Day after day Ignorance and Hate continue to kick us in the face. America at rock bottom is when Ignorance and Hate punch each other in the face and both black out; that might require two terms of President Trump.
I come from a long line of alcoholic beta males – we know a thing or two about hitting rock bottom. Physically inefficient males with wild imaginations: we are the cornerstone of the shrink and rehab industries (and we should *never* own guns).
Possessing such intimacy with self-destruction, I’ve found myself wondering if America has reached the point at which we’re about to wake up – memory-less behind a stranger’s couch in a house 140 miles away from home – and finally say to ourself, “Damn… we really need to get our life in order.” (While many people stumble over gender pronouns, I’m more prone to conjugate with issues of plurality; maybe if We were singular We’d stop having such irrational fears of Other.)
Sadly… I’m not convinced America has hit rock bottom. Yes. It feels that way, but feeling there and being there are entirely different realities. Feeling is a relative experience: the spoiled child of a millionaire feels poor when he’s given $100 to go shopping on a Tuesday. He’s not being poor, he’s being a twat. Very few people in white America have ever had to be anything… they’ve had the luxury of feeling it. It’s a totally different level of existence than billions of people on this planet whose lives don’t allow something as useless to survival as feeling – and one of which the majority of white Americans remain intentionally ignorant. So no… even though it might feel like America has hit rock bottom to a lot of you, we decidedly have not arrived there. If we were at rock bottom, you’d be doing something about it. (The curious among you might wonder if that gives us the authority to therefore define rock bottom as “now” by means of taking action, if taking action is the defining result of said rock bottom-ness… I don’t know…. chicken and egg…)
4 More Years Of Donald Trump Will Be America At Rock Bottom
Day after day Ignorance and Hate continue to kick us in the face. America at rock bottom is when Ignorance and Hate punch each other in the face and they black out; that might require two terms of President Trump. Trump and his cohort of spineless yes-men find new ways to take America from what once was merely obnoxious cousin, to laughing stock dumb (but harmless) uncle, and now a dangerous, cluster fuck country, away from which others are slowing backing away before it explodes. Donald Trump’s America isn’t Lady Liberty… it’s a meth addict pimping his own daughter out of a Florida motel riddled with bed bugs and adverbs. “She’s totally hot, isn’t she? Strongly hot!” Donald says with a wink and a sniff.
There are thousands (if-not-millions) of Trump followers who believe to some degree that democrats are blood-drinking, pedophile baby killers… pretty clear that that faction is nowhere near their wake-up point, which means America is not yet at rock bottom. A right-wing marketing strategy that started with Rush Limbaugh shouting “trust no one but me!” has mutated into an alternate reality freak show. So much so that everything I’ve read about Trump’s QAnon base advise us to literally treat them as if they’re having a psychotic break: we’re supposed to use that paradigm and carefully guide them back to reality; gently and with compassion. Yes. America is a cluster fuck country with millions of delusional, well-armed citizens ready to take down all those “democrat vampires”… but I don’t think that’s America at rock bottom.
Rock bottom is the point at which realization of our collective fucked-upness finally triggers action to turn this ship around. We don’t have collective action. We are lightyears away from universal agreement on anything.
Rock bottom tends to be about 4 levels beyond one’s biggest fear, and 3 above the threshold of pain… we’re not there yet. If you disagree: look around. The vast majority of Americans are calmly going about their day, keeping their heads down, waiting for it all to pass – the very attitude that allowed the insanity of the right-wing politic in America to take root in an alternate reality and rip this country apart. All of us, democrats and “normal” republicans alike, turned the other way and ignored it like a child having a temper tantrum. It’s not until no one is comfortable that change of the required magnitude can finally happen in America.
Just like America hasn’t hit rock bottom until we suffer a second term of Donald Trump, this rant hasn’t (unbelievably) hit rock bottom and therefore has no sensical way of ending itself.
There you go.
