A capitol police officer has died from injuries he sustained during the redneck revolt the other day.
A police officer friend of mine was on social media cheering on the revolt. I haven’t heard from him since the officer had died.
This must be a very confusing time for the folks who were convinced Trump gave a shit about law and order. Dogwhistling is a real phenomenom, racist politicians appeal to the racism in their constituents.
It seemed evident from day one that Trump was in it for himself. But at the core of the issue lays the question: Is Trump more of a citizen than you are?
Our country is founded on the principle that all men are created equal. I understand when this was written it was intentionally racist, but without this in the founding documents I wonder how much harder it would have been to make progress in abolition and civil rights causes. I’m way out of my element when I talk about this, but let’s focus on the fact that our country today is meant to be governed by the will of the people — representative government.
Imagine you wake up naked in a field. It’s a totally unfamiliar place, and you begin looking around for signs of life. There is nothing. No buildings. No planes. No smoke rising on the horizon. You wander around for days. You find a stream and some berries. You begin to hash out your survival plan.
Months go by. You begin to spend a day out and a day back. This becomes your routine. You go searching for life and food for a day, then come back and rest for a day and build your shelter.
One day when you come back, you notice someone has been there. You walk in, and laying on your hay-stuffed mattress next to your rough-edge cedar nightstand lays a naked man. Long white hair and a weak beard, just a couple months of growth. He must have been surviving about as long as you. His body is gross and emaciated. He was evidently an overweight man before his survival. You notice a faint blueish red stain all around his lips — death? distress? blood? nope. You realize that he has found your stash of berries and emptied them. No big deal, you think, he is an old man and I can collect more berries, there are at least five berry trees you’ve found in your immediate vicinity, a safe walk. The man wakes up and grabs a rough sharpened stick from the vine he has wrapped around his waist as a belt across his flabby but skinny body, it is the only article of “clothing” he has on.
“Calm down, sir. Are you okay?”
“You shut the fuck up, Do you know who I am? Are you doing this to me?”
“I understand your confusion. We are out here alone as far as I can tell. I don’t know if we will be saved. There is nobody for miles.”
The old man shifted uncomfortably, his eyes rolled around, clearly disoriented and confused. “Do you have any Adderall?”
“No sir, I woke up just like you–“
“I need my FUCKING adderall! I can’t fucking do this anymore. I’m the most powerful man in the world. I’ve done fantastic things for this country only to wake up naked in some hellhole!” He looks at you. His confusion has shifted to disdain. Having someone to yell at has clearly sharpened his senses.
“I’m sleeping here tonight.” He says and lays back down.
You wrestle the stick out of his hand and poke it right through the paper thin skin above his neck. “Dammit.” You breathe to yourself as he begins to gurgle on the blood and you grab his legs to pull him out of your tent. He might be good bait to attract some big game that you could eat for months.
You go back into your shanty and curse yourself for getting blood on the nightstand. “That’ll never come out.”
Well it turns out the man is Donald Trump, and if you are the type of person to roll over and let him have your spot to sleep then maybe you are the type of person to go die in his war at the Capitol.
You mean nothing to Donald Trump. You are a means to an end — the end being a run on the American taxpayer. He wants your political power and your resources as his own. He wants to use them for whatever the fucks he wants to use them for. He just wants to make sure you are locked in for the ride.
A few years ago I got hooked up with a ragtag band of what I thought to be “gospel-freaks.” As it turned out, we were all just proving ourselves loyal to a cult of personality. The leader at the head of the movement had no issues siccing his dogs and their reputations on their peers who disagree or trolled, meanwhile scrambling to hide critical aspects of his own reputation so that his bubble of influence would continue to inflate. Well, the bubble popped, as bubbles tend to.
My contributions to that cult cost me some relationships that I will never be able to reconcile. Becoming militarized at the behest of one individual is nearly always a losing strategy.
If someone is asking you to die or kill in their war, make sure you are quite sure of the person and the movement. Better, die when God wants you to die and kill only when you *want* to kill. If you don’t believe in the kill, you will always regret it.
There is a time to kill and it’s not when you are a warrior in someone else’s ideological battle.
Maybe I’m not giving enough credit to the Trumpers — they maybe do believe in their cause. They hate their prey and love the taste of the kill.
This hasn’t been true of the majority of Trump supporters I know. They have the look of folks wishing that the rhetoric was less hostile even if the bloodlust has a primal appeal.
The core of this is sort of an “I told you so” but even more it’s an “I’ve been there too and good lord please repent or you’ll kill a part of yourself that won’t ever come back to life.”
