Recovering from the Echo Chamber

It's been a month...almost and I'm not sure if I'm done licking my wounds.  Everyone else seems to have accepted (other than the college kids protesting) that the Orange Cheeto (I still can't type his name without getting physically ill) will be the next POTUS.  The world hasn't imploded.  A black hole hasn't opened up in the sky and swallowed us all.  I'm pretty sure everyone who was predicting disaster still has jobs at whatever propaganda network feeds their Starbucks habit.  Hell, the markets are up thanks to the mislabeled "Trump Rally" so maybe it won't be so bad after all.  Then again, he hasn't been inaugurated yet.  The nightly talking heads not employed by Rupert Murdoch who were warning us against voting for the now President-Elect seem to have shifted their message.  Now they're doing everything their power to prove they were right about him.  Part of me wonders whether any of them are worth listening to anymore.  Even tacitly.  His cabinet picks, to be fair, signal a coming administration that in large part, won't give a flying fuck about anyone who's not part of the elite.  (Yes, working-class-white-people who don't mind being robbed as long as a white man is back in the White House, that means you too.)  But for almost 2 years straight, media, including the Scared White People Network, were treating this election as a coronation for Queen Hillary I.  With every insult, every slap in the face to decency, every bullying remark, every lie, every dick joke, every policy flub, every flirtation with Putin, and every break with tradition (TAXES?), the Cheeto seemed to assure the "smart" people he was un-electable and affirmed that thinking.  Election Day was about formally sending this fool back to his golden phallus in New York, preferably with an iron mask and broken knuckles so we in the real world would be finally safe from his twitterific bullshit.  Or Trump TV.  Whatever.  As long as he was away from the halls of power where the wrong word and a lack of understanding of policy details could literally mean life and death.  George W. Bush that found out the hard way at the cost of more than 4,000 American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Life, however, has a funny way of taking your plans by the ankles, flipping them upside down, and giving your hopes and dreams a swirlie because it was bored.  Now half the country is trying to wipe the taste of piss tinted toilet water out of its mouth only to find the towel is missing and replaced by the last square of toilet paper on the roll.  The other half seems to have taken their win as well as a toddler who hasn't been taught grace.  Except the five year old also says things like, "go back to Africa", "Fuck you Muslim Terrorists", and the ever popular "Build the Wall!"  I'm a non-WASP so honestly I'm used to hearing ignorant shit.  I'm not part of the dominant culture so I can see how those that are can be blinded by their cocoon of All America All the time.  What I didn't see, is that the non-WASPs/woke/liberals have a cocoon too.  Today's version of journalism is crayola 264 neon canary yellow.  You could spill bleach on today's newspapers and it would bead up like water on Armor-All. Impartiality doesn't exist in reporting anymore (if it ever did) and no one in today's generation remembers why the political press exists in the first place.  To provide civilian oversight of government officials.  Can you say that any of the garbage scrolling across your FB feed, Twitter timeline, or chosen news network increased your knowledge of the candidates?  Or did every headline just piss you off and make you even more steadfast in your "values?"  And that's the point.
Social media, Cable News, and the need to sell people shit they don't need has turned spreading knowledge into an exercise in just keeping your attention at any cost.  Our supposed guardians of truth have discovered its much more profitable to lie your ass off about "the others" and tell people you're the only one who cares and will be honest with you.  There's a term for that in psychology.  It's called the cycle of abuse. 

I swore off CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and the newer for-profit bullshit artists One America and Newsmax and their digital counterparts years ago.  The ones that don't have a TV network like HuffPo, Raw Story, Redstate, WesternJournalism, the Washington Times, and a ton of other "sources" need to be added to my no-fly list.  None of these outlets fulfilled their mission in keeping either candidate accountable for the lies they told.  Not one.  Because ratings were more important than the truth, our country may have just squandered the last bit of post-WWII thanks-for-saving-the-world-from-the-nazis good will.  Sadly, you could argue we elected a Nazi.

