In a time when everything has become weaponized.
Everything is politicized.
It feels dangerous to love.
Oh, sure, we can do it, be bold, and loud, and love to spite those that hate, but loving is dangerous in times like these.
My wife and I are IVF parents.
The journey was hard, expensive, and dangerous for my wife, but it was worth it because we ended up with an amazing little girl that is as bright as the sun.
This doesn’t make us strange, or different, or anything but people who wanted a child. It shouldn’t be controversial but, in these political times everything is dangerous, everything is wrong.
The religious Right have weaponized our fears and now they are trying to decide what we can learn, who we can love, who can be American, and who gets to have children.
In a perfect world we’d all be able to have enough to feel comfortable, would not be lonely if we wanted companionship, and could love those who we loved. But we are on a dying world that keeps crying out for us to save it, to save ourselves, and we refuse.
We refuse because we are too lost in the looking glass.
Gazing on the reflection of gods and monsters and we are both.
We marvel at the wonders we have achieved and fight one another to get our time atop the pyramid, to get the spotlight and be seen and rewarded for our specialness.
We are willing to drag ourselves and others through mud and waste so long as we get the cheering and adoration at the end.
We are in a time when the worst of us may well be re-elected as President because he’s willing to say the things that so many others wish they could. He is willing to give breath to the hate and the fear that stains our human race. This political race is for much more than the rule of the nation but the soul of it, though I think it’s too late.
I think it’s already been lost.
There is no bridging the divide between parties, between ideologies.
Every outstretched hand is slapped away.
Every issue people dig deeper on and their position calcifies.
There is no compromise.
There is no coming together.
There will only be festering hate if Trump doesn’t win.
And there are people like my wife and I, who have a daughter we love, who were given a new life in her birth, who are merely cannon fodder and talking points to people who don’t love.
People who don’t understand it.
They will say how IVF, the use of science to help produce a child, is against god and nature and wrong. Then they will ignore the children that have already been born. They will take the aid their families need to help them survive. They will steal history so that the children never see a full view of the world but simply the world as they want them to see it. They will make the children become not who they are but who they are made to be – there will be only breeders and seeders and nothing else. They are stealing the future from the children that are here, and are destroying the world they will inherit.
Why?
Because we are the most important.
We, the living, this is our world, our life, and we deserve it.
It’s manifest, isn’t it?
There is only one god, and we know them.
No one else does.
The hubris of the Right is astonishing.
THEY know what is right.
THEY know what is holy.
THEY know what is good.
And THEY decided they knew it.
These people are happy to let people die, even the innocent, to prove a point. But they get to make the point. No one else does.
People use the word cult a lot, and it diminishes how horrifying all of this is, but it isn’t far off. There is collective insanity, a willingness to put aside common sense to embrace lie after lie after lie because those lies reaffirm how right they are.
Women who choose not to be mothers, however they are pregnant, are wrong for wanting to do the right thing to themselves and for the unborn fetus.
But the Right is worried about the POTENTIAL child, and not the living woman. She is a vessel, a vessel for their will.
How they can tell us that people from CERTAIN countries are bad, are dangerous yet not call out the American villains that are here already. The White men who rape, murder, and abuse.
No, no, no.
It’s those others that we need to worry about.
Those that will steal jobs we don’t want and live off aid that is barely available for the most deserving.
They have created a fairy tale that they tell and retell in the hopes of making it reality.
Oh, I am in no denial that the Left is some group of saviors who want only to do good and to be kind.
No, they are greedy and lecherous and awful also.
Think of the things you are worried about and afraid of – is it someone illegally entering our country and killing you? Is it a trans person? Is it the silly myth that a trans kid will ruin JV sports for your kid? Is it that your kids will become gay? Is it that Christianity will be banned? Is it that guns will be taken?
Is it ANY of these things?
We all fear violence.
We all fear people taking advantages from us and our kids.
We all fear for ourselves because we have to.
But that doesn’t mean we make everyone different than us villains and pretend they are greater in number and power than they are.
Give me a break.
I am more worried about a violent MAGA true believer than any of those.
I am more worried about the person that feels they need to carry a gun everywhere they go, as if they are waiting for a fight.
But those are the boogeymen of the Right.
No, minorities, science, and the rule of law are their enemies, that is what they are fighting.
They are just not the ones setting the world on fire for no other reason than to prop up an old man who hates everyone but himself and an ideology that has no future.
And in all of this I am not just wrong, I am evil because I think differently, believe differently, and have a child with the help of science. It’s against a god I do not believe in.
So they say.
We are chasing ghosts while the world burns.
We are telling fairy tales filled only with monsters.
What a world to live in, a world of monsters and fire.
It’s not the world I choose for my daughter.
Not the life I choose for anyone.
I will hope that somehow we can tamp the fires down and can cool things off and slowly move forward again.
It’s not a matter of outliving the racists, xenophobes, and gunmongers.
I am fine being labeled a liberal.
Being called woke.
If it means I am not sleepwalking towards oblivion while the world burns and not smiling as arrogant, lying leaders rule only for themselves then sure, call me whatever.
I know who I am and what I stand for.
And we all have to take our stand.
We all have to work to stop this decline.
We have to oppose them and live better than them and push them into the light where they will either awaken or their power will be burned away.
The monsters are already in the house.
All we can do is confront them, outlast them, and claw our way back to the light.
…c…
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 