The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The Storm is coming! Or so the Qanon predicts. Or maybe it’s Armageddon. At least that’s what the evangelicals think. After the apocalypse, everything should be much improved. A world without gays or uppity blacks, without the WOKE crowd or elitist college grads, immigrants, liberals, environmentalists or anyone else like me. Okay, a Paradise for Them, not necessarily for You. Probably something akin to present day Afghanistan after the return of the Taliban. Heaven in the eyes of the oppressor.

The January 6th insurrection — or protest if you were one of the folks merely wanting to make yourselves heard while on vacation — might give you an idea of what the Storm might bring to the table to make life new and improved. If you don’t get a seat next to Jesus, you might still get one near Steve Bannon. No, Donald Trump isn’t going to let you anywhere near, stop deluding yourselves.

So after a brief but vociferous Rebel Yell from the disaffected, the aggrieved, the racists and the folks who now think democracy might as well be junked if they can’t get their way and no longer want to wait patiently for Armageddon, how do we re-unite the late great USA? Compromise seems an archaic notion when bargaining with Satan, probably even an impossibility given the increasingly insular bubbles of social media. We live in separate fortresses of rigid belief, each side lobbing flaming oil across a vast chasm, a no man’s land of mines and memes littered with fallen heroes, debunked saviors, discredited Founders among the broken statues of Confederate generals.
As the great philosopher Pogo once said, we have met the enemy … and he is us.

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So little by little, tweet by tweet, you’ve come to grips with the sad reality that Donald J. the Trump is king of America. Hard, isn’t it? Sleepless nights, muffled sobs of despair, an inchoate but ever present anxiety, a mounting anger and a refusal to fully accept this harsh new reality. You thought, with Obama winning the second term, we’d turned a corner in this country. Oh, racism had reared its ugly head again, but … we were a pluralistic liberal society after all, we’d solve these vexing problems.

Just like you, I didn’t see this coming. Sure, I’d listened to Hot Talk Radio and those rating-hungry demagogues. I predicted Trump beating the Rhinos, but I sure didn’t see him winning the Whole Enchilada. I couldn’t imagine it. But … no need to tell you, unless you’ve been self-medicating too hard, he did. I’m not going to reiterate the man’s foibles, you can read it in the lying press every damn day. What we’ve all got to face, what we all need to understand, is we’re in a culture war and we’re losing. The kids aren’t buying into Trump and so if you’re willing to wait a decade or two, well, the tide will turn once again.

But me, I waited through the anti-war Civil Rights 60’s, the Nixon 70’s, the Reagan 80’s, got hopeful in the Clinton 90’s, lost faith again in Bush’s war years, then grew optimistic with Obama. Now we get the backlash. Easy to say it’s just the old white guyz, those Fox News addicts who think their Anglo country is being over-run by immigrants and welfare queens, transsexuals and women in the military, who call themselves the real patriots because they think this is a Christian nation and by God they’re Christians even if they never go to church on Sunday and they’ve made Hate a breakfast cereal to wake up to every day of their unhappy lives.

You don’t win the culture war by staying in the closet. Ask your gay friends. Black Lives Matter has it right. The Occupy Movement had it right. Folks don’t like uppity blacks? Tough. They think men shouldn’t sleep with men? Tough. They think Hollywood is a bunch of neo-commies? Fine. They think immigration is a doorway for terrorists? Wake up. They want to make America great again? Welcome to the future. We won’t be going back to Ozzie and Harriet, Ike and Tricky Dick. The America that’s great is the one that honors innovation, fresh ideas, new blood. It’s the America that’s inclusive, welcoming, democratic and optimistic. And yeah, it’s the America that’s willing to fight back against the bigots, the small minded, the xenophobic and the misogynistic, the America that has nothing to fear but the fearmongers themselves. I say sharpen your pitchforks, we’re in this fight for real now and I for one don’t plan to lose.

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