[With my previous post here, I thought—and prayed with all my heart—that we were through with Donald T****. (I've vowed, following Stephen Colbert's lead, to never again soil a sheet of paper or an LED screen with the man's name.) But, though his own antics have been mercifully absent from the media for a few weeks, those of his disciples have muscled their way back into our consciousness.
And, as the necessary but futile efforts to convict the scumbag in his second impeachment proceed in the Senate, it appears his influence will continue to infect many of our countrymen for a long time.
Thus, the fight—and this modest effort to resist—goes on.]
~ • • • ~
As I contemplate the deadly disease running rampant across my country, I keep wondering, how did this happen? Why weren’t we better prepared? Will we eventually subdue it? Or will it just lay low for a while and then come creeping back and once again lay waste to all we hold dear?
Oh, you thought I was talking about the coronavirus? Nope, the disease I’m more concerned about is the plague of resentment and conceit, the mass delusion, that enabled a bumbling tyrant to hijack the American presidency and rather systematically dismantle our democracy for the last four years.
In my more charitable moments, I might say to people who still support that demagogue alright, you’re entitled to your opinion. I suppose you’re even entitled to your own lies.
Go ahead. If you want to look at a man who’s spent his entire life proving what a narcissistic, corrupt, racist, amoral total asshole he is and see the answer to your prayers, fine.
Care to keep those forward-view blinders on, denying the future for your addiction to a past we’ve long since outgrown both as a country and as human beings? Clutching to your breast those good old authoritarian sacred cows: law enforcement, “the troops,” the Bible, Old Glory—whatever—instead of embracing the glory of possibility? Be my guest.
Question a thoroughly-validated election simply because your guy lost? Sadly, that’s your right too.
Those who expect to have it both ways deserve neither.
CAUGHT IN A LIE
But what you’re not entitled to is extolling one set of truths when things are going your way and another when they’re not. Rules that apply to folks you’re afraid of, but not to you.
Seems to me a “principle” that applies when you want it to, but not when you don’t isn’t a principle; it’s a ruse. As aggrieved and entitled as you may genuinely feel, you don’t get to have it both ways.
I’ll call you out on that duplicity every time. Why? Because we’re political enemies? To settle some perceived score? Because I’m “elite” and you’re “deplorable?” No, those are your kinds of reasons.
The reason you’ll get caught is because any fourth-grader could tell you it’s plain bullshit. Because it defiles the trust that’s the stock-in-trade of a functional democracy. And because it’s intellectually and morally indefensible.
DISAPPEARING ACT
You can’t be for authority when it’s used to control and punish others, but defy authority when it applies to you. Like flaunting COVID-control mandates because they deny you your “individual liberties?” Don’t get me started!
And you can’t be a Christian to justify your passing judgement on others, but then treat them in ways Jesus would never have condoned. (So there goes your cherry-picking from the Holy Bible for reasons why its teachings don’t apply to you.)
A leg to stand on is not the only skeletal part you lack.
You can’t pretend to see tens of thousands of people who didn’t attend your esteemed leader’s first and only inauguration, and then pretend not to see the 81,283,098 certified voters who did indeed make him, for once and for all, a loser.
Nor can you claim to be a patriotic American and then cheer on a petty demagogue who clearly admires our country’s most ruthless enemies. And you can’t love the electoral process when it delivers your popular-vote-losing candidate, and then hate it enough, when both the popular and electoral votes decisively reject him, to desecrate the U.S. Capitol and threaten not just members of Congress, but the Vice President you adored just last week.
And now, during the second impeachment trial in the Senate, we see your T***publican representatives stooping to a new having-it-both-ways low—as if that were even possible. They say the first time your muck-raking messiah got caught red-handed he couldn’t be held responsible because he was president. Now they insist he’s immune because he isn’t president.
You just can’t make this stuff up. A leg to stand on is not the only skeletal part you lack.
SURVIVING ON SCRAPS
To all you poor schmucks locked in a death spiral with this despicable man: I’d love to see you evolve, along with the rest of us, to ways of thinking and acting that embrace a kinder, gentler, smarter future. To restoring the kind of democracy where individual liberties are balanced, as intended by the country’s founders—and God, I should add—by collective responsibilities.
But somehow I just can’t see that happening.
So if you can’t overcome your mass inferiority complex and join us, then I guess you’ll just have to slither back into those dank recesses where you and the rest of the cockroaches skulk till your next opportunity to scurry out and terrorize those of us on whose scraps you’ll, sadly, have to depend.
No comments:
Post a Comment