Week of 07/11/2016

Saying Stuff You Don’t Want To Hear Right Now
– by David Matthews 2

In the past week, we’ve had a series of events shoved in our faces thanks to the air-fluffed ego-driven media.  Events that took our minds off the 2016 Farce and off “Lady Macbeth” Hillary Clinton and “The Ego” Donald Trump.

Two police shootings where innocent men were needlessly murdered, and one instance in Dallas where police were killed by a veteran who wanted to see “white cops die”.

And now the script says that we need to call for peace.  Everyone wants us to take a breath and step back and let things just calm the hell down.  The media says that we are “on edge” and “on the verge”, and Rupert Murdock’s media empire is even going so far as to claim that we’re already in a “civil war”.  So the script is now demanding we all calm down and stop this insanity.

Good luck with that.

You see, I know that I should be telling people that we’re not “there” yet, that things aren’t so bad that we should just go Helter-Skelter on society.  That is what the script is demanding of us all.  They want the Facebook posts and the blog posts and the newspaper headlines to talk peace and “can’t we all just get along” and all of that crap.

And it is crap.

So I’m not going to tell you what the script says I should be telling you.  I’m going to tell you the stuff that you don’t want to hear right now.  Because let’s get brutally honest here... as long as everyone is following the goddamned script, nobody’s addressing the problems that are getting ignored, because nobody’s saying what needs to be said right now.

First of all, we have way too many people right now with chips on their shoulders.  The GOP and their friends in talk radio and Fox News have been busy keeping those people riled up and pissed off like rabid dogs.  They’re spoiling for a fight. They’re itching for a fight.  They need to fight someone.

And it’s not like this is a sudden thing.  They can’t even blame this on Barack Obama being elected President.  This has been building since the 80’s.  This is something that has been growing and ballooning and festering like an infected ingrown hair, and every so often something happens to set it aside.  The bombing of Oklahoma City in 1995 and the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 were moments of pause.  The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the Iraq War were also moments of pause.  The former were warning signs of where their anger was leading them to.  The latter provided targets to focus their rage and their hatred on.  You want to know why the cons and neo-cons have held a rabid hatred of Obama from day one?  This is why.  It has nothing to do with Obama and everything to do with an orchestrated and engineered pattern of rage and anger to keep the rabid on the side of the conservatives and neo-conservatives.

Then on the other side, you have people that are filled with rage and frustration because they’re seeing murder being carried out by people with badges and they’re getting away with it.  The police can’t even excuse these new incidents as just “thugs and hoodlums” like they have previously!  Both victims legitimately carried a firearm and had all the legal permits and permissions.  They did everything right, and they still ended up dead by a cop.

And here’s the really crazy thing: these are people that are told to put their trust in “the system” to do “what is right”.  And eventually they do that, and then the system screws them over and it lets the cops walk!

You see, what is not being told in the whole “trust the system” script is the fact that the police are part of the system!  You can’t hold the system to account for their mistakes, because in the pompous self-serving minds of those in power, they cannot do anything wrong, ever!

Look at what is happening in Baltimore!  A year after an African-American’s death at the hands of police, the officers responsible are all being let go one at a time!  The community that was tearing itself apart last year and set off nation-wide protests was told to trust the system, and they eventually did, and the system is now screwing them over.

And this is something that the Fox News “’Muricans” refuse to recognize.  They’re stuck in their pretentious self-righteous bubbles of arrogance and privilege waiting for these “uppity people” to just pipe down and shut up and move on so they can go back to getting Donald Trump elected President.  That’s why they have those snarky asinine little sound bites like “Cops Lives Matter” and “All Lives Matter”.  After all, it’s the Fox News “’Muricans” that are supposed to have the chips on their shoulders!

This is going to happen again, and it will get worse.  I don’t care how many calls for peace you make.  I don’t care how many “conversations” and “dialogues” you have.  The system will continue to fight any attempt to hold the police to account for their actions.  You’d have a better chance talking judges and prosecutors into sawing off their own feet.  The only way it will change is when those in power have a vested interest in that change.

The other thing that needs to be said that people don’t want to hear right now has to do with what happened in Dallas, when a lone military vet decided he wanted to be the judge, jury, and executioner of “white cops”.  I’m sure he thought he was righting some kind of wrong when he did what he did, but the ugly truth is... he did just the opposite.

What this guy did was make police into victims!  He undermined every single call for justice with his actions.

And this goes for anyone who thinks that murdering someone will somehow “right” any perceived “wrongs”.  It won’t.  In fact, all it will do is it will sanctify that person.

Remember when the whole thing about cops shooting and killing African-American men first started?  Whatever these men did before they died got erased in the eyes of the public.  It didn’t matter that these were criminals.  It didn’t matter that they were doing something seriously wrong.  The minute the cops killed them, they were absolved of any wrongdoing.

Remember the school shootings?  Remember when you had disturbed teenage boys deciding to enact some personal justice on those that bullied and tormented them?  Did they get any kind of validation from the public?  Hell no!  Did the masses suddenly realize what was happening to the shooters that caused them to take up the gun?  Absolutely not!  Their victims were transformed into saints!  Any wrongs they did before they died were instantly purged from memory.  The victims became saints, and the shooters were suddenly evil as sin.

I know we want justice for those that have done us wrong.  I know that probably more than some others.  I know that the scales are out of whack, and that it would seem a whole lot easier if a lot of people who have been doing us wrong were suddenly taken out of the equation.  But it is just fantasy to think that suddenly the world would right itself if that happened.  It won’t.  All you’ll do is turn yourself into the very evil you think you’re trying to eliminate.

