…’cause your lips are moving…
Rump lies like he breathes. He lies about everything, from his golf score to how popular he is. I can’t understand how his followers don’t realize it. Maybe they do, and they just don’t care. He’s their god-emperor, and if he doesn’t have clothes, then that’s what they’ll do too.
Or will they? More and more of his magat followers are turning away, suddenly realizing that they’re not any better off than they were before he got elected, and may in fact be worse off (spoiler: they are). These people are the ones who proudly carried the “don’t tread on ME” flag, with its not-so-subtle, unstated footnote of “tread on YOU”. They’re now being tread upon, and they don’t like it. Only poor people, or people of color, should be tread upon! Not them!
Normally, I would be happy at this turnabout. More people against rump!
But there are those among us (and I use ‘us’ to mean ‘liberal Americans who hate rump’) who say they will never forgive, never forget what those people have done to us. They blame (and rightly so) them for putting a fascist regime in power in the U.S. and cheer at their chagrin and deprivation. They don’t care what those people do, think, or suffer because their actions put us in this situation.
But there are precious few people, anywhere in the world, who are inherently, sociopathically evil. It’s easy to demonize some people, to claim they have no heart or empathy, to aver that they do not deserve to live. But even Hitler painted roses, so Harlan Ellison says, on the doors of Hell. Nearly everyone thinks their views are righteous, somehow, that they aren’t really bad, they’re just, like Jessica Rabbit said, drawn that way (Stephen Miller might be the exception to this, but I digress).
My point is, you can’t paint with a broad brush. Even the oligarchs who apparently run this country have good points (they have to; they wouldn’t be human otherwise). Those may be hard to find, but they’re there. And that may be the only way we have to wrench control from them. Maybe their only ‘good points’ are rooted in their fear of going to jail. It’s at least something.
Kurt Vonnegut said this: if you put black ants and red ants in a jar, nothing will happen. But if you shake the jar hard, they will start killing each other. The red ants will consider the black ants their enemies, and the black ants will consider the red ants their enemies.
The real enemy is the one who shakes the jar.
The same thing happens in society.
Before we attack each other, we should think about who is shaking the jar. Because it’s not necessarily rump doing the shaking. He’s a senile old man who couldn’t strategize his way out of a paper bag. So who’s doing the shaking?
We need to think, long and hard, on the answer to that. Now is not the time for snap judgments.
Anyway, happy Valentine’s Day to those who celebrate it.