The 2010s were a decade of transition. At 11:59 PM on December 31, 2009 who thought that transvestites would be the most coddled and protected class in America as the decade came to a close? Hell, when we woke up to the new decade on January 1, 2010 the gheys still couldn’t get “married” in America. Trump was still a pop culture icon and Joe Biden was the VP, sniffing little girls and remembering what century we live in. We still kind of thought that Iraq and Afghanistan were about “the war on terror”. I was working a corporate wage-slave job and thought that the future was offices, long bathroom breaks and leaving early on Friday. We were so young and naive!
Things were getting sketchy in the 2010s. Thanks to the Great Uniter Obama, race relations were going in the toilet. Black Lives Matter rose to prominence and a mediocre quarterback got super rich by protesting a make-believe problem. In a span of less than 18 months, from June 2015 to November 2016, we had gay “marriage” magically found to be a Constitutionally protected “right” and Trump got elected in what likely will be a final middle-finger from the white working and middle class. By January of 2017 most of the country was slowly waking up to the realization that there was a small group of people in America who think they make the rules and those people hated our guts and want us dead.
But you could still kind of hide in plain sight in the 2010s. As long as you didn’t raise a ruckus you got to keep working and consuming. Most of my people spent the decade on the sidelines, other than 63 million of us casting a secret ballot for Trump.
In the Roaring 20s? You have to poo or get off the pot. Being neutral won’t be an option. They will be coming for you and nothing will be safe. Not your homes or your kid’s schools or your church.
Every single one of us will have to choose, more or less openly.
Will you get on the boxcar bound for the gulag?
Or will you stand up and be counted and declare you will not comply. You will not live in a pod. You will not eat bugs.
There isn’t going to be a third option. Think about where we are right now today. Then think about how much things have changed in the last ten years. Finally try to fast forward ten years to December 31st, 2029. Crap is accelerating already, it is only going to pick up speed.
Your safe job, your pension plan, your health insurance. None of that is going to remain safe for long. When they have taken everything away from you that keeps you from speaking up, will you finally stop being silent?
In this war for survival between tribes, your silence means you acquiesce to your own destruction.
Pick a side.
When the time comes, I will load my weapons with a heavy heart and join the resistance. The REAL resistance – that is, those who wish to preserve what was good, rational and "normal", not those who wish to smash it all to bits. And I will do so not for myself but for my children, and for their children. It breaks my heart that my grandkids don't know what it is to be a 'kid', to be safe, living among and playing with others just like themselves. As White boys, they are pariahs, the new marginalized and oppressed, as if they themselves were responsible for perpetrating the monstrous crimes for which White men, the very architects of the modern world, stand accused.
I don't know about you, Arthur, but I never owned a slave. I never blocked a school doorway to prevent a child from entering, never relegated a woman, barefoot and pregnant, to the kitchen, never hurled a slur at an illegal alien wearing a burka or speaking Spanish. I never met Jim Crow, never killed a mockingbird, never questioned anyone else's right to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness. Hell, I'd have to YouTube how to tie a noose, should I ever discover a need to tie one.
And my grandkids certainly never did any of those things, either. Yet here we are, charged, tried and convicted as guilty co-conspirators by virtue of our pale skin and male genitalia in Alice's demented Wonderland. The same pale skin that got my elder son jumped on his way to school from time to time when we lived in a 'diverse' neighborhood. The same male genitalia that even today has female hires a generation younger than I am racing past me up the corporate ladder on no greater qualification than their lack of a penis.
I am a late boomer who came of age in the last gasp of the 70s, long after the dust of the civil rights era had settled. In idealistic, long-haired youth I even considered myself a liberal. Yet today I might as well be the reincarnation of Bull Connor and George Wallace. That clip you posted yesterday of Michael Douglas could be any one of tens of millions of us older White guys. We will all be casualties in this war.
TwoBuckChuck
If you haven't already picked a side by now I will never trust you anyway.
That implies willful ignorance as to what has been happening in front of your face for the last twenty five years.
I understand the sentiment but almost everyone has been living that way. I don't care as much how long you have been here, as long as you get here before it gets really spicy.
TBC, it is going to be total war when it happens. Like I wrote yesterday, we all followed the rules other people set for us and in return they are trying to exterminate us.