I have been on social media for a while now, and I’ve noticed that about every three and a half years, the heightened discourse over politics simmers for some weeks, and hits its fever pitch in late summer. This boiling over coincides with the hot, restless nights, shootings, and political conventions.
People who have been typically cordial start to take on a political surrogacy; my team is the best, and the other is about to cause WWIII, the apocalypse, or the destruction of America. If you love the other side, you’re an idiot. If you like the other side, you’re stupid, so I need to re-educate you, and let me bring my other social media friends in on the frenzy to show you just how much of a tool you are.
I get it, people have very strong views of their right and wrong. Most folk are able to see the other sides to arguments, and while they read others’ posts, unless something is blatantly obvious, they tend to keep it moving…maybe you’ll get a “like” out of them. Yet, I have some Facebook friends—and for goodness sake, even Linked In connections– that are out there to initiate discourse, to just plain vent, or to start a culture war. A post every couple of weeks about a thing said by a politician or a societal wrong, like a shooting doesn’t qualify. I consider those as public announcements. But there are some of them that say things that you can tell they picked up from the local barbershop or AM radio.
To you: No matter what I think about what you say, even if it is asinine, bigoted, backward, insensitive, or having varying levels of stupid all over it, you will still be my friend on Facebook.
Unless……you have personally called me out and justified your position based on your moral high ground. Lately, I have seen some of you upping the ante, driving full speed into the fog, making the leap that my support for any position differing from yours also means that I cannot be a Christian. And to take it a step further, most of these positions are coming from the Right.
I voted for Bernie, but you didn’t want to hear that. You see, you laughed at a man who wanted to create more taxes for the wealthy, and you angrily scoffed at his socialism solutions. Get that; you and I together are part of a faith that celebrates a belief in a socialist afterlife, in which all have mansions with the almighty, all are fed and clothed, and loved. While on earth, together we value the teachings of Christ, a descendant from our Lord who walked with the poor, admonished the rich, and was murdered by the powerful…yet your ‘faith’ leads you to the conclusion that any course that drives us closer to parity is in fact, a pathway to being unequal. But you didn’t debate me on that Christian/Christ/Money is the Root to Evil/It is easier for a rich man to find a needle/ thing when it came to wealth and God. I let it go; because that would be me on my moral ground, and I don’t want to go there with a person who see today’s Jesus as a conservative white male dot com CEO.
Now there is no more Bernie for me, and you are coming after me with a vengeance. You see the writing on the wall…no Bernie, he is defecting to Hillary Clinton for President. You start dropping post after post about Hillary–lying Hillary, murderous Hillary, sneaky Hillary, Hillary who wants to see your kids turn gay, Hillary who wants to take away your guns, but also wants to keep killing babies with abortion…..and then it gets nasty. The people who show up at the Democratic Convention are Devil Worshipers. Hillary is evil, Hillary is Satan; Democrats for siding with Hillary and what she stands for are evil. No Democrat or Hillary voter can be a real Christian.
Wha? The Non Democrat supporters now have a lock on faith too? I supported Bernie, and dude is at best an agnostic…but I wasn’t evil then. Now, because I am titling Hillary I am evil and I have lost my faith?
Let’s be perfectly clear: your last guy standing is Donald Trump. He has never walked by the measurements of faith that you use to challenge me. He has been accused of rape, he has been endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, and his political platform speaks to racial division and bigotry. He has thousands of lawsuits against him for business practices, and most of his comments are significantly misleading to downright lies. He has never held office and doesn’t understand public policy or government, but wants the biggest job in the world; he doesn’t want government intervention in business or taxation, yet he got his start evicting people in subsidized housing, has declared bankruptcy four times and has stolen public funds from city budgets through non-payment of debts, and he won’t release his tax statements as there is a likelihood that he is doing business with a foreign entity that is a US enemy state, and he has donated virtually nil to charity.
Yes, but he is still better than Hillary.
That might be a funny punchline if told correctly, but that is all.
Now, you have told me that to even question this suggests that there is a problem with me. My problem is that I cannot look past the particular candidate and roll with the whole Republican Party. Even if he needs help, I need to support this Party. See, the Party will handle everything, and the Party is moral.