I know our system is screwed up.  But a blind fanatical adherence to it at all costs – as those in the Fox News “Murican” crowd demand - won’t fix things.  Comedian Jon Stewart said it best back in 2014.  He said “You can truly grieve for every officer who's been lost in the line of duty in this country, and still be troubled by cases of police overreach; those two ideas are not mutually exclusive. You can have great regard for law enforcement and still want them to be held to high standards.”  It’s one thing to take a stand, to demand things be fixed, to push for things to be fixed.  But the minute we take it upon ourselves to carry out a quick fix of the violent kind, we become just as much of the problem as the people that have caused it.

We need solutions, not talking points.  We need to fix the system, and that means giving up the ones that don’t want things to change.  And until we’re there, we have no right to tell others to simply “trust the system” when we know that trust is a lie.

Week of 07/04/2016

240 Years Later And We Still Don’t Get It
– by David Matthews 2

This week’s article will be released on July 4^th, 2016; the 240^th birthday of the United States of America.

I know we’d like to think that our forefathers were great and noble people that “gave” us this country and that we’re just squandering the “gifts” that we were given from the sacrifices made almost two-and-a-half centuries ago.

Conservatives and neo-conservatives seem to operate on the delusion that America was “bequeathed” to us from God in the same way that Moses came up with the Ten Commandments in the Book of Exodus, and that the only way we can “keep” this country is if every single person and every single law and every single policy and every single item and every single structure and institution follow their specific religious standards.  Oh, and they get to determine whether or not we are all “following” those standards.  And if anything “bad” were to happen to us – terrorist attack, shooting spree, Stock Market collapse, plague, Donald Trump’s hair getting messed up, another Kardashian coming into the world – then it’s “our” collective fault for all of us not being “devout” enough.

To conservatives and neo-conservatives, freedom is not only a “blessing”, but it is a privilege that they give and take away in the name of their version of God.  We kiss their asses and pray the right way to their ideas of God and we bury ourselves in their false images and pretenses, and we’re “allowed” to exist.  We resist or question their authority or we challenge their standards, and we’re branded as criminals.  Our “privileges” are taken away from us.

And to complete the delusion, they want us to pretend that this is not only the way that it has been, but also the way that it was always “meant to be”.

Don’t just take my word for it!  This is in their own rhetoric!  This is what they tell people!  This is what is in their own books and their own radio programs and their own editorials and their own cable news channels.

Liberals really aren’t any better in that regard.  They also have their standards, and those standards have little to do with any semblance of equality or fairness.  They seem to operate on the delusion that there is something “missing” and something that is “owed” and that they need to “right the scales” until everything is “fine”.  And, again, they’re the only ones that get to determine what that “balance” is.

Yes, they do talk about freedom, but not in the way that cons and neo-cons do.  And to them, it’s not “set in stone” and adherent to a specifically-personal interpretation of God.  No, if they do embrace freedom, it’s dynamic and subject to evolution... just as long as they get to control the evolutionary process.  Like breeders that come up with all of those purse-rat dogs.

We don’t get it.  We still just do not get it when it comes to what freedom really is in America.

I’ve discussed what freedom is six years ago in a three-part series available on YouTube called “What Is Freedom”.  If you haven’t seen it yet, I urge you to do so, and to tell your friends about it as well.  And when you see it, you’ll understand why the liberals and conservatives – and especially the neo-conservatives – just do not get it when it comes to what freedom really is.

And... this is going to come as a shock to some of you, but many of America’s “founding fathers” had no idea either.  In fact, I seriously doubt this is what they even wanted in the first place.

Let’s get brutally honest here... America’s founding fathers weren’t saints or geniuses or visionaries. Not all of them anyway.  They were elitists.  They were the upper crust of society.  They pompously believed that they would speak for all of the 13 Colonies when they decided they would become a new nation called the United States of America.  Yes, they were white, male, privileged landowners and businessmen who didn’t like what was being done for the benefit of King George III and Parliament.

You know what else?  A lot of them really didn’t know what to do after they decided we’d form a new nation.  That’s why a lot of the people who were signors of the Declaration of Independence didn’t go on to create the Constitution of the United States.  (Never mind the fact that some of them died in the meanwhile or else suffered misfortune.)  None of them said “Hey, we’re going to break from England and form a new country with a new set of rules and leaders and piss on everything the British monarchy stood for.”  A great many people in these colonies wanted everything to be just as it was then, just under new management.  They simply didn’t want England to get all the gold while we got the shaft.

We had to be sold on the idea of a new system of governing.  That’s what the Federalist Papers were meant to do.  They were selling points.  We had to be sold on the idea of freedom.  And even then it was only meant for an elite few in this new country.  We are talking white male landowners, and usually of the dominant religious belief of the area.  Women, children, slaves, poor people, it was same old-same old.

That is the utter hypocrisy of it all.  The very people who were shouting “Freedom” at the time only meant it for themselves and their friends, not for everyone.

Fast forward 240 years, and we still don’t get it.  Yes, we now say that “freedom” means for everyone regardless of race, creed, color, income, or gender.  But we still have a hard time applying it to everyone.  The bible-thumping, Wal-Mart-shopping, Fox-News-watching, talk-radio-listening Donald Trumps of the country think that it shouldn’t apply to Muslims or to the LGBT community, never mind to atheists and agnostics and free-thinkers, or for that matter, liberals.  The kale-eating, Starbucks-slurping, SUV-driving Hillary acolytes think that it shouldn’t apply to same aforementioned bible-thumping, Wal-Mart-shopping, Fox-News-watching, talk-radio-listening Donald Trumps of the country. 

And yet both groups will grab an American flag and grill up some kind of protein and watch fireworks and say “Happy Fourth of July”!

And in doing so, they are making a mockery of the very thing that we are supposed to celebrate and cherish in America.  And they’ll be very proud of themselves in doing so.