It’s hard to take our American culture seriously at times. Especially our moral outrage. I saw this in the 1980’s with music and the fear that the devil was influencing kids as they sat listening to music in their rooms. Then there was the fear of role playing games. The fear of video games. The fear of movies. It’s interesting, as a side note, that most of these things target introverts that are just minding their own business, but hey, that’s a biscuit for another basket.
The latest boogeymen are books (again), female sexual health, and anything to do with LGBTQIA+ folks, (though I am sure you can through BLM in there as well for good measure as that’s still a common talking point you see bandied about). These are but some of the new devils that are threatening, I dunno, our nation, our morality, our children.
WHO WILL THINK OF THE CHILDREN?
We’re anti-education…unless it is approved ahead of time by several religious right parents, and three hardline right-wing senators. Unless the lessons are about manifest destiny, how amazing the American military is, or why Donald Trump is just as awesome as Jesus, they want nothing from them learnin’ books.
We’re anti-books that may show a world that is a little too big. Oh, they say they’re against violence and sexuality, unless it’s in the Bible or on a reality show the parents like. Reading is not exactly a national pastime these days. Still though, those kids could pick up a book and learn about wizards, or maybe periods, or that, darn it, slavery was really a thing! They act as if school libraries are full of porn. Please. If parents aren’t willing to accept that kids are seeing, and saying, and, in many cases, doing things that the parents don’t approve of then they should think back to their own childhoods. It’s easier for kids now because of social media. Whatever you are blocking them from, like books, music, and movies, the kids will find on their own or through friends.
LORD A-MERCY, them darn gays are at it again! That we keep pretending that LGBTQIA+ people are a new thing would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous. Erasing people from society doesn’t work. It never works. Swinging the Bible around and declaring things are against an omnipresent god that controls all things, well, I mean…do we see the flaw in that logic? That if all things are FROM god then that means that so are these folks we’re so scared of our children becoming. We are so concerned with what other people will think, how we’ll show our faces if our children don’t conform to a false cultural narrative of who they should be that we’re literally killing our kids. We are showing them that they don’t really matter, and that if they can’t be who we demand they be that they mind as well not be around and, well, some of those kids are agreeing with that thought. We put so many demands on kids while we restrict them at the same time, it’s a wonder they manage to get out of their teen years with any sanity at all. Kids have it hard enough. I cannot FATHOM realizing, with horror, that you are different from people around you. That who you see yourself as and who others see you as are not the same. Kids, all kids, deserve love and patience and support, even when it doesn’t seem like they want or deserve it. We can’t throw them out and declare they are ‘broken’ if their path is different from other people. We have to love them all the more because they are on a harder path because our culture is so desperately afraid of what others will think and how people will see us, as parents. It’s not about the kids, it’s about us, and our inability to accept that people are all different and need different things to be happy and complete and we can’t change that. Or control it.
And we hate that.
God save us all from women’s sexual health! We don’t want to support it, and are happy to deny it, but lord, if my penis can’t do its thing, get me my pills! That’s the funny thing, with our faux-outrage over HOCUS POCUS 2 and Harry Potter and gay people, and on and on. We rail against those things but then flood the airwaves with commercials or erectile dysfunction. These ads don’t even bother to dance around the subject, either, they cut right to it – my thingy won’t work, make it work! HERE, TAKE THIS PILL AND IT’LL BE HARD ONCE MORE! We want to make sure guys can get it up but if a woman gets knocked up by that errant erection and doesn’t want the baby she’s a whore.
That’s what we’re good at – shielding men from responsibility and blaming women for having to live with unintended consequences.
We treat both sexes as if what is between their legs defines them.
A man MUST be virile and sexually active and must have conquests to make him feel he is a man. Women OWE men that.
Women must remain chaste and viriginal and should only enjoy sex with a spouse if it is for procreatory reasons. She must hide her gross monthly issues and must never speak of her sexual needs.
GOD HELP HER if she should get pregnant because unless you are married, well, that’s what happens to whores.
What sort of message are we sending girls?
That they don’t matter but that erections do.
We want them to dress like teen girls, we want them to wear makeup, and we want them to act mature, but then we want them to act their age and listen to us when it comes to what we want. Culturally we sexualize girls at such a young age and then when a man becomes attracted to them we’ll say well, she should have acted her age.
We want to blame girls for everything and exonerate men for being creeps.
We are a nation that wants to pretend it’s puritanical and religious when most people only think of their faith when they need something or at the holidays. We want to tell others how to live and declare we’re a Christian nation and then flout the limits that religion can have on others as put into place by our founders. We talk about what those founders REALLY meant and REALLY thought but then want to pretend that many of them weren’t rich slave owners.
We are a nation that holds up the ‘greatest generation’ and bemoans how our modern young people don’t want to fight wars that are nothing like we fought in World War 2, but then embrace fascist leaders and ideology.
It seems apt that there are so many commercials about erectile dysfunction because as a nation we just can’t get it up.
We want to fly our flags, and shout our slogans, and demand patriotism while we have our boot on the throat of people that aren’t like us.
We want to cheer about how great our team is and then start a fight when we lose.
If you want to see how off we are it’s to look at how many beer, alcohol, and prescription drug ads are on television while we shake our fingers at people who ingest medicinal marijuana – only to want to get into that growing market as an investment.
It’s absurd.
We are a nation that won’t look at itself in the mirror, afraid of what we’ll see.
We are changing, as well we should.
We should always be evolving as a nation, becoming better, and embracing the world we claim to want to come to our shores.
We have enough enemies in the world, so why make more?
Why make enemies of our own?
We are preaching pantsless from the pulpit and profaning the very things the messiah many of us follow stood and died for. Ignore the words in red unless it’s a threat or supports our belief.
Run from knowledge.
Education is a tool that many fear because they are afraid it will sow dissent. It will make people question things. It will shake up the status quo.
We have allowed ourselves to be bullied and herded by people who want to drive us this way and that for their own ends and own gains. We have allowed ourselves to fear one another and our differences instead of embracing and encouraging them. We are stronger for our differences and better for that knowledge. It strengthens our nation.
If we let it.
Or we can just live in fear and ban and burn everything and celebrate our nation of ash with our raging erections for the whole of the world to see.
…c..
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 