Take A Good Hard Look In The Mirror

 by  Shaun Lawton  (a gonzo op-ed for today, written without the use of AI). 

         (photo provided courtesy of The Telegraph) 

 

    Rest in peace, Renee Nicole Good. American politics is just a big old reality TV game show to our current elected president, as if he doesn’t realize that politics is the only game in life where the stakes remain our livelihoods and very lives. The livelihood of the American people, and our lives ARE NOT A GAME to be played on a demented whim as if you were on some gambling binge in a dirty casino in Las Vegas.

But his supporters don’t seem to understand that. They’re like a pack of rabid howler monkeys, screaming from the peanut gallery, throwing popcorn and having the time of their lives, wearing 32 ounce plastic mugs on their heads as if they’re at the Superbowl.
If the rest of us don’t manage to get together on a drastic level and do something about it soon, this little game our forefathers started two-and-a-half centuries ago they called the United States of America will be OVER, . 

     

    This administration lied today, again. The current administration always lies. Our CEO appears to lie all the time. Pam Bondi lies. Straight through her teeth. 47 lied throughout his first term, and he's doubling down on lies here in his second one. Kristi Noem lied today, defending the rogue ICE agent who shot an innocent woman three times dead in her car, without compunction. Kristi Noem had the audacity to state Renee Good's actions in her vehicle were regarded as being "an act of domestic terrorism." This now appears to be fascism getting started, first by several phases, then it comes on quick. If she wasn't lying, then she was mistaken, and the next few days should clear this up. Meanwhile, our questionably elected leader still lies every day. This guy does not seem to care about you. He does not appear to care about me. From what I can see, Trump remains a distinct threat to the best interests of this country.  A lot of it has to do with incompetence.  I'm just here to learn as much as I can. So please, enlighten me.  Why can’t you supporters of his see what we're seeing, and hear what we're saying? Cutting through all the bull, how can you be led to believe in this apparently deranged wannabe president? Look at the plain evidence and get a sense of the big picture. Everyone's got issues but, this is crazy, it's gone too far. Chalk it off to our Social Dilemma, whatnot, with all the various closed-circuit media news outlets proliferating across the nation, and the hundreds of dumbfounded idiots swallowing it hook, line and sinker.   >.< 

    If you don’t stand in solidarity with Minneapolis and Chicago along with me and the majority of American citizens who are shocked and outraged at how cavalier this administration's representatives and constituents are being while taking the news of Renee Nicole Good having been summarily executed by an ICE immigrations and customs enforcement agent this morning, then what’s taking you so long to come to your senses? What’s it like to live in fear of immigrants, sworn in already or otherwise? Every person out there represents one of us.  Governor Tim Walz — a real man with more courage and integrity than all MAGA-hats put together — who served and still serves our country with honor and decency — takes action today against the fascist takeover of our once free country.  Now is the time for all hard working and decent, freedom loving real Americans to stand up and take our country back from this senile, demented old witless Russian asset, and just steer it back to standing tall once again with our allies around the globe, just when the world needs it most.

 

     If you're still rallying for this president, can you please explain it, in dummy language so we can understand, or don’t you even comprehend what the United States of America is really all about? Have you ever read the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights, or our Declaration of Independence? Oh wait, you don’t like to read, or you can't, I forgot which. Why don’t y'all download the audiobooks from the public library, or something? I’ll wait. Can't stop thinking about those Liars. Lies, lies, lies. The president, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, all of 'em, liars propping up a faux-legacy whose expiration date was up five years ago, and he's really startin' to stink up the fridge, now. 

    There’s a reason we have well-trained officers in blue. There’s a reason our police serve to protect our communities without masks.  And that reason has nothing to do with our current administration’s illegal purging of our population. And those of you sitting behind the safety of your screens cheering them on, I pity you from the bottom of my heart. Without even realizing it, you are encouraging lawless bandits while they do their dirty work because you must live by, and for, nothing but fear.  Franklin D. Roosevelt famously stated "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," back in March of 1933, urging the American public to overcome their fear from the Great Depression, and that's what introduced good old fashioned democratic socialism into our nation, which could more accurately be described as  progressive reform with strong federal involvement in economic recovery and social welfare.  But try to tell a certain demographic of uninformed Americans that, today, in particular conservatives and Republicans and MAGA supporters, all somehow roped in to the whole televangelical mess.   

