Redefined

In the Supreme Court, arguments were being heard in what could be the case that finally solidifies marriage equality from sea to shining sea.  In that discussion, as with most debates about the issue, there were multiple iterations of the concern that a ruling in favor of marriage equality would redefine the institution.  I can think of many reasons why this is an asinine objection.  You could question how the court would be redefining anything in this case, considering they already established the federal definition in the last case of this kind that sat in front of them.  You could mention that every religion would still reserve the right to define marriage for their own purposes, without forcing others to redefine their own meaning of the word.  And you might recognize that a changing definition is historically common for this institution and we are all the better for it.

Marriage is not the monolithic institution that so called “traditional marriage” supporters claim it to be.  Within the Bible alone a marriage could be between one man and many wives, not to mention concubines.  But this also overlooks the reality that even when a marriage was between one man and one woman, it was not what we now understand a marriage to be.  It was a property transaction between the father of the bride and the groom, wherein ownership of the woman was the key matter.  We are all the better for having redefined marriage before, within the Western context.  In the broader scope of marriages in the world, there are still many places where marriage is not between two consenting adults, leave alone whatever gender.  Arranged marriages are still quite common in certain parts of the world, and the age of consent in others is quite a bit lower than we would accept here.  This being a way of saying that what we define as marriage is rightfully a reflection of our own moral understanding of the world, and whenever we see that our definition of marriage is degrading to the people involved or the institution itself, we should redefine it, or rather let it be redefined.

Language is an ever evolving thing, and the definitions that were used generations ago will not be the same as those used generations from now for many words.  This is a natural process, but just like the enemies of marriage equality, I also have to put my foot down on certain redefinitions.  It’s too late for some words like “awful,” which once literally meant something that fills you with awe.  In its original context, a god was not awful because it was bad but because it was glorious and inspired terror.  Sometimes you have to recognize when the tides have turned against you, especially when it happened centuries ago, but that’s not to say we shouldn’t fight a very different corruption of definitions.

Boycotts, protests, peaceful assembly: these words used to mean something.  It meant a group of people, who recognized the inadequacy of the status quo, would use peaceful and self-sacrificial means to propose a better alternative.  The people carrying out the Montgomery Bus Boycott were sacrificing their time and money by actively avoiding a service that was discriminatory.  The people protesting the undemocratic, communist regime of the People’s Republic in Tiananmen Square sacrificed their education and in some cases their lives just for the hope of reforms.  The people who peacefully assembled across India in the 1940s sacrificed their own security and personal prosperity to defeat a colonial power.  The greatest failures of any of these were the people who waited at the fringes to muck everything up.

You can judge just how weak an argument is by how violent its supporters get in spreading it.  If the idea is strong it will be compelling and win people over on its own merits, but if you have a piss poor idea then you need to use war, terrorism, vandalism, and any other form of violence to scare people into pretending it’s a good idea.  The peaceful protests that go on in the aftermaths of the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and more are the full definition of civil resistance, among the most powerful weapons for positive change in the world.  They address the real problems that confront people of color in America through calm but pointed protest.  Unfortunately they are given a bad name by a select group of people who have become so disillusioned with the world that they can only think of destruction, and sadly these people are redefining that noble idea of protest.

Right now on Google, the first word that succeeds Baltimore is Riots.  This is the frightening image given to the legitimate protest, as now all people can think about is the destruction and violence that was also borne of the tragic death of Freddie Gray.  Now the image of protest is a rock being hurled at the police in the same way that the protest of Michael Brown’s death is now summed up by the image of a burning restaurant.  Is this fair? No, but it is the reality of the world that the news will only depict the most visceral scenes over and over again, regardless of how many more people showed up to clean up the mess this morning.  But before we all get too justified condescending to the communities of color that spawn bad seeds, let’s not forget that the other redefinitions that are going on.

The police are the members of our community whom we all entrust to keep us safe.  They’re the people we call first in times of extreme duress… or rather that’s what they’re supposed to be.  Our boys and girls in blue cannot do their job if the very idea of the police is redefined into a terrifying monster that only appears to make things worse in your life.  I think any fair minded person would have to recognize that it’s the few bad apples that are spoiling the bunch, but then the same would have to be said of those corrupting the protests.  In both cases, it’s not enough to simply acknowledge that it’s just those annoying few that are the problem, we actually need to address the problem.  Too often, the police are empowered only enough to crack down on people without being able to become a part of the community, a trusted extension of who we are.  Too often, the rules that the police are forced to operate under, crack down on the poor instead of working to eliminate poverty.  And unfortunately, many precincts are not adequately funded to attract and train the right kinds of police officers.  This is why those few bad apples are allowed to exist, because it’s either put up with that jerk who wants to act like he has all the power in the world or go out on the beat without any backup.

But more than anything else, it’s the redefinition of “caring” that perturbs me most.  People seem only capable of caring about something for a matter of minutes, and I don’t know if that is a dramatic shift from how things used to be, but darned if it didn’t seem like we were able to focus on things for longer than the length of a snapchat video.  Give it a couple days and no one will remember the name Freddie Gray, give it a week and no one will even remember the Baltimore Riots.  There will be some new story, some new distraction and everything will remain as unresolved as ever.  It gets that much harder to hold onto hope that we will finally say enough is enough on darn near anything of importance.  But it’s not simply a matter of not caring enough to pay attention, the very idea of what it is to care about people has become so obtuse as to basically be meaningless.

We don’t care about our fellow Americans living on the other side of the tracks.  We don’t care about how they live and what they may be dealing with.  All we want to do is to either feel a momentary sense of superiority in seeing our fellow human beings struggling with problems that we refuse to understand, or else in the case of a natural disaster like that of Nepal, to simply throw about $5 at it and make a short tweet.  It’s impossible to feel deep empathy for everyone all the time, but this is being taken as an excuse to simply ignore problems and ignore people.  And until we can reclaim these basic definitions we won’t be able to address racial disparities, the limits of the police force, marriage equality, income inequality, or really any other important issue.

Empathy and Wishful Thinking

One of the perennial issues that comes up with presidential campaigns is the “Mommy Problem.”  As a respite from the excruciating political realities we face, feel free to watch that eponymous episode from The West Wing.  Long story short there is an assumption that Democrats are the “mommies,” as they are more concerned with apparently feminine issues like the social safety net, whereas the Republicans are the “daddies,” as they are more concerned with apparently masculine issues like war.  One might expect that in the likely event that Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination this might come up again.  For this to make sense as an analogy for reality, however, we would have to be talking about a sitcom family where the daddy is essentially inept and the mommy wears the pants.  Because for all the rhetoric, mother knows best.

