Tag Archives: Trump supporters

Rise of Militias… Hatebreeders / The Misfits

A Response…

These “men” exemplify a trend towards the juvenile among male culture in our society. How much time, energy and resource have they poured into this foolishness which begs what they pretend to fear… the erection of oppressive power which threatens democracy and freedom itself.

It seems to me there is a common gauntlet we must all run, which fills us with anxiety and little promise of fulfillment or security… a gauntlet we all soon learn can only successfully be addressed with an aire of enthusiasm, feigned or no. That is entrance into the marketplace. No one escapes it, we need money to live… no matter what vain pursuits you enlist to deny it’s necessity–such as, survivalist preoccupations.

Further, we all understand from the schoolyard that to show weakness is death. It is one of the many animal traits we are capable of descending to when will, consciousness and a sense of dignity finally fail us. And as with rats, when we perceive vulnerability, we are every bit as capable of bullying, beating, stealing, betraying… in a word, cannibalizing one another.

Yet rather than facing their own insecurities, identifying and addressing them directly… these men are too vain, instead they would thwart their own experience and ability to perceive, to redefine their fears. They would rather live in contrived fear of an armed threat in which their answer accommodates some action movie fantasy in which the are pitted shoulder to shoulder gun in hand against an oppressive government.

A government, meanwhile, due to their lack of engagement… is left in the hands of lobbyists serving moneyed interests not concerned with the plight of the countries citizenry, but the preservation of cornered markets and large holdings of wealth.

And these fools… in their camouflage and all male retreat… only step out of their secluded homoerotic fantasies long enough to engage in the democratic system in the most base and basic manner possible… merely to vote. And who do they vote for?! A billionaire casino owner who games the system to the detriment of working men and women… who doesn’t pay his bills, who inherited his money and has ties to Putin’s Russia! It’s so absurd a joke that to laugh requires a degree of self-negating insanity.

I believe it was engraved on the largest cannon barrel to be forged at the time of it’s creation… 18th century France, I believe… ‘The last reasoning of Kings.’ But it was better rephrased by Isaac Asimov, [Violence is the last resort of the incompetent.] But in this case… the devolution has taken it one step further (or backward) … A gunfight is the first dream of boys who would have you call them men.

And to the asshole who says he worries about a [tyrant] and just wants to be “prepared”… how about fostering a little self-awareness, reading a book and becoming engaged? I know it isn’t as sexy as a camp full of automatic weapons and men dressed up in camo, but I guarantee it’d be a whole hell of a lot more effective.

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Trump’s Appeal is Psychological, Not Ideological

I grew up in Oak Park which borders Chicago on the west… except for a stint in the military… I’ve lived my whole life in and around Chicago until just a few years ago. There are ~13 million in the state of Illinois, ~10 of which live in metro-Chicagoland. I now live in central Illinois.

I went into the Farm and Fleet the other day wearing my Hillary pin and the kid behind me in line was openly glaring at me and muttering under his breath angrily. I said something about how I suspected the trend in micro-homes and RV’s seemed somehow to coincide with the rise of the Billionaires and the woman at the register chuckled a bit and vowed never to go back to a double-wide.

Though she was polite, I am sure she was a Trump supporter. I stopped a moment to chat with an older woman waiting for her husband and picked up the thread of conversation we had been having about Billionaires in politics, our Governer Rauner has held up a state budget for over a year now demanding cuts which would put pensions, funding for services such as psychiatric outreach, not to mention schools and educational programs, at risk. Companies have gone under waiting for checks from the state. Educators and other state workers live in a limbo of insecurity. state colleges and universities are drastically cutting curricula. And people like this woman I stopped to talk too say they are voting for Trump because they don’t trust Hillary.

Not wanting to cause any unpleasantness with this, otherwise, nice woman, I steered the conversation to an unacknowledged crisis we are having here in Bloomington. In the first 5 months of 2016, in a town of 79,000, $8.6 was spent in video gambling machines. I spoke about how one third of that money goes to the video gaming vending co. and how there are no jobs of any substance created by this business even while so much money is being siphoned out of our local economy. I was speaking to this woman but facing and projecting my speech to the lines of people checking out. I saw only one potentially attentive and sympathetic smirk at my point.

I ended with, [these business people are running a business which takes advantage of people’s hopelessness to the detriment of the entire community.] She excused herself as her husband had showed up with the truck and I said good day to her… leaving the dangling conclusion that Trump was just this sort of person. These are scary times, there is no convincing people. Trump’s appeal is psychological, not ideological.