TygrBright
TygrBright's JournalOh, God, Here We Go Again: Dear Denmark
Dear Denmark-
I want to apologize, on behalf of all adult-Americans, for the childish and insulting behavior of the Occupant of the Oval Office toward your nation and its leaders.
Please believe that we ordinary Americans have great respect for you, and profound gratitude for your steadfast friendship and alliance in promoting past shared geopolitical principles of advancing world peace, justice, and social equity.
Please know that an actual majority of us STILL share those principles and goals, and are appreciative of your national examples of tolerance and progressive change and non-violent solutions to troubling issues around terrorism, economic inequity and world migration.
We are, for the moment, stuck with the Occupant and his sycophants, but we as ordinary citizens are doing all we can to hasten his departure in a manner consistent with the above-mentioned shared principles.
As you are aware from your educated appreciation of your own and world history, these profound errors cannot be rectified in a day.
We love you peeps, and are grateful for your forbearance.
embarrassedly,
Bright
3:00 am thinking...
Things catch up with me, yanno?
I do what I can, from day to day. Try to find ways to bear light, to oppose the darkness. Keep reminding myself that I can't fix the whole damn' world.
Most days I can find something to be grateful for. The weather. Fresh peaches ripening on my trees. A cheerful phone call from my elderly mother. Snuggles from the Feline Overlord. A bit of news, here and there, of people doing the right thing, the human thing, the loving thing.
Mostly, it's enough.
But lately, just the last few days, I wake in the darkest hours of the night, and I stare out into the shadows of the bedroom, and watch the black branches toss against the charcoal background of the window, and the shadows are full of unanswered questions.
And the biggest question is:
How are we going to make this right again?
Americans, neighbors, people living among us, are committing crimes against humanity.
Americans, neighbors, people living among us, are tearing apart families, locking up children, putting people in concentration camps.
Americans, neighbors, people living among us, are gathering in smug secret little social media gatherings to dehumanize people, to promote bullying and cruelty and cowardice.
Of course, most of them are "just following orders".
And I shiver in the darkness.
Those are words full of deadly weight.
How will we ever make this right?
Even if- in the unlikely event that we hold the "leaders" accountable in some way- (briefly, I fantasize seeing Stephen Miller's dead-eyed face in the dock, waiting for a judge to pronounce sentence... briefly, I fantasize the confiscation of ill-gotten fortunes and the funding of thousands of libraries and day care centers and free clinics...) -what will we do with the not-leaders?
The ones following orders. The ones "enforcing the law". The ones who righteously believe it was perfectly okay to treat human beings like trash, like a disease. In the service of their own faith in the rule of a law that privileges them as somehow right to do so.
At 3:00 am I wonder how it was in some small, quiet German city in 1948. Did neighbors look at one another with unspoken doubts? "Was that you guarding the platform to make sure none of the people being loaded in the boxcars escaped?"
How does America heal from this?
At 3:00 am, I cannot imagine.
And in the sunlight of 3:00 pm, I cannot imagine, either.
Things I considered undeniable truths of our shared communal understanding of rightness are becoming translucent, shaky, fading...
Can we ever make this right again?
sadly,
Bright
Nomenclature Check: LISTEN UP, news media, law enforcement!!
Kindly expunge the phrase "active shooter" from your vocabularies. Add it to your "do not use" filters. Please instruct your spellchecker, Siri, whatever...
to substitute "HMWG (Homicidal Moron With Gun)" for "active shooter".
And, there's a BONUS for you journos in the audio and video media: You get to pronounce this, and here's the correct pronunciation: "HUMWIG".
Got it?
Because "active shooter" is a term often used in video games, teevee action-hero shows, comic books and comic book movies, and it has acquired in the minds of certain deranged melanin-deficient racist/misogynists suffering from acute testosterone toxicity, a veneer of "cool".
"Oooooo "active shooter"!! Wanna be one of THOSE! Maybe they'll make a video game of me, THEN I'll be important!"
Kinda works, doesn't it?
On the other hand...
"Oooooo "HMWG"! Sounds... um... lame-o..."
Yep, that's the ticket.
So that's what y'all can do for America today, folks. If the peeps listening to the police scanner hear "Reports of active HMWG downtown, respond all units"?
If the talking head at the scene peers earnestly into the camera and states "The humwig was shot by police, so we can't yet speculate on what motivated him"...
If the Internet headlines on the Google search return "HMWG at Peoria Arby's, police report casualties"...
Yeah. Please help out with this.
creatively,
Bright
It All Started With Pong...
...clear back in the 1950s.
In 1958, to be precise. Well, the Atari version came out fourteen years later, but all those computer engineers... they STARTED IT!!
Personally, I blame the amount of time it used to take to compile your programs and punch the tape. The computer guys weren't even allowed to smoke in the computer room back then, they had to do SOMETHING.
A mere sixty years... three generations... later, we're mowing each other down in Wal-Marts and nightclubs, yep.
A slippery slope indeed.
Do these people ever even LISTEN to themselves?
Dayum...
disgustedly,
Bright
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