It polls well and it feels good to sound tough about policy, regardless of the policy.  We need to treat criminals without a shred of compassion and give harsh sentences for small crimes and always hold the death penalty as a tool of justice.  We need to shut down our borders and be ruthless with our immigration policy to ensure that not one illegal immigrant makes it here, then we can worry about slowing down legal immigration too as a way to protect our jobs.  We need to pull the poor off of the public teat so that they will get to work and stop being a blight on our society, and the very idea of providing drug addicts the tools to continue in their addiction is beyond laughable.  We need to kill the bad guys over there before they come over here, and we can’t let the smoking gun of their attacks take the form of a mushroom cloud.  We need to defend our rights above all else and make sure that the government never gets its grubby hands on our guns.  Damn, you can almost see the testosterone emanate from each and every hardline word in these “solutions.”

To try and bring empathy into any of these discussions would be viewed as naive, as wishful thinking about what we wish would work.  Here’s the thing, in most, if not all of these cases, it’s the tough side that is doing all of the wishful thinking, because empathy works.  The death penalty doesn’t serve any useful purpose, as much as we may wish that by killing wrongdoers we can avenge what was lost.  The states with the death penalty still on the books tend to be more violent than those who’ve gotten rid of it, which indicates that it fails as a deterrent.  It is more expensive to actually put a convict to death than it is to lock them up for life.  There is a real possibility that some of the people on death row are innocent, and you can’t undo a death penalty in the way that you can let a person go free and compensate them for their loss if the evidence does turn up.  And above all, the government has no business in killing its own people.  We wish it were true that the death penalty worked because when you have a loved one stolen from you, you don’t care about justice or rights, you want vengeance.  This is natural, and I have all the empathy in the world for every parent grieving a lost child, but taking someone else’s child will never bring them back.

This is all aside the point that our prison system locks away too many people.  In fact one of the records America still holds is as the country that locks up the greatest percentage of its citizens, unless you count Seychelles with its population about half the size of Worcester, MA.  For this achievement we’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars a year to keep Americans locked up, in many cases simply for possessing small quantities of cannabis.  This has had a negligible effect in keeping us safer, as very often the prevalence of convict populations leads to their families and communities following similar paths.  A little empathy here would lead us to focus less of the punishment side of prison and more on the rehabilitation side.  A country like Norway should be our model, because if we are going to spend about $47,000 annually per prisoner, we might want to try and keep them from coming back.  But we wish it were true that the police could simply lock away the bad guys and that would be the end of it, sadly reality is a bit more complex.

Immigration is another topic where wishful thinking tells us that these people coming from other countries simply need to be shut out, and if we can just do that all of our problems would be solved.  We can’t afford the people we have here already and we can’t afford to be giving away our jobs to people who game the system.  In reality, however, illegal immigrants do pay into the system and because they fear deportation are often unable to receive the benefits that the rest of us expect, like workers’ compensation or retirement benefits.  More to the point, the idea that illegal immigrants are taking the jobs of hardworking Americans is a myth, as much as we might wish that there is an easily identified boogyman for why there is still unemployment.  At worst illegal immigrants take jobs that Americans are either unwilling to take or unable to because of where the jobs are located, more than likely illegal immigration is actually creating jobs by stimulating the economy from the bottom.  Treating illegal immigrants like the human beings they are is a decent step toward increasing employment over all, but you don’t hear many politicians talking about that because it seems like it shouldn’t work that way.

We have been seeing state after state decrease the funding for assistance programs, and what funding remains is so tied up with red tape that it places an additional burden on poor families.  Kansas is the perfect example of a state that hates on the poor.  New laws limit the amount of their assistance money that poor people can withdraw from ATMs at a time to $25.  This means that the poor have to waste even more of their money on ATM fees for each withdrawal, and more than likely on transportation costs in time and money to get from where they live and where they might work to where the ATM is.  But the idea is that the government shouldn’t be wasting taxpayer dollars on keeping the poor, comfortably poor.  By removing the safety net, the poor will be forced to actually go and get sustaining jobs, and community organizations can take care of the rest.  Here’s the problem, that’s not just wishful thinking, it’s immoral horse shit.  There is truth behind the idea that by making the social safety net too comfortable you discourage people from seeking jobs, but in almost all of these cases the social safety net is only compounding the problems of the poor, making it that much harder for them to get out of the cycle.  This comes to a head with the rebirth of debtors’ prisons, where the people who are too poor to pay their bills are brought to court and ordered to pay more, when they can’t pay those fees they are sent to prison, where they cannot earn an income, so that once they get out of prison the whole process starts again.  Victorian England may have been willing to put up with this insane policy, but it’s not a workable or moral solution.

In Indiana, aside from handling the fallout of his “religious freedom” bill, Governor Pence has decided to extend an emergency needle exchange program.  This lends some proof to the hypothesis that when backed against the wall even a conservative extremist will do the right thing, i.e. act with empathy.  Though Governor Brownback of Kansas would seem to be an apt counterfactual.  It makes sense that by not condoning dangerous drug use that we could crack down on addiction, but this too is wishful thinking.  This assumes that people are always making rational decisions, but when it comes to drug addiction, reason is hardly a factor.  By forcing drug addicts to stay in the shadows, we let blood-borne diseases spread and we make it that much more difficult for people to actually seek the help they need.  Both of those consequences are dangerous to the whole of society and not simply to those individuals.  The diseases these unfortunate people contract through dirty needles eventually spread to non-users and the families and communities that surround drug addicts suffer from the loss of a healthy and productive citizen.  It’s in these moments, again, that empathy is the only adequate solution.  It costs less in the long run and it actually helps people.