Then they do either of two things; they are acknowledge ‘yes, he is a flawed candidate, but…’ HOLD up: Al Gore was a flawed candidate: Trump makes Bill Cosby look like the better choice in giving out Halloween drinks to white sorority girls at a rave party. Or two, they absolutely ignore the reality that Trump is their candidate, and start off every comment with the number one issue for religious conservatives: abortion. In the Pachinko machine of morality, as soon as you cast a position on abortion, you get slotted down a path. There are 50 more important platform decisions that affect all US citizens than this one, but they won’t let you think of that. Abortion is it brother. You don’t believe that a person (I said a person, because a man who sides with the woman is also included) should have one for any reason; you get the nod. You don’t believe exactly that; you get put at the line of indecision, and get placed at the equivalent of the kids’ table of Christianity on Thanksgiving. You believe a great deal more about not infringing into someone else’s body, and you are a worse sinner than the person having the procedure. You see, you know better….better? What am I to do about someone doing something with their body that I cannot control? That my faith and current law tells me I should not control? It does not matter; your lack of verbal commitment to the cause makes you a murderer. You are in alignment with a political party who believes in murder. And then they let their Facebook friends gang up on you. These people start calling you everything short of nigger, and you say to yourself, I gotta see who this nutcases are. When you see the profiles of their friends, they do not look like the America you know; they don’t act like the America you want. Then you go though their pages, and you see the race comments about Obama, or Black Lives Matter, or the jokes—and there are so many jokes– which range from chicken eating, to being monkeys, to bad grammar Mexicans…and then it gets to the guns and the flag and eliminating all of those who don’t fit their bill of Americans.
And I say to myself; so now we have it. In my compromise posts—and as I look back over the years, they all were compromises to ease the peace– I have told you that as a black man who can trace my roots to slavery, I have a hard time with the prospect that the only way to stop abortion is to enslave the pregnant women. I have a hard time with your candidate that believes you change immigration laws and do not believe in the ability of others because of the color of their skin. I have a hard time with a man who doesn’t disavow the Klan, and there is strong evidence that his father was aligned with the KKK. I have a hard time with a man who puts out falsehoods that 87% of whites murdered are because of black men, when the numbers are almost inverse with white on white murder. I have a history of understanding what it is like to see blacks being called rapists and murderers, and I have a hard time with a man who labels others as such. We haven’t even gotten to his lack of vision, his lack of civility and his absence of details to make this a constructive conversation. When I throw out facts, or analysis, or reason, or the decency card, you fall asleep. But why do I need explain myself to you? There is nothing sacred about my beliefs as to yours…why do I owe you an explanation in the first place? You don’t back down, you don’t see it any other way, you don’t apologize. I am wasting intellectual arguments on you. I have born my soul to get you to understand to hear you only say ‘eh, sounds like a cop out;’ ‘you aren’t doing enough;’ ‘that still doesn’t cut it..’ Why do you feel so superior, even with an inferior argument, time after time? Then it hits me, you cannot ever be inferior to me, and religion is just a part of it.
I have to quit you. You are a manager of people; you are a counselor; you are a teacher; you are an adviser, you are a coach. You work with people all the time; that is your job. Life must be pretty lonely for you; all of these people you meet are liars, idolaters, sinners. You are not casting any stones; you are just reading it how it is. I have no idea how you can work with people that while you are looking at them, secretly you wish you could banish them, stone them, or send them to hell yourself. How can you possibly help someone to which you cannot understand them, or you believe that their very existence is an abomination? You are living the ultimate lie.
You didn’t like MLK, because he was a liberal and a ‘racist’, but you sure use him to your advantage when it comes to dismantling affirmative polices for underserved….’what about the content of one’s character?’ ‘What about giving someone an opportunity based on their ability?’ you say. But when it needs to be put into practice, in your camp, you stare at the ground. Was Sarah Palin among the best or the brightest? Is Trump? You call yourself a Christian and you can understand what it was like to be Moses, but you cannot understand what it is like to be black in America (particularly funny because you have not made the logical leap that Moses was black). You have been silent about police brutality, yet when cops get murdered, you tell the world that we need to heal and stick together; your friends yell that blacks are being evil, and you say nothing. You distort the facts that tell us police are of all stripes, their killings in the line of duty are the lowest they have been in almost 50 years, and nearly 3/4ths of those killings are by white offenders. When you are faced with a rebuttable truth, you are Judas.
Your guy is not enough of a problem to see that he is presents a big issue to me, and yet I am the liar. A lie is to spread a falsehood; the notion that you can accuse one candidate as the liar while being in bed with a person who has lied about everything astounds me.
If I vote for Hillary, I won’t be doing it to start a revolution; I will be doing it to stop one from Trump.
But when I unfriend you next week, you won’t be hearing it.
Goodbye Melania.
holowe 