Most of what we're seeing from republicans today is the effects and consequences of their own mental illness
...the party looks to be an assemblage of paranoid, insecure, fearful folks who have reduced their politics to the classic deflection of working to drag others down to their low level to make themselves appear tall.
It's just sad and icky watching them move from one prevarication to the next, scrambling to hide their own disgusting behavior behind projections against people they think should be beneath them.
What's really the tragedy here is that most of what we're seeing from republicans is the effects and consequences of their own mental illnesses which they refuse to deal with; like their avarice, their inability to deal with any aberrant personal trait they may acquire or possess, their insecurity with their own whiteness (so many have told me THEY are the target, not the ones they're targeting), and their false expectations around their sense of nationalism.
That's being generous, but, we have to try and understand each other outside of these political characterizations politicians have used to impress their own petty and narrow appeals on people they expect to vote for them and send them money.
We need to make more clear that the interests of politicians in their effort to acquire or retain power can be a narrow and self-interested pursuit which almost never gets to the heart of where Americans actually live.
They talk in abstractions about divided communities, when most of us are mostly successfully and productively living and working together with people of all sorts of backgrounds, interests, and expectations.
Many of the people arguing and advocating against groups of individuals and those they fear or abhor have not only never had any personal experiences with their targets of hate and ire, but aren't actually affected by what they're pushing others to oppose in any direct or material way.
Our often fragile lives have been a political game for pols and their supporters who very often have the means and resources to be completely unaffected by the things they're gaslighting us about.
That's why their pursuit is usually a campaign against someone or something, instead of a sincere effort to work with people in this country who live and breathe these divisive political abstractions that politicians and others insist are supposed to define us.
...some Sunday inspiration:
“Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
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