It’s odd that empathy has been viewed as the emotion of wishful thinking, because in the real world it seems to be the only adequate solution, more often than not.  On the Far Right, the wishful thinking of “tough” guys has cost us dearly and there seems to be no end in sight.  The fringe calls for declaring war on Iran have gained steam and the once laughable proposition of nuking the Middle East actually seems to be gaining a foothold among some conservative extremists.  There are some who wish that we could simply level these areas where we hear endless stories of war and worse, that by doing so we could effectively end world conflict.  This too is simply wishful thinking, though the most morbid kind.  We cannot simply “kill them all.”  It is an unfortunate reality that at some point in the defense of innocent lives we do sometimes have to kill, but there are consequences to violent action.  If we learned anything from decades of interaction with the discordant situation in many parts of the Middle East, it should be that violence only creates further violence.  The vacuum left by the dismantling of Saddam Hussein’s regime allowed ISIS to emerge, the fight against the USSR in Afghanistan led to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, etc.  Before we resort to the most vile measures, we need to ensure that we’ve exhausted the empathetic options that have a higher likelihood of working with fewer negative consequences.  To ignore our own hearts and minds when making decisions, only serves to put us at greater risk of even worse problems.  As much as it may seem naive, the evidence shows that the wishful thinkers are the ones thinking they can simply be tough to solve all problems.

Conservatives, What Gives?

I find it truly tragic that there are any number of conservative Americans who claim people like Ben Shapiro, Bill O’Reilly, or Rush Limbaugh as a representative of their principles.  I know conservatives, and just like any group of people there are goodnatured and hardworking conservatives just as there are petty and lazy conservatives.  The people that the Far Right hold up as their spokespeople are so petulant, so blind to facts, and so self centered as to near sociopathy.  Their views on taxes, immigration, foreign policy, social issues, etc are not only wrong, but there seems to be a competition with who can make the most inhuman statements.  Let’s just set aside the labels of homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, sexist, or simply bigoted.  To these members of the Far Right media sphere, you aren’t a bigot, ok?  You’re just being a massive dick.

It would be difficult to count the number of hours I’ve devoted to try and understand the point of view of a person like Ben Shapiro, but every time I hurt my brain trying to understand how someone can be at once as educated as he clearly is and yet so ignorant of the world and people around him.  In a debate about what the president should do in confronting ISIS, Mr Shapiro was clear in his condemnation of the president.  His desired course of action was equally clear; the president should send military advisors to supervise the Iraqi offensive and use air strikes to hit ISIS targets.  Had his position been based on what was actually going on in the world and not simply to attack the president, he might have noticed that this was exactly what the president has ordered the military to do.  We have literally conducted thousands of airstrikes against ISIS and Mr Obama has chosen to send over 300 military advisers to coordinate Iraqi and Kurdish led strikes.  Mr Shapiro was pushed as to whether he would advocate boots on the ground in the form of American fighting forces, and he said he wouldn’t.  So there’s no substantive critique of the president, there’s simply the dickishness of wanting to say that President Obama is a bad leader, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.

On the subject of gay rights and gay people, Mr Shapiro has taken a similarly Richardian tack.  When Jason Collins came out of the closet, being the first man in the NBA, NFL, MLB, or NHL to do so while an active athlete, Mr Shapiro feigned surprise that this merited being a story in the first place.  He was shocked, shocked I say, that the media would implicitly claim that the American people were so homophobic that they wouldn’t accept a gay athlete.  Well, let’s just say that if gay athletes didn’t feel this were the case it might not have had to wait until the year 2013 for this to happen.  More to the point, Mr Shapiro is among the people who demonize the gay community for seeking the same rights and benefits of their straight peers, scandalous I know.  So it’s beyond disingenuous for him to claim that society is well beyond the point of caring about a subject like this, when it is eminently clear that he is not beyond caring about this subject himself.

See, this is the thing I may never understand about the Far Right, the inability to recognize who is actually oppressed in the world.  I’ve heard many people claim that the LGBT community should essentially just shut up now because they’re already treated as equals, or at least better than in the truly homophobic countries.  It’s true that homosexuality is not a crime in America, it’s been that way since 2003. It’s true that there isn’t a death penalty for being gay in this country, but it isn’t for want of trying from those who favor a literal interpretation of Leviticus.  It’s true that in many, but not all, states there are workplace protections that keep employers from firing employees simply for their sexual orientation.  But mostly it’s been true that even when none of these small steps toward equality were in place, these same dicks have been demanding gays remain in the closet and out of the public eye, and out of the realm of the living if at all possible.

For people with functioning hearts and minds, it will come as no surprise that people who’ve been told all their lives that they deserve to die, that they’re going to hell, that they aren’t welcome in their own homes might not be entirely satisfied to continually live as second class citizens.  Everyone is free to believe and preach whatever they want.  As much as a decent human being might hope that people would willingly choose to believe and preach love, the right of the people to be dicks shall not be infringed. However, there’s a difference between getting to feel that you’re better than everyone else and actually being better than everyone else.  Alas for a fringe on the Christian conservative front, the distinction has been made moot for too long, so now that they’re being treated as equals with those lowly gays, they equate the loss of privilege with persecution.  And this is where Bill O’Reilly gets his turn to shine.

I’ve talked about Mr O’Reilly’s act before.  This Harvard educated talking head, still fancies himself a man of the people who can easily divine who’s a pinhead and who’s a patriot.  His heart cries crocodile tears for those poor Christians who are being assaulted on all fronts in America, most especially at Christmas time.  Now, I don’t agree with John Stossel on quite a few issues, but one place where we do seem to see eye to eye is on Mr O’Reilly and the feigned culture war against Christianity.  “You’re just a ten-foot-tall cry baby.”  OK, maybe that was a little bit of hyperbole… I don’t think Mr O’Reilly is actually that tall.  See, we live in a country where we value the rule of law and the separation of church and state.  These are really good concepts that protect everyone, especially the religious.  It wasn’t for the sake of atheists that secularism emerged, it was for the sake of Baptists who feared retribution from Congregationalists and to keep Catholics from persecuting Quakers, etc.  The defense of these institutions by maintaining that law can’t be solely based on a religious tenet is there to ensure that Jews can wear the Kippah in public and that Christians can congregate as they see fit, tax free.  As a side effect, however, this also means that religious groups can’t unilaterally bring some of that old time religion down like a hammer on the head of gays.

But let’s be fair, these dicks of the Far Right have really only recently turned this much on the gays and the atheists, their traditional home is sticking it to women.  “Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot.”  Sorry that was just a plug for an Al Franken book, now back to serious matters.  Rush Limbaugh is a big fat dick.  If we can stretch our memories all the way back to 2012, we might remember the less than glowing description Mr Limbaugh had of a law student, fighting to have her healthcare covered, Sandra Fluke.  Or to put it his way, “It makes her a slut, right?”  This brilliant exegesis of her position clearly and succinctly shows how little he knows about the world and apparently female reproduction.  As a gay man, I have to say that female reproduction is hardly my forte, but I seem to have a better grasp of it than Mr Limbaugh, who thinks that the pill is popped in ladies’ mouth for each and every sexual encounter and not as a daily regimen to keep hormone levels in check.

