The Revenge Tour

Legislation via revenge. 

Leadership through grudge. 

I can’t say that I saw that as where our politics were heading but here we are. 

We are at the point where people want into politics not to lead, not to give back, heck, not even just to be rich and powerful but to track down their enemies and make them pay. 

The money part is just a bonus. 

And there’s so much money. 

Because this is what adults do, this is America today, this petty grudge making as if we are a nation of kids chosen last for the team and now we wanna make everyone pay. Suddenly politics is one huge slasher film about childish revenge for a forgotten slight.

As our nation just languishes in Neutral indefinitely, unable to rise to the challenge of the future and unwilling to just give in and fall apart, so we dodder on, like a toddler into tomorrow. Our politics have become so fractured and fractious that nothing can be done. 

It’s finger waving and threats. 

It’s hyperbolic speeches and rhetoric. 

Promises and dreams. 

We refuse to agree on the most basic things like – kids need good schools. Once you say that then someone has to intone with, yeah, good LIBERAL schools to indoctrinate them on how to be GAY!

That we’re looking at literal book banning again, in 2023, tells you where we are. 

That the right hides behind children as they throw molotovs full of urine is despicable. 

OH, it’s for the CHILDREN!

Ban sexual education. 

Ban Critical Race Theory. 

Ban discussions of slavery as more than just ‘an inconvenience’.

Ban furries!

Ban books. 

But darn it, don’t you dare ban the pledge of allegiance because that’s what a god fearing American HAS to do to prove themselves worthy. 

OK. 

Sure. 

It gets tiring hearing about how the right is working to protect kids while they take their healthcare, their parent’s benefits, and take away the laws that protected kids from predatory businesses happy to hire children so they don’t have to pay adults.

IN WHAT WORLD DOES A KID NEED TO GET A ‘REAL’ JOB BUT THEIR PARENTS DON’T NEED SOCIAL BENEFITS?

Fine, whatever, it’s all good…

Only, this isn’t how you get to that whole American Exceptionalism thing. 

You do that by LEADING. 

By pushing ahead. 

By embracing challenges and rising above them.
You do it by working to better educate your people, to make sure they feel secure, to make sure people are not living near the poverty line, and by making sure people know that they matter.

That’s not us. 

We’re petty. 

We’re rich people on their phones sending threatening messages out to social media as if they don’t lead the company. 

It’s industries clear cutting jobs like trees so they can push some more money into their pockets. 

It’s people getting poorer as jobs dry up with businesses claiming NO ONE WANTS TO WORK despite their unwillingness to pay living wages, offer any sort of insurance, or to treat workers as humans. 

Our country is shriveling up because it hasn’t been watered with the least amount of kindness or common sense. 

Some things we should want, and should work together on, despite our disliking of one another’s politics, for the ‘greater good’. 

There is no greater good though than the glory of the self. 

THEY don’t know how to do it but I do and I will do it GREAT, the politicians tell us as they order another lobster dinner on their vacation. 

We are at the point of insanity. 

When a party can call for outright delusional revolution because they feel slighted and yet they can STILL be a legal party and take control of the wheel that tells you how far off the radar we are. 

For the love of god they act as if the insurrectionists are patriots in some twisted and imaginary version of reality. 

The thing is though that the whole country is insane and we just can’t figure out that if we aren’t willing to work together then we can at least stand together and watch the nation burn. 

In my former city, Flint, you’d think it would have been an easy place for tech and government to focus and to say – this is a perfect chance to get an easy PR win. Companies could move there, near skilled labor and easy travel routes, and the government could use Flint as a place to reboot a city that needed the funds and assistance. In the VERY least you’d have thought it would have been a great place to test new water standards and safety measures but naw. 

We still don’t even have resolution over the lawsuits yet. 

Heck, there was a point where the tide turned and people blamed the citizens for what happened here. 

Good grief. 

So if you tell me that candidates in office or running for office are out there openly telling the world that they are coming for their enemies well, all I can tell you is that many of those people will get elected because as a nation we’ve regressed to tribalism and jingoism and darn it, they ain’t gon’ take muh GUNS!

I need a nap. 

…c…