I'm still in recovery.   I'll let you know when I think its safe to see people again.  If I were to guess though?  It'll be in about 8 years...maybe 4 if I'm lucky.  By then, if this country still resembles the one they taught us as children, maybe we'll finally have learned the lesson in how dangerous it is to only listen to what you want to hear.

Til Next Week...maybe.

A Final Appeal to Sanity - Election Day 2016

My Brothers and Sisters, 

Donald Trump cannot become President.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is guilty of many things.  

• She is a self serving politician of the highest order
• She was negligent at best in regards to important documents during her time as Secretary of State
• She used dog whistle tactics to attack Obama during the 2008 primaries 
• She comes across as insincere 
• She uses her celebrity status to earn exorbitant paychecks for speaking engagements
• The Clinton Foundation has questions that must be answered in regards to Haiti.

I get it.  She comes across as the typical Washington politician that's ignored our community for decades except for election time.  Some of you may even feel betrayed by Obama for not doing what you thought he would for us.  Voting for Trump, you think, would show the Democrats that we're not to be taken for granted, which is exactly how the Republican base feels and why Trump has even gotten this far.  Some of you may feel you'd rather face an open wolf than one in sheep's clothing.  Just for once, you want to be heard, acknowledged as a united group, and to prove that you're no one's political crutch.

Only one problem.  Electing Trump would effectively silence us.

I'm not going to get into all of the ridiculous, insulting, idiotic, predatory, and deplorable (yeah I said it) things he's said over the past 2 years.  The New York Times needed 2 pages to print them all yesterday.  I'm not even going to remind you of his position as Head Birther in Chief.  All I'm going to remind you of his views on black people.

The last Presidential candidate that presented himself as the keeper of "Law and Order" was Richard M. Nixon.  The Nixon administraton felt the best way to deal with black people was to flood our neighborhoods with drugs, heavily criminalize their use, and destroy black families.  It's a legacy many white suburban families are now struggling with.  Anyone older than 40 should easily recognize the rhetoric from Trump as the same buzzwords Nixon used.  Disguised as support for law enforcement, Nixon was really referring to extermination of the Black Panthers.  Trump, of course, is referring to quelling Black Lives Matter.  Under the Obama Presidency, unprecedented levels of racist police corruption were exposed.  Though few of the high profile cases resulted in arrests or convictions, the Department of Justice got more involved in protecting the rights of Black Americans than they have in the past 30 years.  Should we really believe that a President Trump, who thinks we all live in ghettos, go to poor schools, get shot just walking outside, and still thinks the DNA-exonerated Central Park Five are guilty, would direct his DOJ to the protection of black lives?  It's more likely he would accelerate the rate of incarceration (he's advocated expanding stop and frisk to the federal level) then dismiss it as us not taking personal responsibility as most white conservatives do when confronted with the truth of how ghettos were created in the first place.  

A man who wants my vote should actually know what my problems are.  Intimately.  Hillary does.  For all her faults, she knows our grievances inside and out.  She's too intelligent to feign ignorance, which is why the email scandal is so infuriating.  Too often we simply accept Trump's ignorance as Trump being Trump.  I refuse.  Ignorance of our issues as the leader of ALL Americans, the excuse we gave Obama for not being militant about black issues, is unacceptable.  It guarantees that we would be completely ignored and dismissed like whiny children with the same paternal arrogance we see too often from both the left and the right.  Trump wouldn't even pretend to care about our issues because he doesn't understand them.  Only when cars start burning would he respond the way he knows best.  With force.

We have made steady progress in the post Civil Rights era.  This isn't Nixon's America.  This isn't Reagan's America.  This isn't even Bill Clinton's America.  Despite the old guard's best efforts we have more of a voice in our county's future than at any other time in its history.  Cut through the media fluff.  See past the anger.  Don't set us back by electing a man who thinks the best thing about us is our vote.  You can be heard by loudly telling him and his cronies that we demand more of a President than being born a rich white male.  Frankly, that's all he has to offer.

I'm with her.