It would be easy to claim that Mr Limbaugh is a sexist, probably accurate too, but he loves women so much that he’s on his fourth marriage, so let’s just agree that he’s a dick.  An argument could easily be made that he is a racist, given that his interpretation of a speech made by then President Hu Jintao, literally was a series of chings and chongs, but again dickishness will suffice for him and all his ilk, because here’s the point I want to make, “conservatives aren’t dicks, so what gives?”  The conservatives I know give generously to charity and care deeply about their communities and their country.  The difference between me and the average conservative is really just a matter of what policy we think works best, it has nothing to do with whether one of us is a better person.  But I have no trouble at all in saying that the average conservative and I are substantially better people than these dicks that spout conservative rhetoric.  So, someone help me to understand what gives?  Why are these the people that you listen to, that you pay money to see and hear, that you hold up as the people who best represent your point of view?  I just don’t get it.

Tax Day

Yes it’s that time of year again, when everyone collectively complains about taxes, regardless of whenever or whether they actually filed.  It’s the season that conservative politicians live for, because for a short period of time nearly everyone is willing to listen to how taxes are too high, the IRS is evil, taxes are too high, the income tax is unconstitutional, taxes are too high, and taxes are too high.  Normally I would try to use a little word play to say the same thing in slightly different words, but considering how the Right sees no use in expanding their vocabulary on this issue, it just seems appropriate to describe their position in their own words.  Let’s face it, paying taxes isn’t fun, it isn’t sexy, and if all you can see is the money subtracted from your income, then it stands to reason why you might think of yourself as a fiscal conservative.  Here’s the unfortunate reality of being an adult, sometimes the things that you need to do aren’t fun.

Regular readers might remember that I have Crohn’s disease.  Long story short, it’s less than fun.  The treatment I’m on, requires that I go in for a several hour long infusion of drugs, it’s not the most fun thing in the world.  In an ideal world I wouldn’t have to going in for that, but in an ideal world I wouldn’t have a disease that necessitates it in the first place.  So noting that we do not, in fact, live in an ideal world, it behooves me to show up to ensure that I don’t endure the worst symptoms that I have previously experienced.  All things considered, I’d much rather go through this small hassle to enjoy the much larger benefits that come with it.  Taxes are a similar inconvenience.

Just like everyone else who works a job, I see my wages garnished a bit with each paycheck.  Some taxes go to the federal government, some to the state, some to social security, and some to medicare.  Before April 15th, I have to go through the same annoying and tedious ordeal of filing and seeing if there’s going to be any further payments or whether I get back some of the money I put in.  It’s not fun, but hey I like the benefits of having paid my taxes, and not simply for avoiding the ire of the IRS.  Our taxes keep our troops equipped, even when they are being shipped overseas by war hawks.  Our taxes keep our streets paved, unless the most obstinate in our government block its funding.  Our taxes ensure that the less fortunate in our society have the resources so that they can cease being the less fortunate of our society, though there are some who go out of their way to make the lives of those making use of the social safety net as miserable as possible.

I find it incredible that the conventional wisdom is that conservatives are older, because when it comes to the issues, especially taxes, it’s nearly impossible to find a bigger group of fully grown babies than the Far Right.  Any and every tax rate is too high, and anyone who tries to defend the existence of taxes is painted as if they want 100% taxes on everything.  Even in states that don’t use an income tax, there is a push to reduce the tax burden of those at the top by subsidizing their income.  And this might be a little more rational if they actually meant it when they said they believe in smaller government.  Conservative politicians tend to favor increased government spending on military, on subsidies, and all the other big ticket items of discretional spending.  Apparently the $1 we put toward food stamps will put us all in the poor house, but not the $1,000,000 for a weapon that neither works nor will see combat use.

Libertarian politicians are at least, generally, more consistent with their rhetoric.  The few libertarian politicians that actually hold office, tend to actually want to cut the size of government alongside taxes.  The problem is, again, the types of things they tend to favor cutting.  Back when he was running for president, Ron Paul called for closing down five federal departments, including but not limited to the Department of Education.  I’ll grant that the DoED could be doing its job better, but that’s a reason to adequately equip it to do the job, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  Others simply oppose the very idea of an income tax and believe so thoroughly in the Laffer Curve that the elimination of the income tax will somehow increase revenue anyway.

I’m fully willing to admit that there are occasions when lowering taxes will paradoxically increase revenue, as it did under President Kennedy.  However, that was at a time when the top marginal tax rates were at 90%, now we’re living in a country where the richest Americans pay at or below 15%.  The further tax cuts by President Bush decreased revenue, at a time when we were paying for multiple wars that he’d started and recovering from his other economic boondoggles.  This is my way of saying that, in many if not most cases, taxes are indeed too low right now.

I know, when you’re seeing your money stripped away from you, it sounds like outright heresy to be told that your taxes are too low.  In America it is near political suicide to even be as honest as to actually say “increase taxes” as opposed to “increase revenue.”  Here’s the thing, we’ve cut most of our agencies to the bone, to the point that they actually cost us more in time and effort.  I’ve experienced the DMV in three different states and I have to say there’s almost a perfect correlation between the quality of experience and the level of funding.  Shocking as it may seem, if you are willing to pay for it you can indeed get quality.  A state like Massachusetts does have higher taxes than a state like Nevada, but the essential government services work in Massachusetts.  My wait time in a Massachusetts RMV was under a half an hour, having gotten there just after it opened.  My wait time at a Nevada DMV was over five and a half hours, even having gotten there twenty minutes in advance of its opening.  I will say this, at least the Nevada DMV is efficient enough to have set up a pager system so that you don’t have to spend all five and a half hours there.

These are anecdotes, so it should not be taken as definitive proof of anything, but it is reflective consistent of what we see in government at the state and federal levels, you get what you don’t pay for.  If you don’t have an effective progressive tax that fairly distributes the load, you get what we have now, a continual siphoning of funds up to the already wealthy.  There’s nothing wrong with being wealthy and there’s certainly nothing wrong with getting wealthy, but there is something wrong if the system we have in place makes it unfeasible for the people who buy the products of the already wealthy to buy those products.  Consumer spending just crept the tiniest bit higher in the last quarter, and only because the rather recent drop in oil prices made car purchases temporarily possible for more Americans.  On nearly every other front, the vast majority of Americans are not willing or able to spend money, and that has a negative effect on the economy and the ability for anyone to get rich, except perhaps through loopholes and subsidies.

