lawyers in the brief.
Got that? Now that it’s so easy to give up kids for adoption, women should be forced to carry them to term. I mean, we make people get vaccines, right? Pretty much the same thing. Good lord, these are the best legal minds we have available to us?
I also considered writing about how the modern Republican party is pretty much just a hate orgy. 30 years ago, implying that a fellow member of congress was a suicide bomber might have gotten you removed from office. At best, you’d at least have to sweat out a few months of criticism from your colleagues. But now? Nary a peep. And I’m not exaggerating. This is what she said:
Get it? She’s a Muslim so if she’d had a backpack obviously she’d be a danger! Hilarious. Keep in mind this ENTIRE story is made up. It never happened. This is some sort of weird white power fantasy that Lauren here has jumbling around in her head. Now you might be thinking “what’s the big deal? It’s clearly a joke.” Wellllll… it really isn’t funny. And it’s wildly inappropriate to say something like this about a co-worker. If anyone else in almost any other modern workplace said this they’d be fired before noon. This is dangerous rhetoric. See, not everyone gets the “joke” and believes that Omar is actually a terrorist on a jihad against America (she’s not). They leave her messages like this one:
Cool cool. Nice party the Republicans have there. And who can be surprised? For all of my life, Republicans used to just dog whistle this kind of hate. They fed off it. They maintained power because of it. The only people who vote for Republicans are white people. That’s their entire base. That’s the only way they get elected. By winking at maintaining supremacy, they keep the whites afraid and engaged and voting for them. Boebert is another breed of GOP though. She doesn’t feel like she needs to hide it. I mean, once they elected a dude who bragged about grabbing women by the pussies, called Mexicans rapists and drug smugglers, and banned Muslims from the country (again, his own words that it was a Muslim Ban) why hide anything? I have no doubt there will come a day when one of them uses the n-word and nothing happens to them. Hell, they’ll probably double their fundraising. Because this is who Republicans are and have always been. Oh, and one more thing. For all of her bluster about how bad the “jihad squad” is, they’re a lot safer to be around than a career criminal like Boebert.
I had also considered writing about the school shooting in Oxford, MI that killed 4 and wounded others. The killer used his father’s gun to do it. I’ve got a personal connection to these kinds of things now that I work in a school every day. And let me tell you, the kids in that school are the same as the ones in mine. I think we even have the same desks. And next week, we have a “soft lockdown” drill to practice for this kind of stuff. It makes me sick to think about it. Look at the terror on these kids’ faces when they think the shooter is pretending to be a sheriff to gain entry to their room. They have to flee out a goddamn window.
I’m old enough to have grown up in a time when we didn’t have to practice for when one of our fellow students decided to get a gun and kill us. How many more times is this going to happen before we realize that a minority number of Americans’ “rights” to compile arsenals that would make most other nation’s militaries blush isn’t a good thing. It is ludicrous to think that the Founders could have possibly imagined the weaponry we have access to today. And lord knows (since a bunch of them were slave owners) that they wouldn’t want EVERYONE to have access to a gun.
What else is there to say about it? We’re in a ship that’s sinking and nobody wants to do anything about the water. Guns have been the problem. Guns are the problem. Guns are what need to go. It really is that simple. Will this ever happen? LOL. You’ve got a better chance of Marjorie Taylor Greene recommending we teach CRT to kindergartners.
Speaking of MTG, did you catch this exchange the other day?
LOL just a fantastic party you got there GOP. What are their solutions to the problems we face today? Why, it’s shutting down the government, of course!
Where is all the heading? What is the end game in all of this? Fascism. All of this leads to white supremacist fascism taking over this country, if it hasn’t already. Every election they do a little bit more to establish their goals. Even when they lose, they win. They have their Dear Leader. They have their cause (maintaining white supremacy). And they have their tactics and mythos. This isn’t scaremongering or hyperbole. This is what’s happening today. Watch this video and tell me if it hits a little too close to home.
We are approaching a point of no return with some of this. I don’t know what the answers are. We have generations of people (50 million) owing trillions of dollars in school debt. TRILLIONS. The forests seem to burn year-round. Cities flood all the time. There are so many problems it seems almost unsurmountable. Perhaps it is.
I have no idea what’s next. Could there be another Great Awakening? Except, this time, instead of turning to the darkness of ancient myths, we turn towards progress and enlightenment? Maybe. It’s all we have to hope for.
Hope. It ain’t much. But it’s what we’ve got to keep.