penfist

stories are the bones of everything

trump

Othered

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You’ll have to take it on faith when I tell you that I understand how a coward thinks. I used to get beat up after school. Not because I was a coward. Mostly, I think, it happened because words matter.

I had so many to choose from, and I loved that.

I love that fact still.

The coward’s way is the ability to stop listening. To filter out the voices that disagree. The ones that offer another perspective.

The ones that are smarter than I am. They are better at othering than I am.

It’s all scalable. I’m not, by any measure, the smartest one. I hope only to be among those found, by the measure of history, to be one of the ones most able to listen.

I probably won’t matter enough for history to notice, but that’s most of us. That’s the 99%. I love them, and I wouldn’t mind being relegated into their tribe.

I was only human.

It is why I unblocked every single person I’d ever blocked recently. We all have a voice, and I want to take every one I have the time for into consideration. If this is a popularity contest, and it is, then I need to figure out how a spray tan man took the highest office in the land. Then I need to figure out how to end his reign.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. And everything else that has been observed by the weak who refused to give away their power.

Be the change you want to see in the world. Refuse to filter out that with which you cannot stomach. You will grow stronger. As a coward who wishes to grow into some other state of being, I can tell you from long experience that scars are not shame. Wear them proudly.

Write down the names of your enemies. Burn them in effigy. Join your tribe with that of another and rejoice. The weak ones always win when they band together and make demands.

We can do that. If we overcome the fear.

I will not allow my weakness to be my master. Not should you. Study your enemies. Invite them into you house. Tell your tribe to keep their knives sharpened and their eyes and ears always open.

We win because we are legion and they are cowards more craven than we.

I will fight. Will you be my tribe?

I won’t other you. I won’t let them other you. I won’t take your humanity away just because we’re different. You can be my tribe, if you learn to listen.

Tear down the wall, or just refuse them the power to build it.

Make America great again

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The world isn’t ending no matter how you voted. Trump is going to be the next President. Barring acts of god or other forces beyond our collective control.

#MAGA

By the way, America was never great.

It has had moments of self-awareness, and little flashes of excellence, but America can’t be made great again, because it never has been great.

Pick any moment in the history of this country, from the start up until the present, and you will find stains on the pages.

Think we were great because of the founders? Half of them were slave owners. Black people were worth 3/5ths of a white person during that time and they could be bought and sold. Not great. The founders took the land they built this country on from people who already lived on it. We call them native Americans today, and early Americans abuse the ancestors of today’s native Americans horribly.

Maybe you think we were great when we saved Europe from Hitler during World War II. You’d be wrong, because while we were busy doing that admittedly righteous thing, we were still segregated at home. We built concentration camps for Japanese-Americans because of paranoia. Not so great.

But America defeated communism you say? That’s what makes us great! Not so much. One could argue that communism isn’t such a bad concept, but I won’t go there. I’ll just remind you that   we fought a lot of dirty wars to do what we did to bring down the Berlin wall in the late 80’s. Take a moment to research how many dirty wars the CIA has funded only to cast aside the fighters it recruited for political convenience. Google the Hmong, or Iran Contra, or just “the worst things the CIA has done.” American government has a long history of installing and funding atrocious, despotic governments and making friends with bad people. Remember Saddam Hussein? He was once a great friend to America. Before he became a great enemy to our great country that has never really been great for any sustained period of time.

Maybe you think America was great more recently. Let’s say you think it was great after slavery and segregation and all the secretly funded dirty wars. We finally made some progress on human rights and immediately started massive spying programs that break our laws. The NSA collects data on all Americans and possibly all the world for all I know. I know for certain that our so-called great nation is spying on world leaders and governments while keeping many secrets of its own from us. That doesn’t seem so great to me.

America was never great. It only has the potential to be great in the future. That’s the real challenge of a Trump presidency. Admitting that the starting point of his entire campaign is a lie. I don’t think he’s up to the challenge. I’ll be watching and commenting the whole way, as he attempts to make America something is has never been. Again.

Next time someone tells you we’re going to make America great again, I hope you’ll call them on it. We can make America great for the first time, but we need to start from an honest place to do so.

It just feels like a waste of time

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The political system in the United States is broken

I watched the first presidential debate of 2016 last night. Gross.

Why do I have to choose between a shady, back-room power deals career politician and a shady, back-room power deals career businessman? Both of them are liars. Both of them are flip-floppers. Both of them are power hungry. These are not qualities I can support in a leader.

Every logical fallacy I am aware of was at play in the debate last night. These two individuals are not the best choices to lead the United States for the next four years. We shouldn’t have to choose between two paragons of fail. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are not root causes. They are not the disease. They are the symptoms of a bigger problem.

The virus of the two-party system, where all opinions are slowly silenced until there are only two voices left. A system of decision making that offers only two choices is not healthy. The debate last night didn’t offer any real dialog about the problems average Americans face. It didn’t offer any real perspectives. That’s because, in the United States, minorities who aren’t bought are still silenced. That’s the real problem.

If you’re a socially progressive and fiscally conservative, like I am, there isn’t a real choice. If you believe politicians should be honest and responsible, you don’t have a real choice this election cycle. If you think government should operate transparently, always choosing to balance personal liberties with social infrastructure that demands personal responsibility, neither of these two is palatable.

They will both hoard power. They will both continue the vast, non-transparent, morally bankrupt security state we’ve been building since Sept. 11, 2001. We’ll keep using drones to extra-judicially murder those who, real or imagined, represent some sort of threat to this nation-state. All of our options will continue being boiled down into soundbites that lack any true substance. I can’t vote for that. I won’t vote for it. I don’t want to build a wall, and I don’t want to create more failed states like Libya and Syria in the name of the American people.

We owe it to ourselves to destroy the two-party system that offered up these two as our best hope for turning the ship before it collides with an iceberg named mediocrity.

I asked my girlfriend to register to vote. “It just feels like a waste of time,” she said. She’s right.

Until we manage to destroy the two-party system, this country is going to continue its downhill trajectory. It doesn’t matter which party wins in the upcoming election. The problem isn’t the candidates, it’s the system that offered them up as saviors.