So now let’s bring it back to where conservatives and progressives can have some common ground, the tax code does need to be simplified.  Every working person should be able to add together all their income, whether conventional or capital gains, and enter that number into what is essentially an Excel spreadsheet to know exactly what they owe in taxes.  No deductions, no loopholes, no finagling, just a simple punch in and get the answer system such that filing could take a couple of minutes for the richest and poorest alike.  This would have the further effect of easing business costs in the real world, as small businesses wouldn’t have to sink money into accountants and attorneys to ensure that everything is aboveboard.  Then the battle is to ensure that we actually fund our agencies like the DoED and the VA so that they can and will actually get the job done.  In the meantime, let’s all act like adults, at least, and suck it up.  Happy tax day, and welcome to the adult world.

Ready For Hillary

I think any person who has experienced adolescence understands the strange knee jerk reaction against someone whom you don’t entirely respect.  Over the weekend I had the less than desirable experience of listening to conservative commentator after conservative commentator spout off whatever ridiculous nonsense they wanted to, at the NRA Leadership Forum.  Even after suffering through a CPAC conference, this was some brutal, uncut fear and hate mongering.  I mean, it’s not every day that you hear pastors compare people who wanted the slightest improvement of background checks in gun purchases after Sandy Hook to Nazis during Kristallnacht.  But when they weren’t attacking liberal principles like environmental protections and the minimum wage, they were insulting two people.  Yes, there was the usual refrain questioning the President’s devotion and love for his own country, but there was another name on their lips, even if they didn’t always utter the actual words aloud.  Hillary Clinton has finally, officially thrown in her hat for the 2016 presidential election, and after hearing everything the Right hates about her, perhaps out of spite more than anything else, she’s really grown on me.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  When I wrote about Mrs Clinton last time, it wasn’t by any means a glowing recommendation of her as a candidate, and I stand by the criticisms I made.  As a candidate, I think she brings with her a lot of baggage that another wouldn’t.  As a representative of progressive causes, I think she falls far from what I would consider an ideal.  At a time when one of her likely opponents is also a legacy candidate, I think she makes it hard to give the people who aren’t passionate about politics already a reason to show up at the polls.  But any person who pisses off Donald Trump, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, and Ted Nugent must be doing something right.

So far in his tenure, President Obama has overseen one of the most dramatic and successful rehabilitations of the economy in American history, he has passed the most significant reform to our broken healthcare system in generations, he has visibly used the bully pulpit to call for human rights, he has kept America safe and improved our tarnished image abroad, he has defended net neutrality and pushed for greater access to broadband across the country, he has sought diplomatic solutions to tough problems, and he has fought global warming without sacrificing the economy in the process.  His record is not spotless, though the same critique could and should be made of every president.  Warrantless wiretapping, lack oversight for drone use, the continued existence of Guantanamo Bay prison, the lack of a public option in the healthcare reform, the diminished regulations that were put in place to keep a repeat of the Great Recession, and a general unwillingness to tackle issues like tax reform will likely go down as the spots on an otherwise fantastic record.  There is an easy argument to be made that he is, at least, the greatest living president and certainly among the greats of all time.  Why does this matter in the context of a post about Hillary Clinton?  Let’s remember 2008.

The 2008 general election was my first time voting, but because I was a little too young I was not able to vote in the primary.  Nonetheless, I was fascinated by the campaigns that were going on in the Democratic primary.  There were three candidates then: Obama, Clinton, and John Edwards.  This, of course, excluding the other candidates that put in their names before pretty quickly dropping out.  Edwards did end up receiving about 15% of pledged delegates in the process, but his campaign became famous for his private life more than his principles and that left two real candidates.  In my mind, I thought that regardless of who was chosen that the Democrats would have an incredibly solid ticket, in spite of some harsh campaigning.  By my estimation, Obama seemed like the better candidate over all, but there were certain issues that I actually aligned more with then Senator Clinton, and at the end of the day they had the majority of issues in common.

On an issue like healthcare reform, I was actually much closer to Clinton’s proposal than Obama’s, in an ideal world.  However, I knew what happened the last time Mrs Clinton went after healthcare reform and seeing as it is a critical issue to me, I wanted to hedge my bet with the more conservative, but more likely to pass, proposal put forward by then Senator Obama.  I still see this as the biggest mistake in my judgement, even though I would still have proudly supported Mr Obama had I been able to vote in the primary in the first place.  When you are haggling over something, you don’t make your desired price the starting bid let alone a price you think is more than reasonable.  If you do this, then you have nothing to give up in the compromise other than the things that are critical.  This is why there is no public option and this is why many Americans still do not have health insurance.  We needed to start big, especially considering how the Democrats came into power with a super majority, that is when Mrs Clinton’s plan would have been exactly what the doctor ordered.

When it came to social issues, neither of these candidates wanted to rock the boat too much.  Coming out of President Bush’s evangelical tide, people were still uncertain whether a candidate could both stand firmly for marriage equality and have a chance of actually winning, for example.  It was clear that they were both playing the game, but whereas Mr Obama had at one point openly claimed to be in favor of full marriage equality, Mrs Clinton has always been mum on the subject.  In the intervening time, both have seen that standing proudly progressive on social issues is not just morally sound, but inspiring to the general public and energizing to the base.  This is why I am glad to see in Mrs Clinton’s announcement video that she is proudly giving voice to gay couples, Spanish speakers, people of color, the middle class, men, women, and the full spectrum of what America is.  Is this coldly calculated by campaign strategists? Probably, but she’s shilling in my language and I’m glad to see it.

Among her biggest problems in the last campaign was the perception that she felt entitled to the White House.  She was the early frontrunner, not unlike today, and she had the strong nostalgia of the very successful Clinton Administration in the 90s to back up her camp.  But then, as now, people were skeptical that she was getting special treatment for her surname in the same way that Bush did.  The fact that this upstart Senator from Illinois was challenging her, seemed a minor annoyance, and her primary debate performance reflected this.  She seemed to think she was too good for this, and regardless of whether this was the case or not, in an election, perception is everything.  Her preparation and very early forays into this election give the indication that this was a chastening experience from her, and that she is going to really try to earn her nomination.

