I've been seeing a great many comments recently about the ongoing coup going on in Washington D.C..
Unfortunately pretty much all of these comments are by people who knew this was going to happen, and who didn't vote for the coup leaders in the first place. What we need are more comments from people who have been changed witnessing the results of their misguided choices, people for whom the scales have fallen from their eyes, voters who now know they chose badly.
I understand that in the coming weeks, months, and years a great may of them will suffer from the disintegration of a government they very much depended on. They took the organized services paid for by our tax dollars for granted not because they were fools, but because they were fooled. There is a difference. Anyone can be fooled, and whereas a Fool is entrenched in their ignorance someone fooled can learn from their mistake.
What we need is more people to have the bravery to step forward an admit that they were outsmarted by some of the most powerful people in the country, deluded by billions of dollars worth of propaganda, and fooled by shameless, practiced hucksters who were willing to say anything at all to secure votes. Considering the almost overwhelming forces arrayed against them it's kinda understandable so many were fooled.
We need people to admit that their fear of a complex economic present was redirected against people who were in no way to blame, that their anxiety regarding a frightening future was redirected to blaming those unlike them, and that their totally understandable desire for simple answers was used against them by people and organizations who do not, it turns out, have their best interests at heart.
It is understandable that people want to return to what they have been told were simpler times. That sounds very comforting and attractive when things are so difficult today. And it is understandable that in the whirl of information and struggling a great many people might be easy to fool by con men and women who offer simplicity.
We need more of these people to realize they were sold a pot of boiling shit and told it was beef stew.
There are also a great many people who just want the joy of punching down, who want to set fire to house they live if it means those they hate will burn with them. There are those who firmly believe the worst thing that happened to the United States was the defeat of the Confederacy, or women gaining the right to vote. There are those who believe any who have not accepted Jesus should suffer a hell on Earth.
I'm not talking about those people.
I'm talking about the friends and relatives who, in the confused struggle of modern life, took their eye off the Constitutional prize, and fell for the carpetbagger's promise. I'm also talking about the too-smart-by-half folks who thought voting for a Democrat was a lesser-of-two-evils choice without really considering that the difference between that lesser evil and the greater evil was actually pretty damn vast.
You probably know some of these people, and they are the ones we need to talk to and hear from. They need assurance that we understand how they were tricked into making such a self-destructive decision, and that they can be part of the fightback. They can't be in charge of it, as they clearly have bad judgment, but they can carry a sign. But the first step for them is going to be acceptance, a sort of ego death for the version of themselves that thought they knew what they were doing when they voted or didn't vote last time. I know that acceptance will be difficult, and they will argue and try to justify, but as their lives and rights are further constrained not by immigrants of trans folk or Leftists or teachers or scientists or women speaking their minds or civil rights protestors or DEI hires but in fact by the same old sexist, racist, capitalist bastards who have been shoving their facing into the dirt their whole lives they might start to see who their real enemy has been all along.
Oh, and those conversations and comments will help us separate the fooled from the Fools.
Comments