In my praise of Bob Dylan three days ago I quoted one of his lines, “Don’t criticize what you can’t understand.” I can’t understand this….but I do criticize it.
Yesterday morning a man set fire to his house, then drove to the rail yard where he worked, then shot and killed nine employees as they were getting off the night shift. He then committed suicide.
Two hours before the gunman left his flaming home we were treated to the otherworldly spectacle of a full lunar eclipse. This is what it looked like from my deck at 4:10 am.
Another image below of the same event by a nearby resident.: The photo isn’t the point. The text is. 14% of Americans believe the earth is flat; 26% believe the sun revolves around the world.
I can’t understand such stupidity, and I freely criticize the morons who believe either of those two false premises.
Wait. There’s more.
Trump lovers would take a bullet for him. Women would freely give of themselves to have sex with him. His base believes that he wasn’t elected, that he was actually selected by God to be the President of the United States. There aren’t enough adjectives that accurately address the depravity of the twice impeached scumbag that inhabits that loincloth. I can’t understand the devotion, the blind acceptance, the denial of facts and truth. I don’t try. I can only criticize.
Last Thursday Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgian congresswoman, compared the wearing of masks inside the House of Representatives to the holocaust.
"You know, we can look back in a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star and they were definitely treated like second-class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany," Greene said. "And this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about."
It isn’t news that MJT is stupid. That’s been well-known long before she was elected. Her embrace of right wing conspiracy theories, her belief that California’s wildfires were started by a Jewish space laser, her acceptance of QAnon’s unhinged beliefs, all was known before she ran for Congress.
But here’s what I don’t understand—that Georgians in her district believe her, that despite her evil intentions she is one of the most prolific fund-raisers in the Republican party, and that the leaders of the party fear her, so much so that they won’t do anything to rid themselves and this country of this “troublesome priest.”
Maybe there’s a very simple explanation for all of this—that within the human breast the forces of evil constantly vie with the forces of good, and whether one attributes those evil forces to an external source—Satan, witchcraft, or an internal source—original sin, human fallibility, or free will, this is simply human nature. Ergo, our existence on this planet will be forever stained by the presence of those who accompany us on this ride—the evil, the incompetent, and the hopelessly stupid. So maybe I do understand, but I’ll still criticize. And no one, especially yours truly, is immune from these afflictions.
But why now? Serial murders, stupidity, cults, and political malfeasance have been bread and butter on the nightly news as long as we can remember, but the golden statue in the loincloth elevated them, gave them affection and respect, brought them out of the gutter, and served them to the masses on his faux gold platters in Mar-a-Lago.
What to do? Remembering that we have free will, we can choose to rejoice in the morning just because we woke up, acknowledging as Maya Angelou wrote, “There were people who went to sleep last night, poor and rich and white and black, but they will never wake again. And those dead folks would give anything at all for just five minutes of this weather or ten minutes of plowing.” We can co-exist with The Flat Earth Society, the Trumpies, QAnon theorists, the Marjorie Taylor Greenes, and cowardly Republicans, but we have to oblige ourselves by living the lives that nourish us, to be, as Angelou suggests, “the rainbow in someone else’s cloud.”