Which brings us back to her perception on the Far Right.  The critiques fall into essentially two groups: factually incorrect allegations and things that put her on the correct side of the debate and of history.  By the former I mean claims about her “what difference does it make” comment that were taken completely out of context or any number of strange conspiracy theories about her time as first lady.  By the latter I mean accusations that she wants to continue the Obama policies of weak diplomacy and redistributive economics.  If by weak diplomacy they mean seeking peaceful solutions before declaring war and by redistributive economics they mean empowering the working and middle class, then guilty as charged.  Heck she should consider just playing their accusations as her own campaign material, because only the most hardened zealots could view these sound policies as anything other than the right choice.

I still remain skeptical of Mrs Clinton as the flag bearer for the Left and I look forward to hearing from her competition in the very long time between now and the primaries, let alone the general.  There is no question that she is a better candidate than anyone currently running or expecting to run on the Right, but she needs to earn the party nomination.  There needs to be a fight to the Left to make sure that the real majority of Americans who silently work and want only a little fairness from the government are not continually ignored.  Once that happens I will dutifully consider if I think that Hillary Clinton is the best candidate available, both in terms of principles and viability.  But all things considered, now more than I have in a long time, I am ready for Hillary.

Iranian Nukes

Unless you’ve been living under a rock since the 1970s, you are probably aware that Iran has had a largely icy relationship with the rest of the world, particularly with America.  In the time between the hostage crisis and now, Iran has pretty openly sought nuclear technology, with the ultimate goal of creating the bomb.  To combat this, the United States convinced a large number of countries to enter into a course of sanctions that have done immense damage to the Iranian economy.  But as was the case with North Korea, the fact that the rest of the world has largely stopped trading with them has not been a sufficient handicap to stop their nuclear program.  However, we now have the opportunity to stop the parallels between Iran and North Korea and keep the Middle East from devolving into an unimaginably dangerous race for nuclear proliferation.  Naturally, conservatives are opposed to this.

Ok, maybe that is a bit of a cheap shot, but if you listen to just about every Right Wing pundit or politician, you will hear the constant refrain of opposition to President Obama’s diplomacy.  That refrain is unfortunately accompanied with the drumbeat of war as figures, like Senator Tom Cotton, express how easy the fight against Iran would be if it did come to that.  It was not so long ago that we were assured by members of the Bush administration, like Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, that the war in Iraq would be, “five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”  Even if the main combat operations would be completed as quickly as the Iraqi military was defeated, we would still be left with a unstable Iran.  And Iran, unlike Iraq, would have materials that could quite easily be made into weapons of mass destruction.

If all you have is a hammer, all your problems look like nails.  The war hawks on the Right look for any reason to send our fighting men and women to die, if they even feel the need to come up with a reason in the first place.  War is viewed as an economic stimulus, despite it having a drag on the economy by definition, and any threat to America can be treated with preemptive uses of the military.  Heck, when you have as bloated a military budget as we have, it can be tempting to let the cars out of the garage for a bit.  But war is always the last choice, not only for moral reasons, but because it’s impossible to know just how destructive to all sides a conflict like that will be.

I have heard a lot from conservative pundits, comparing Iran to Hitler’s Germany, and Obama’s policy of diplomacy to Neville Chamberlain.  This might have little more weight if they hadn’t already been saying the exact same Nazi themed comparisons about Vladimir Putin in Ukraine and President Obama himself on any number of issues.  This being a long winded way of saying that the Right has become the boy who cried Hitler.  There is a particular vindication felt on this particular example, however, because their accusations are being echoed by the Prime Minister of Israel.  Let’s be clear, it is crucial that Israel remain the oasis of Democracy it is, defended against the many existential threats that surround it.  But Mr Netanyahu is incorrect on this, and a great many matters.  I am a friend and ally of Israel, but I have no such fond feelings for the person who happens to be its leader.  Conservatives might recognize this feeling in regards to America and her current president.

Shocking as it may be to some, Iran is not Nazi Germany and not every threat to America is Hitler.  This isn’t simply a matter of confronting inappropriate use of hyperbole either, because we have a chance to make the world a safer and more prosperous place, and it would be a fairly obvious course of action if not for a dedicated core of people dedicated to endless war and global poverty.  I always find it astonishing how little conservatives actually believe in capitalism, regardless of what they say.  When it comes to international competition, we can’t possibly allow for free markets.  When it comes to combatting autocratic regimes, we can’t possibly allow for the emancipation of people through holding stakes in a global economy.  And in Iran we are seeing the same thing as with the Cuba debate, conservatives are not capitalists and will fight to use government to block trade, when they see fit.

Iran, Cuba, and North Korea have been isolated from the rest of the world, to varying degrees.  The one common lesson that we should learn from these examples, regardless of their differences, is that the same policy of isolation does not weaken the establishment, but actually empowers bad leaders at the expense of their people.  North Korea has been under the harshest international sanctions for decades and they’re now in their third generation of the Kim family, possessing a nuclear arsenal of some size, to boot.  Cuba is still under the Castro regime, and Fidel Castro himself is now in his late 80s and still well enough to occasionally meet with the people.  Iran is still the Islamic Republic of Iran under the Ayatollah, and on the road toward nuclear weapons.  It is not in spite of their isolation that these regimes have remained in power, but because of it, because in all cases the establishment gets to play the national pride and defiance card.  It only furthers the narrative that there is us and them and they must be opposed.  But now, there is a chance to do the right thing.

Iran is a young country, not just in terms of when it historically emerged as such, but in terms of the population.  The majority of Iranians are too young to remember the revolution, the hostage crisis, etc.  They are too young to understand why the hardliners made “Death to America” the national chant it became.  They have been calling for change at the polls and are genuinely putting an effort toward a peaceful solution to this conflict, which includes the dismantling of the Arak reactor that Israel designated as the biggest threat in the whole mess.  This along with international investigators being allowed into the country would make Iran’s path to the bomb as difficult as possible.  People mocked the investigators for being unable to find Saddam Hussein’s nuclear arsenal before the war, but now we know it’s because they are actually good at their job that this was the case.

More to the point, however, Iran will finally have a stake in keeping the peace.  International trade is multilateral and mutually beneficial, but only so long as all the members are indeed still there.  By allowing Iran to enter the global marketplace, we are creating a new generation of Iranians who will find war with America as unthinkable as we find war with Canada.  Free markets mean exposure to Western businesses and Western culture, the exchange of which means an Iran that no longer feels like the rest of the world is “them” but rather a part of a much larger “us.”  Most of these things, so far, have been more on the carrot side of the equation, here comes the stick.