    If you're reading this, and are a gung-ho, MAGA hat wearing American, you are the craven, and represent everything this country is against. You're a hypocrite, plain and simple. Or you've been unwittingly led into a cult, and deserve to either be rescued, or find your way out of it, like quick. Otherwise, y'all come across hard like some uneducated, uninformed, selfish narrowminded hypocrites. Or you're too old, out of touch, or don't know any better, or know too much, while having been fed on a diet of false news and lies through WHATEVER TV, or wherever it is you get your information from, in whatever manner, in this corporate sponsored oligarchy growing more out of control every day while we live and breathe. It appears you will never come around to understanding how much more power and strength there is in love, tolerance and forgiveness, which is sort of ironic, I shouldn’t have to tell you. Yet here we are. Maybe you should sit down with yourselves and take a good, hard look in the mirror. Or don’t. It’s your own life, do what thou will. But don’t get all surprised when you’re denied forgiveness, there’s only so much we can take.  It's okay, after I take a few deep breaths and calm myself down, I realize your unadulterated sheer state of being uninformed ain't nothin' to really shake a stick at.  My lion's heart softens while I begin to consider pitying you all. Y'all with your big trucks dangling faux bull's balls from the trailer hitch, with your bumper stickers and feverish defense of the Second Amendment despite us now having fast forwarded civilization two hundred and thirty five years into the future, where things just aren't the same.  We all have guns now, so now what? That's not the issue, here, really, in a nation that only loves to appear how divided it is to offset our mutual disdain for one another? Of course it's the issue, and it's not the only one.  I don't have that much to say on the matter, as I remain as neutral as I can, amid the oncoming storm. 

    But for some reason, I ain’t even worried about Civil War, it’ll go over like an expired pack of Ladyfingers purchased in the Clearance isle at Kroger’s and go off like duds on a rainy Fourth of July that’s been cancelled anyhow. It’ll discharge like a few wet farts in a kid’s dirty diaper tossed into a dumpster outside a strip mall in Louisiana, it’ll make Hurricane Katrina look like the Battle of Alcatraz, Hell—I’m willing to bet that if it began tonight, sparked off by the murderous halfwit employed by ICE in Minnesota today, and drag on for eight-and-a-half months, 98% of the suburban neighborhoods across America won’t even notice, in particular on the Fourth of July, when unaffected families make more of a ruckus with their illegal fireworks purchased over the border than the few bedraggled goons all fired up for Trump could muster. I’m not trying to make light of it, I’m just saying this president’s support is not real — it’s a feigned shit-show 3-Ring Circus Clown Act of shitty real life Villains out of a Batman cartoon, and they’re running their train on absent rails, sailing over a cliff like out of a Warner Bros cartoon, caricatures of convicts in their striped prison pajamas, trying to run off with all our money and the thing I find rather funny is no one seems to care.  

     There was once upon a time when your average, every day American seemed to understand one simple tenet of our life under this red, white and blue flag which represents freedom for all, united under a government with a rule by law and operated for the people, by the people, who have all been sworn in from every disparate nation on Earth.  And that plain idea centered on everything our forefathers fought and died for, that their children and grandchildren and all the generations since then who did the same in the Civil War, WWI, and WWII, who shed their blood and gave their lives, as the rightwing love to say, and bravely died for our country so you and I can enjoy the freedom that our Constitution and Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights protects, with equality for every one, even those displaced, tired, and poor and huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse washed up to our teeming shore, where we once pledged as good Samaritans to take them all in, and welcome the homeless, the tempest-tossed, to us, here in the USA, the land of the free, where we would all lift our lamps beside our golden door, embracing one and all to join us.  The tenet I refer to was the idea that if these once near unanimously agreed upon values weren't applicable to a single individual, they would then be quite lost to us.  I remember.  I remember that time clearly, in my head, when we still had enough integrity to uphold our values in service of one single individual human being.  I can't even remember what the saying was. If we can't reach out to help one person, or bother to think about saving them, what can we in truth be expected to do for others? While there's always something we can do for ourselves. Let's remember one person. 

    Let that one single person be Renee Nicole Good.  Why not let us commemorate her memory on this day, when her life was needlessly taken away, for no reason at all but to serve this crass and unnecessary crusade established on a whim by a charlatan who does not represent the interests of our expansive and diversified population of good, hard working true blue collar citizens who believe in nothing less than being innocent until proven guilty.  Let her be remembered and let justice be served in the following days.  It's time for the majority of our able citizens to flood our congressmen and women's phone calls and emails demanding they stop supporting this unhinged administration from doing any more damage to our reputation as a once well respected and trusted country among our allies throughout the world.  Let's rise up with a unified voice and just make the madness stop.  Otherwise I need a deeper and broader context, to make things a bit more clear.

    You may never know how deep it can get, or how long its been buried. Things have a way of surprising us, and from where I sit these days, it's so hard to tell since I'm trapped in my own closed-circuit version of Hell, what often seems to becoming my home. Oh no, say it ain't so.  Little game over, so overblown.  Only of our potential can nothing be known,  for it remains ever  yet to be reached, by definition.  We can agree to disagree on a single condition. Freedom. Let me sing, let freedom ring, it'll be alright. There are no differences to set aside, enjoy the ride, if you can, I say, if you can just stay tuned to what’s really going on, here. 

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