Venting on the Sabbath

But this isn't really about politics, you see. It's not about right vs. left, but right vs. wrong.

A couple months ago, John Oliver summed up my feelings about giving Drumpf's presidency a chance: "In the broadest sense, I get that impulse. Hope for the best in the face of very long odds. It's like we're on a plane and we just found out our pilot is a wombat. I don't like this, I don’t understand how it happened, and I'm pretty sure we're headed for disaster, but what the hell? Come on, Batty, prove me wrong! And the thing is optimism is nice if you can swing it, but you've got to be careful because it can feed into the normalization of Donald Trump - and he is not normal. He is abnormal. He's a human 'What is wrong with this picture?' He sticks out like a sore thumb, and frankly, he even looks like a sore thumb. So giving him a chance in the sense of not speaking out immediately against policies he’s proposed is dangerous. Because some of them are alarming... [I]t sounds like you're reading the to-do list on Satan’s refrigerator, which of course Satan no longer needs now that hell has frozen over."

Because Drumpf was allegedly the "lesser of two evils" (which might as well be the Republican Party's slogan), many Hillary supporters who are accustomed to me being on their side probably expect me to shut up and not criticize him anymore, kind of like how a bunch of them went to town chewing up Mitt Romney during the primaries but suddenly had only good things to say about him when he became the nominee. Sorry not sorry, but no can do. I not only have no respect for Drumpf, but no longer even have respect for the office of the presidency because if someone like him can come within eight hundred miles of it, then it's clearly a joke. Of course I wanted him to pleasantly surprise me. I didn't hate everything he did this week. A lot of people are angry about him following the lead of Ronald Reagan and George Bush and signing the Mexico City Policy back into law, but personally I'm not at all bothered that my tax dollars will no longer be used to fund abortions in foreign countries. There were other things he did that I decided weren't worth the effort of being upset about, or else it would be a long four years.

Other things are less forgivable. I'm done giving him a chance.

I was so angry last night that I had significantly more trouble sleeping than usual. I was so angry that in the attempt at an initial draft of this post, which was lost due to Weebly being stupid, I referred to Drumpf as a "living excrement stain". Although that assessment stands, I've decided not to use it anymore now that a cooler head has prevailed and I'm trying to be a good Christian and stuff. Anyway, I'm sure you've heard by now about him making good on his promise to stick it to Muslims, but not those from countries where he has business ties, and specifically those who have already been forced from their homes, jobs, and possessions. Not judging anyone, but can I just say as an aside how grateful I am now that I didn't throw away my principles and vote for him as "the lesser of two evils"? That would have haunted me for the rest of my life.

Anyway, Drumpf has confirmed that his idea of making America "great" again includes discarding the values that made it great already. He apparently intends on rewinding our social progress back seventy years. Hey, wouldn't it be ironic in a really sick way if Jewish refugees during World War II, such as Anne Frank and her family, had also been denied entry into the U.S.? But I mean, surely if that had happened we would have learned our lesson and never allowed such a thing to happen again... oh wait. Crap. This country has been far from perfect, and it's had its share of human rights abuses, but I thought it was a learning process. I thought we were getting better and coming closer to the ideal that it was founded on. And maybe we were until 2017. If this is allowed to stand, the terrorists have won. Daesh (the name I call ISIS because for some reason they've threatened to mutilate anyone who does) are probably laughing themselves sick at us right now. They will have scared us to the point of rejecting the values of our country that they hate so much. They will have tricked us into damaging our own country more than any suicide bomber could dream of.

Maybe there's nothing I can do about this, but I'm not going to let it go. I'm not going to shrug it off and be like "The sun will still rise tomorrow, herpa derp derp." That would be easy enough to do because, as another so-called Christian helpfully pointed out, it doesn't affect me at all. It probably never will. Maybe it will. Maybe this will be a slippery slope and someday the Republican government will be targeting Mormons (again). But whether that ever happens or ever has the potential of happening is completely irrelevant. If "First they came for the Muslims" remains "They only ever came for the Muslims", that's enough. It's not acceptable. And I'm going to fight it in whatever meager insignificant little ways I can. John Oliver also had this other brilliant thing to say: "If we don't get actively involved to at least mitigate Trump's damage, things will not be OK. And yes, the sun will rise each day, but the continuing rotation of the earth should not be your baseline expectation of American society."

I guess that's all I need to say about that for now.