Iran has been brought to the negotiation table by the efficacy of sanctions that are not terribly popular on a global scale.  Many countries would like to have a new market to do business and would be more than happy to have yet another source of oil, but they’ve been kept in check because there was an understanding that this was for the sake of international peace.  If we are the ones who screw this up, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.  The world will look on the United States the way we look on those 47 Republican senators who tried to sabotage the agreement via letter.  That is to say, the rest of the world will see us as obstructions to world peace and lovers of endless war.  The snapback sanctions that are part of the framework deal can only work if we are working in good faith, if not then there is nothing keeping Iran from pursuing weapons and no sanctions to force them to the negotiating table.  At that point the only recourse may indeed be war, which is why we must pursue the diplomatic option above all else.

Service

“Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”  Dr King was so much more than a speech at the Lincoln Memorial, so much more than a single march, yet for many it seems that his entire life’s work was summed up in a single sentence about his much larger dream.  As powerful as that speech was, the “I Have a Dream” Speech was but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of what he did and said and stood for, to echo another great thinker, Charles Dickens.  In fact it seems a great disservice to the memory of one of America’s finest figures to use that particular speech as his defining moment, because the bulk of his work was dedicated less toward his own dreams but dedicated to the service of others.

America has, for an unfortunately long time, suffered under an inadequate understanding of service.  It is perhaps most apparent in the political world that our notions of service, especially whom we serve, are lacking.  Whom politicians serve is largely a matter of identifying who can keep them in power, and rare is the Cincinnatus who serves only long enough to do what needs to be done for the people before returning back home.  We hear routinely about the big ticket donors like the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson, who spend millions and billions of dollars to influence politicians and voters alike that what is uniquely in their own interest actually is in everyone’s interest.  But sadly, one of the realities of democracy is that even if a politician somehow managed to succeed in spite of the big donors, they might still be corrupted by service to what is popular in the short run.

At any given time in the last decade or so, the majority of people might have been for or against marriage equality, for or against stricter gun control, for or against government surveillance, for or against wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.  For politicians, particularly those with extremely short terms, to remain in office they are painted into a corner where they can’t think through what would be the best course of action for Americans, instead favoring what the American people prefer at that specific time.  This task is made nearly impossible by the reality that polls of public opinion themselves can swing responders to give utterly divergent responses at the same time.  But by serving public opinion, neither the politicians nor we the electorate who incentivize this form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, or secure the blessings of liberty.

Even in our private lives we become more and more certain that our service should end only with ourselves.  The virtues of independence and thrift are perverted into accusations about the undeserving poor and indifference to the needs of others.  Where once there would never be acceptance of any individual who seeks war at the expense of peace, now there is an entire party dedicated to that very proposition and headed by a Speaker who mocks the president for seeking peaceful solutions that keep nuclear weapons out of unstable hands.  Where once the party of Eisenhower states definitively that every dollar spent on our massive military is ultimately a theft from the hungry, the homeless, the needy, the neglected, etc; now that same party routinely revels in the idea of eliminating assistance programs, eliminating the minimum wage, eliminating safety and environmental regulations, eliminating everything that protects the least off in society, let alone the rest of us.

Nearly every problem we face can be tied directly to our inability to understand the world as being populated by people other than ourselves.  Indeed there is a world of about seven billion people out there, some 318,000,000 of which are Americans.  Each and every one of us has a story, family, loved ones and yet we act as if those stories do not matter and that the links between us all do not exist.  We choose to become ever more introverted, hiding behind walls in the form of smartphones and computers.  I myself am guilty of all of this as well, I too live online behind this technological wall, which ironically was invented as a window for all of us to be exposed to the rest of the world.  All I can say is that regardless of how important it is for us all to return to a service centered view of the world, it is not easy.  And because it is not easy, we have routinely failed to do the work that was given to us to do.

This country that I love has failed in her service toward her sick, not least of all those afflicted with mental health problems.  In the 20th Century we saw that the asylums and sanitaria that had been set up to help these people were disturbingly unfit to do that task.  Our response to this was equally unfit, as we simply closed them down leaving real people to handle serious medical issues on their own, without the means to seek assistance.  The families did their best, but as so many tragedies and mass shootings have shown, the problems of a whole society can not be put on the backs of a few people without breaking them.

This country that I love has failed in her service toward her poor, as we simply learn to accept and expect that many people should simply live uneducated and unemployed.  The schools that dot this land range from the envy of the world to among the worst.  Children in the rust belt and the heartland and the urban sprawl alike have no guarantee even if they somehow manage to make it through and graduate from these failed schools that their degree will be worth anything.  As with the asylums, there is now a repeated drumbeat on the Far Right to simply get rid of these problems, in this case by dismantling the Department of Education.  To do this would be a betrayal to every child, every family that cries out for reform only to deliver them something worse than what came before.

In the words of Dr King, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”  If you listen to the philosophers adored by the Right, the question should rather be, ‘what are you doing for yourself?’  I don’t make the claim that these two are mutually exclusive concepts, as it just so happens that many times the more you give, the more you get; however, if you are only ever driven by the latter, then the former remains as unanswered as it is now.  We need a deeper meaning to life.  Some people find it through service to god, I find it more than sufficient through service to my fellow human beings, but in either case the goal is indeed service to something greater than yourself.  I’m not so sure that there ever was a time that we did get it just right, but there’s nothing that says we can’t try to make that time come up soon.

In most cases, I am reluctant to proclaim that something is un-American.  Who am I to divine what is truly in someone’s heart?  And without that knowledge, how am I to tell that a person who burns the flag, for example, isn’t doing so out of a profound sense of patriotism and duty to their country?  However, the constant drumbeat of war, at the direct and expressed expense of the poor is not simply inhuman, it is un-American.  We are the people that created the most powerful weapons ever devised in human history and used them to end war.  We are the people who enter war with great reluctance and do so with the goal of ending war.  We are the people who first declared the self-evident fact that all men are created equal.  We are the people that believe the immigrant who comes with nothing more than the shirt on their back has every right to found their own business and become rich and powerful.  We are the people who chose to declare war on poverty, but there has been a group out there that has tried to fundamentally change who we are.
We are not a people who revel in bloodshed and hunger for endless war.  We are not a people who seek out fights to make us feel important.  We are not a people who believe in the superiority of the rich and powerful, or the inadequacy of the unprivileged.  We are not a people that declare war on the poor, and we are not a people who shirk their responsibilities.  We have so much work to do, so much service to give, so let’s have at it.

