You want to know the really funny joke?
OK, here it is: Once upon a time, there was a center-right political party that felt like it was losing its way after a guy named Clinton won the White House twenty years ago. So what they did was spend millions and millions of dollars in a radio, television and direct mail campaign aimed at convincing the same Americans who were suffering from their bad ideas that poor people, minorities, women and Democrats were the breathing essence of evil...
...
But all of a sudden - and here's the funny part - the horse got out of the barn and went pounding across the countryside, absolutely beyond control. Twenty years of peddling hate and fear metastasized into a 'Tea Party' base whose real muscle came from championing hate and fear...and the smart boys who started the whole thing two decades ago were left in front of an open barn door wondering how things got so bad so fast.
Suddenly, the worst elements of their dark creation - Christian dominionism, anti-gay zealotry, anti-woman Biblical dudgeon, unabashed racism, cocked-rifle xenophobia, and an all-out assault on even the most meager concepts of government - went from being the crap they'd once ignored as bad noise from their "useful idiots," to being the hood ornament on the careening juggernaut of a party they no longer had control of.
The rest, as they say, is history:
If your upbringing or pastor or background or whatever leads you to hate total strangers because of who they love, where they live, what they look like, how they worship or if they worship, if you have devoted yourself to an 'Us' or 'Them' mentality and refuse to abandon such poison, if you have no ears to hear, but instead choose to pursue a course of vitriol and division, here is a truth: we will break you across our knee like so much kindling (my em and halle-fuckin'-lujah!). We are large, we contain multitudes, and yours is a course of dissolution and despair.
Cast aside your furious obedience. Freedom begins with a "No."
People like that are scared to death of freedom. George Hanson was and is right:
"This used to be a hell of a good country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with it." He observes that Americans talk a lot about the value of freedom, but are actually afraid of anyone who truly exhibits it.
Especially if they're brown or black or gay or female or intelligent.
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