I’m meeting my grandfather for lunch on Friday. It’ll be the first time I’ve seen him in several years. He went all the way down the hate hole. Never heard him cuss but last time we talked he was using the N word.
He’ll be 87 soon. Most likely, I’ll never see him again. He’s going to find out we’re moving out of the south to yankee land.
Fuck it. He’s not the man I knew. He doesn’t have the wisdom I thought he did.
I hate it and it fucks me up. I’ve lost my people to hate and stupid. So fucking stupid. They all want to suck some orange cock. Fucking really? That’s your fucking Messiah? They didn’t actually fucking read the fucking book they claimed they believed in while shoving bullshit down my throat and the throats of any child they could get ahold of.
Fuck em. They could wake the fuck up if they choose to. They could read. They could think. I tried to tell them.
I’m real sad about it. Not a fucking thing I can do about it. They can live inside their lie holes.
Blackberry Winter has skipped two years. There are armadillos, geckos, and fire ants now. Those critters didn’t live here until things changed. The fucking woods smell and sound different now. They could wake the fuck up and quit listening to fox or their preacher but they choose not to.
I tried to tell them and they didn’t listen because they choose to be ignorant.
fuck em
One of the starkest shocks I had during the initial trump candidacy and pandemic was the veil being lifted on so many people I worked with or knew.
People I thought of as intelligent, level-headed, and reasonable suddenly appeared hateful, mulish, and willfully ignorant.
They didn’t care about the environment. They didn’t care if they got people sick or killed them with covid. They didn’t care about the open overtures to authoritarianism or fascism - if anything they directly welcomed this. The wild and rampant stupidity behind the conspiracies and Q-anon. The concerted attacks on women’s or lgbtq rights, the denial of equality or justice for people killed by police. The complete willingness to throw their fellow humans under the bus for any reason at all to spare themselves the inconvenience of not being able to eat at Applebees without a mask.
And they manufactured whatever slights they could think of to justify their actions regarding the above. It was retaliation for loss of perceived status as White People In Charge.
It completely killed discourse because you can’t have a discussion with someone who isn’t willing to argue in good faith. Who Gish Gallops and buthwhatabouts. Who exhausts their opponent with conspiracies that are so full of shit that you don’t even know where to start rebutting because they have no place in reality.
The trump election sharply split America in two. The country and the world are a far less stable place than a decade ago.
When you realize all the people you admired for their love of freedom actually just meant the freedom to be an asshole… That’s a hard lesson to learn.
Yeah, that’s the truth. Their freedom to not be inconvenienced regarding how their fellow humans are treated.
Yes. it was an incredible shock. 9-11 was less of a shock.
It’s like a transmissible soul sickness that they willfully acquired because it seemed easy and it made them feel right and justified.
I’m moving on and trying to make peace with it. I’m trying to view it as a different kind of pandemic or an asteroid that came out the sky and smacked us.