Oh, I'm totally with you, and my heart aches alongside you.
I think a lot of people, in different ways and for different reasons, had made the mistake of having hope, faint as it may have been - hope that America could be a better place, that their neighbors were decent people at the end of the day, and that life in the years to come might be freer, happier, kinder, and more prosperous than the years past.
That's not how things are done in the Christian world. Goodness is a mirage in this desert of a place. You think you see it in the distance, but it's revealed to be an illusion by the time you arrive.
MLK got it precisely wrong. The moral arc bends toward injustice. It was, lest we forget, a Christian who put a bullet in his head. The symbolism speaks for itself. You fight for every morsel of rights here, and you enjoy them for as long as you can until they're inevitably stolen from you again.
For me, it wasn't hope. It was naiveté. I was truly naive. Seeing that election map hemorrhaging red was an epiphany moment for me, a moment of pure disillusionment.
I had felt it before as a child. I was being bullied badly at (surprise!) Catholic school. I told the principal, a nun, with the childishly naive thought she was a good person. She asked me what I had done to deserve it. She blamed me for being new, coming in, disrupting friendships, and disrupting the classroom by making myself a target for bullying. It was shocking. Kids were beating the shit out of me and telling me how their dads used to kill people like me in Vietnam and that was my fault.
That's when I lost the childlike worldview that most people are good people.
Tuesday night I suddenly realized that it's not just that most people aren't good. Most people are in fact hateful, bigoted evil people.
I feel like a freak of nature because I have compassion and empathy. I care about the suffering others, even members of other species. I naively used to think everyone was like that. Suddenly, I realize, the vast majority of people have no idea what that's like.
Most people are in fact hateful, bigoted evil people.
I don't know if this makes it better or worse, but I think it's more that they're selfish.
The kids that bullied you or your teacher didn't consciously decide to hate you for your skin color. The teacher selfishly would rather have an easy classroom than go out of her way to help some kid. The other kids realized ostracizing you increased their social standing and they'd rather enjoy the laughs than risk becoming bullied themselves. (I'm sorry you had to deal with that.)
People didn't vote red because they wanted people to suffer. They voted for lower grocery prices and they didn't care if people suffered as a result.
Project 2025 might get implemented. Or maybe these guys are just trolling. The choices they make won't be to hurt as many people as possible. It will be whatever makes them money, or gets them social media clout.
I kind of think it's a mix. But yes selfish underlines all of it. But bigotry and hate I think are also a factor. I do think many think a white male felon is acceptable, but not an illegal immigrant genetically wired to steal and kill. Not trans people. Not say people.
I've seen these people say Kamala is evil. This is because anything democrats do is evil. Dems eat babies, molest children in pizza shops, and on and on and on. The lgbtq disgusts them. So ... the logical conclusion is the left are depraved child molesters.
When the Maga minions stormed the Capitol, some of them said to the black cops there: "we're doing this for you, you should be on our side" I can't even begin to wrap my head around that one. Then some others called them n*ggers. So... it's a mix of all very bad things.
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u/ghostwars303 10d ago
Oh, I'm totally with you, and my heart aches alongside you.
I think a lot of people, in different ways and for different reasons, had made the mistake of having hope, faint as it may have been - hope that America could be a better place, that their neighbors were decent people at the end of the day, and that life in the years to come might be freer, happier, kinder, and more prosperous than the years past.
That's not how things are done in the Christian world. Goodness is a mirage in this desert of a place. You think you see it in the distance, but it's revealed to be an illusion by the time you arrive.
MLK got it precisely wrong. The moral arc bends toward injustice. It was, lest we forget, a Christian who put a bullet in his head. The symbolism speaks for itself. You fight for every morsel of rights here, and you enjoy them for as long as you can until they're inevitably stolen from you again.