9 Comments

Thank you, Steven, for putting this tragedy in clear and eloquent terms. These are sad and horrifying days. I ask everyone here to step forward in your own way - Challenge this ruination and depravity in our midst. Find your own way to speak out and do it relentlessly.

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Aug 30, 2021Liked by Steven Beschloss

What really gets me is that so many people were so easily led down this path to self-destruction and destruction of our democracy. It certainly has echoes of Germany in the 20’s and 30’s. But it’s different I think. These are willing participants in demonization of the “other”. The leaders promoting this know their followers can be whipped up through racism, nationalism, misogyny. There is no difference between any right wing philosophy: terrorists from the Middle East, Afghanistan, Africa, Asia and the US. Some are more brutal than others, but they all want to be in power and kill those who oppose them. However, at least here, those who support TFG and won’t get vaccinated and think it’s all a plot, are getting sick and in some cases, dying. Their children will be sacrificed on the altar of TFG.

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Many here among us feel that Life is but a Joke

😒

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The willfully ignorant don't need an excuse to be that. They believe what we know are lies because it's what they felt and believed, all along. The GOP has been slowly brainwashing their base since Reagan. Decades and generation after generation, steeped in hate, prejudice, racism and conspiracy theory. What the last 5 years has done to me, is, I stopped caring about these people, especially over the last 18 months or so. I'm exhausted. I've done everything that I'm supposed to be doing. These people haven't, from day one, from trump on down. The GOP have gotten very good at feeding red meat to their rabid base. Unfortunately for all of us, they've lost control of the monster they've been priming. Instead of doing the right thing, and standing up to these people, they've doubled down. I think to the vaccinated politicians, on the right, this is a game. They give their voters what they seem to crave, they throw in some radical bullshit, just to see how far they can get these people to go, and then they just hope they live long enough to keep them in power. They want blind obedience, nothing else. The fact that they actually booed trump, shows how far gone these people are. This is a dangerous cult with a good number of domestic terrorists thrown in, for good measure. I've gotten to the point where I just wish they would die quicker. They're bringing down our batting average and until our weakest links are gone, our country is in mortal danger, on several fronts. I know that sounds harsh, but, seriously, and excuse the language, I am all out of fucks to give. I just can't anymore.

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This may sound cruel but I don’t feel sorry for people who essentially turned their brains over to a lifelong criminal con man and anyone else mimicking him. It’s tragic, no question about that, but frankly it never occurred to me to feel sorry for them.( I do feel sorry for their children though.) I’m not sure why I don’t feel sorry for the adults but I expect it has something to do with witnessing tragedy that people didn’t do anything to deserve when I was an emergency and critical care nurse at a large teaching hospital.

Mostly I marvel at the sheer stupidity of it. I can’t imagine what possesses people to risk not just their own lives, but the lives of everyone they know and love over a simple vaccination that’s no different than any other vaccination they’ve had. A few years ago I never would have dreamed anything like this could happen here in America. Now I find myself frequently trying to figure out what the hell went wrong.

The bottom line is this-the idea that became America is in very grave danger. All that we thought we stood for post WWll has slipped away somehow and we didn’t even know it was happening. There’s no question in my mind that Trump was the catalyst for all of the astonishingly inappropriate behavior we’re witnessing. But that doesn’t explain why so many were so vulnerable to such obviously bizarre and cruel antics of what I would say is a profoundly mentally ill person.

No doubt a lot of it has to do with greed, envy and racism, but there’s more to it than that. I remember before the 2016 election many people were saying Trump was a great businessman and that’s why they planned to vote for him. I eventually realized people felt that way because of the TV show Trump did for many years. In the show he was portrayed as being a very talented businessman who invariably made sound business decisions. That was when I first panicked. Millions of voters watched that tv show and believed everything they saw on it was genuine. It never occurred to them it was scripted and directed by others to make Trump look like he knew what he was doing! I even wrote about it pointing that out, but I was ignored. Granted I didn’t have a big audience, but the few who responded insisted that Trump was the real deal, a smart, competent businessman the likes of which we needed to run our country. Their naïveté was stunning.

Then there was the Obama backlash. President Obama was one of the most competent, caring presidents we’ve ever had who managed the Herculean task of pulling this country out of a devastating recession (while being ridiculed and disrespected)with uncommon grace, and all many Americans cared about was the color of his skin. When he was elected I thought America had finally overcome prejudice based on the color of someone’s skin. But that was a result of my own stunning naïveté. At any rate, I had no idea there’s still an enormous number of racists in America and I now understand how that played a big part in making Trump popular among certain groups.

I don’t know what the answer is to the disunity in America. But I do think I know of a good way to start doing something about it. I think it’s imperative to eliminate money as a motivator in our government. The way things stand now, campaign donations are nothing but bribes and they’ve corrupted our politics and our politicians. Instead of being about helping ordinary Americans lead better lives, it’s about self-enrichment. As it stands now, the needs of ordinary Americans are an afterthought. The only way we can eliminate campaign donations is to pass laws making private donations illegal, giving politicians only public money to run their campaigns. Every candidate should be given the same amount of money and the fec should collect receipts and track spending to keep them honest. When a candidate runs out of money they get no more. I also firmly believe the only way such laws can be made is to have a clear majority of democrats in Congress, a President who’s a democrat and an expanded Supreme Court.

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The anti-vaxxers & republican reps. have made a game out of this. It’s become a political game which is costing lives. I have said this many times. The way our country is today is at its worst. It is because of Trump that Americans have become so ugly that even vaccines are a hoax. The way Republican governors are handling this pandemic is not normal. All this has become political because of Trump. Trump has brought the ugliest of ugly in America and I’m not sure if we can fix all this. My prediction is, if the Democrats don’t fix this mess, I believe that if a Republican gets into the WH in 2024, we will never have another president ever. We will become a dictatorship. And the ugly will get much more ugly. The way to stop all this is for Merrick Garland to start issuing indictments and the FBI start issuing warrants. The entire Trump party must be held accountable for the mess they have made of our country. This is how the Roulette will stop and hopefully get back to a country of meaningful values, ethics and morals.

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