I have spent most of my social media time on Twitter recently. The COVID19 epidemic has driven me back to blogging (as I'm sure it has for others as well). This one comes from a tweet I just read:
The key quote here is from Colin Hugeunel: "These people make me F#@&ing furious." I never heard of Mr. Hugeunel before today and I commend him for working as an ED doctor. The following is not an invective directed at Colin Hugeunel, or any other people expressing outrage at the behavior on display in the crowd of flag-waving (probably astroturf) protestors decrying the shelter-in-place order in their area.
Here's a though experiment. You know the fairy tale story about the mysterious stranger who comes to a person's home, delivers a mysterious small box with a mysterious red button on top. He explains to the recipient that if that person presses the red button they will receive a million dollars and someone will die as a result of the button having been pushed. But don't worry, says the mysterious stranger, it will not be anyone you know. Asked how the stranger will know whether someone pushed the button the stranger replies simply: "we'll know."
Now imagine that the recipient, instead of thinking about it and/or agonizing over the decision pushes the red button immediately and without hesitation, then asks "OK, where's my million dollars?"
Flabbergasted, the stranger tries to explain that the death is immediate but the million dollars will take some time -- not expecting them to hit the button right away -- we'll get the money soon. Then the recipient, in a state of rage and frustration, frantically hits the button over and over again, and so fast they no one could count the number of times the person pushed the button. Somebody dies every time, but still the million dollars just does not materialize. The recipient refuses to relinquish the button box, but instead spends years pushing the button, which activity itself prevents the delivery of the million dollars because the frantic, ceaseless pushing of the button kills off members of the mysterious "we" who are trying to deliver the million dollars but they drop dead from the button pushing before they can carry the money 10 steps towards the button-pusher's house.
Electoral majorities in low-population states have given us a GOP lock on the Senate and a racist game-show host in the White House. They have demonstrated a depraved indifference to all human lives except their own for decades. Pick your analogy: either the mysterious "We" in the story above ran out of poor people to kill or the recipient put the box in some sort of device that pushes the button for him faster than a human could and 24/7. These viciously insane two-legged creatures have existed for a very long time and have exerted their power to elect officials who carry out toxic, punitive policies that assume that all "other" people deserve shortened lives of suffering and misery to stop them from enjoying being poor or somehow stopping the GOP voter from acquiring what they believe they deserve.
This nuttery has been with us since the election of Ronald Reagan (give people a hand up instead of a hand out, but not really -- they started the shipping of jobs overseas in the 1980s while declaring that people were poor only because they refused to apply for the magic unicorn jobs). Maybe now that the insane hatred the GOP voter has always expressed towards pretty much the entirety of the rest of humanity has actually started to kill non-poor people, we can only hope that other non-poor people can figure out just how loathsome, dishonest and hateful the GOP's base always were, and stop yammering nonsense about "uniting" the country.
No one can reach people who live in a land beyond reason where they continue to push the red button, ever more frantically, knowing it kills but so intent on receiving the million dollars they can no longer see doing anything else until everybody dies.
[I started this post in the Spring of 2020, finished it in the Spring of 2021].
