This is not the post I had expected to write today, but it is the post that needs to be written.
This is what it is like in the modern United States, a once-proud republic now held in thrall by right-wing fanatics, ammosexuals, ideological zealots, and Dominionist blasphemers. This is what it is like, to have to take to the streets with signs held high to protest the fact that children are being slaughtered in their schools by men with guns. No civilized society would need such a protest, and you can draw your own conclusions about the modern United States from the fact that such a protest is needed.
Because there are actually those in this country who see no problem with such slaughter. Who would rather have their guns than the children. Whose weakness and fear knows no limit and must be compensated for with military-grade weaponry and junior-high-level snark. Who shout “Shame!” at the people working to fix the problem, working to prevent children from being slaughtered.
Imagine having the sort of impoverished mind that thinks such a reaction is appropriate, if you can.
No, really. Go ahead. Try to imagine what it takes for someone to declare themselves on the side of the guns rather than humanity. Get a good feel for it, and then you will know why evil flourishes despite the best efforts of men and women of good will, and why the children have been forced to lead since the adults have abdicated their responsibilities.
We marched here in Our Little Town, today, several hundred strong. We marched through the downtown, past the pathetic young man with his penis substitute, standing on the corner as if he could intimidate us.
We are Americans. We are not afraid. These colors do not run.
We marched through the streets and to the office of our Congressman, a coward who has not had the backbone to hold a public town hall with his own constituents in years and who remains in office only by virtue of some of the most egregious gerrymandering in the entire United States. He hasn't won his own home town in nearly a decade. He wasn't there, of course. He never is.
There is a change coming, you partisans of the gun.
We march to send you a message. Don't say you weren't warned.
We outnumber you.
We are coming.
You are on the wrong side of history, morality, and American patriotism and values.
We will see you fail.
We will make sure you and all your works are forgotten.
Sleep well.
Don't let them be forgotten. Just let them be reviled.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with "reviled" is that there are always those for whom that is an attraction.
ReplyDeleteThis is why "neo-Nazi" is so much more horrific than "Nazi," after all. These are the people who looked at the horrors of WWII and the Holocaust, who saw the revulsion with which civilized people regard Nazis, and said "Yes, that's for me."
They want monuments to their glory. They want to be remembered. Fuck them. Let them be forgotten so utterly that future generations will doubt the sanity of anyone who suggests that there ever might have been such people.
Yes! Let them be forgotten.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, we must not let their deeds or ideology be forgotten. Let it not just be driven underground and away from view. We've made that mistake too many times already.
Graham Nash foresaw this, oh so many decades ago:
And you, of tender years can't know the fears that your elders grew by,
And so please help them with your youth, they seek the truth before they can die.
Teach your parents well, their children's hell will slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams, the one they pick's the one you'll know by.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqRIGjfN0mk
We can not live in fear, and we need to find a way to teach those who do to just get the hell over it.
Lucy
It's a fine line, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteI want what I cannot have - I want those people and all their malignant beliefs consigned to the deepest pits of oblivion from whence there can be no escape. I don't want to know their names. I don't want to know their reasons.
Yet life does not work that way.
It should.