Fighting Dictatorships?

“Why is the Congress rolling over and letting this communist dictator destroy my country… I want him out of the White House, he’s not a citizen.”  These are the immortal words of perhaps the only person in America extreme enough to even give Rick Santorum pause during a question and answer session with conservatives in South Carolina.  This is nothing new, in fact many commentators and conservative media sites have said, if anything, even worse things about President Obama.  Throughout our political history, it’s been common to mock the president and other politicians.  There were more than a few good barbs against President Bush about his intelligence, his disastrous foreign and economic policy, his intellect, his way with words, and his brainpower.  And while there may have been the errant depiction of him as Adolf Hitler, there were no serious claims from the Left that he was a tyrannical dictator, hellbent on destroying our country.  So what’s the deal?

Let’s first be entirely clear that the United States is not now, now has it ever been anything close to resembling a dictatorship.  At times, when I’m confronting some of the talking points on the Right I feel as if I have to review the ABCs, in how basic I have to begin discussions, but there it is.  Do you want to know what the first indication that President Obama is not a dictator is?  The fact that people freely call him a tyrannical dictator.  In real dictatorships dissent is crushed and those who insult the dictator are silenced, because get this, you’re dealing with a dictator.  Mao made sure that a hundred flowers were cut short, he didn’t allow for Kuomintang radio stations to berate him with their insults.  So, in a country where we are freely able to insult, mock, passively threaten, and piss off our elected officials, I’d say it’s a fair bet that we aren’t enduring anything close to a dictatorship.

What’s more, every claim about President Obama’s overreach as president comes with the unfortunate baggage of precedent.  This is not to say that the commander in chief should be able to execute warrantless wiretaps, just that if you are going to argue against that practice you can’t pretend like Mr Obama is doing something new and shocking.  If you are going to complain about how much time our president spends on vacation, you have to put it in the context where he has still taken fewer vacation days at this point in his presidency than Presidents Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Reagan.  In fact, to even approach President George W Bush’s record, President Obama would have to take the rest of the year off as well as a good chunk of next year.  So no, Obama is not doing anything new to destroy our country, he’s not using the Presidency in some new way to live large at the expense of the people, and in point of fact he has done a large part to repairing the huge mess that was left for him when he took his oath of office.

So, why are the extremists on the Right so adamantly certain that President Obama is, in the words of Ted Cruz, a “lawless imperator?”  It’s because the rest of society is no longer willing to put up with their bull.  The Far Right has this staunch belief that the government is trying to silence them; therefore, the First Amendment has been destroyed and they are being oppressed.  So let’s go to the text of the First Amendment.  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Congress has made no law respecting an establishment of religion or freedom of speech.  Even if you take this more broadly to include the actions of all branches, including the executive, you have to recognize that the government has done nothing to touch religion, even if it should.  Churches remain tax exempt, even in cases where clergy tell their congregation how to vote; “religious freedom laws” are quite openly being expanded, regardless of what the majority of people would actually want; and yes even Hobby Lobby gets to deny birth control to its employees, establishing a new precedent that expands religious freedom at the expense of the rights of workers.  Congress, you may have noticed, has done just about nothing in general for years now, so clearly they’re not to blame for any “oppression” that might be felt.

What has happened is that groups of private citizens have used their right to the freedom of speech, and of the press, and to peaceably assemble in efforts to confront the conservative agenda that threatens to undo all the progress society has made since the Enlightenment.  When conservative groups seek to rewrite school curricula to exclude evolution, it wasn’t Congress that put a stop to this, it was documentarians digging up the truth and citizens acting to get the responsible parties out of office.  When conservative groups shoved through repressive and discriminatory legislation, Congress has been mute on the issue.  It’s been normal people calling out bigotry, protesting in the streets, and boycotting establishments that openly hate entire groups of people.  When conservative commentators slag off women fighting to have their necessary medication covered in the same way that viagra is covered, it wasn’t the government that attacked them it was private citizens who voted with their dollars to no longer support those commentators.

The reason why Dinesh D’Souza was found guilty in a court of law for violating campaign finance law was because he was guilty of violating campaign finance law.  It’s not because he is an outspoken conservative, it’s because he’s a criminal.  The reason why James O’Keefe has just lost his libel case is because he has repeatedly ignored the law and reality by selectively editing footage to get people fired and entire organizations shut down without a shred of truth behind his claims.  It’s not because he is a conservative documentarian, it’s because he’s a liar.  The reason why Rush Limbaugh keeps losing sponsors and advertisers is because his profane and inaccurate take on the world pisses off even people that once supported him.  It’s not because he is a conservative commentator as such, it’s because he is an intolerable, intolerant blowhard to whom people no longer want to listen.

None of this has been because the Obama administration is going out to crush dissent through new laws, secret police, or any of the other hallmarks of actual dictatorships.  The ultimate reason why the Far Right is feeling oppressed right now, is because they’ve oppressed other people for so long and they’re no longer willing to just take it on the chin anymore.  If you were shouting insults at other people for years and years, you can’t play the victim card when someone finally asks you to kindly shut up.  Now, if the government starts closing conservative talk radio stations, boarding up extremist churches, etc I will be on the side of those whose voices are being silenced, regardless of how stupid the things they say are.  Everyone has a right to free speech, which is why these crazy people claiming that the President is a communist dictator are allowed to roam the streets, even if an asylum might be a better fit.  If at any point the government puts a stop to this, it will be pretty clear, and I’ll know which side I stand on.

In the mean time, I’m appealing to a sense of decency that may no longer exist.  To those on the Far Right who actually believe this funhouse mirror version of the world, please, enough with the bull, it’s just tiring to constantly have to put up with this inane and insane prattle on a daily basis.  The republic still stands, your rights haven’t been touched, but you’re being dicks.  Right now you’ve turned it up to eleven and we need you down at like a two, otherwise the adults can’t hear themselves think.  We know what it’s like to have someone in the White House that you don’t agree with, but that hardly makes them a tyrant bent on the destruction of the United States.  There are dictatorships left in the world that we need to oppose.  These are terrible, oppressive, autocratic regimes where opposition is not tolerated but crushed.  Let’s work together in combatting those before we start charging against windmills.