"Be Human"

 

I saw this post by John Pavlovitz:

We now have a concentration camp in Florida. 

Stop pretending any of this is normal. 

If you claim to be a good person and you're not outwardly opposing this regime, you're not a good person.

Be human.

Jethro's Big Beautiful Bullshit is destructive to the social safety net. Deliberate cruelty aimed at other peoples may be, evolutionarily, ingrained in our species, but thank gawd that the great majority of us struggled through our wars and now as a majority condemn deliberate cruelty (while ironically watching it motivate a hero in every action thriller in the history of the world).

These are the Times of the Bully. Isn't it obvious why? Jethro's a mean and hateful man, always self-serving and belittling of others (Zelenskyy in the Oval Office), and don't his adherents feel privileged now to let their own venom of resentment flow. Everybody wants to cuss everybody else OUT, all the time. "Karen" has virtually become a sub-species. Road rage, sometimes inflamed by bumpersticker spite, is mos def on the rise. The guys with all those stored up guns talk "civil war" with other jacked-up dudes, and violence often accompanies pride. You know which Pride.

MAGA has turned the videos of masked ICE-men and -women roughing up brown-skinned peoples into a kind of porn -- fantasies fulfilled of violent retribution, and oddly, proof of worth to xenophobes. They love ruthlessness in uniformed surrogates who manhandle the very people they have a particular reason to hate and resent and wish to eliminate from the landscape.

I'm not apart from these Times. I feel the steam off the crock of anger rising in myself, turning to full-on hatred that might involve some yelling at inanimate objects, like TVs, or some fully articulated epithets said out loud about other drivers. Not a good thing in me. Meanwhile, I get a huge kick out of being totally inconsistent, because I also applaud aggressiveness and the willingness to take it to the streets in some of the leaders on our side. We do have to stand up to the bullying, even at risk of harm. That also is being human.