Through the Spyglass: False Gods
Things have certainly felt easier in these United States. It isn’t often where you feel so much happening all at once. It’s more than disorienting when it feels like everything is burning.
Billy Joel once famously pointed out, “We didn’t start the fire. It was always burning since the world’s been turning… no, we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.”
That song served its purpose; show the world that times have always been crazy. It appears to have been a successful venture in retrospect, with the song having earned him a Grammy nomination and the number one space on the Billboard Hot 100.
The people heard it and loved it, with the idea of the ever-burning world putting itself in the subconscious of many. People now widely take for granted “Well, the world has always been crazy.”
We won’t be discussing Fall Out Boy’s hackjob here.
But there are times where things are especially crazy, and I think we are living in those times today.
Famously, the aforementioned song starts in 1949. Which would be post-World Wars. We often take for granted that the world burning is meant to show it always has been, but it’s those moments when the world is eating itself alive do we need to focus out proper attentions on.
There are plenty of points in history you can point to and see how bad things can get. There are watershed moments that shape the trajectory entire world. It is the explosion that we often remember in history; the World Wars, the US Civil War, even the Revolutionary War. We are taught about the build up to the explosion.
Strangely, we often glorify it.
There is no doubt in my mind that we are heading in a direction we may not be able to come back from if we don’t address it now. We might not have reached that point of no return yet, but I fear just how close we might be.
Let’s take a moment to understand the situation we find ourselves in.
Nearly two weeks ago, as of the posting of this article, a 16 year old who was radicalized online and expressed neo-Nazi views shot and critically injured two students at Evergreen High School in Evergreen, CO before committing suicide.
You might not have heard about that because, that same day, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed.
Two weeks before that, a gunman opened fire at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis during morning mass, killing 2 and injuring 21 before committing suicide.
You may have heard about that one, because much of the narrative was spent around the fact that the gunman was trans.
Also in Minnesota, two months before that, Democratic politicians Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman were shot, with Rep. Hortman and her husband succumbing to their wounds.
Of course, I could keep jumping back and back and naming incidents. But there’s two that happened after Charlie Kirk’s death that got lost in the shuffle.
The first was the black student at Delta State University who was found hanged from a tree. This immediately conjured up images of lynchings in the Deep South. Many felt panic, wondering if this was retaliation.
The same day, a white man in Vicksburg was also found hanging from a tree. Being homeless, many wrote that off as a perhaps understandable suicide. But in a state with a history of lynchings, and with tensions on the raise, one could never really know for sure one way or the other if these are connected or if these incidents are indeed lynchings.
In this political climate, I’m not willing to commit to saying I know for sure. But in this political climate, it has become increasingly clear how capable we are of turning on each other.
The second incident I want to mention comes from a supporter within our party. They shared with us that their friend was attacked in Renton, WA by a group of teenagers hurling homophobic insults.
This is unambiguous. This is a hate crime.
This cannot happen.
What is becoming of our countrymen? Growing up, the “Land of the Free” really did feel like the ultimate goal. It felt as though we were getting there. Perhaps it is the optimism of a 12 year old who remembers Obama selling us “Hope”, but it felt like our troubled past might remain there and that our future might truly be bright.
Of course, it wasn’t really that way and things didn’t suddenly take a turn for the worst. This has not happened in a vacuum.
When this country ended apartheid in the United States, which we gently and more kindly referred to as “segregation”, we were perhaps on track to better correct the issues faced following the failures of Reconstruction. The country had the chance to move forward from its past and start anew and do it right.
Instead, we elected Ronald Reagan, an opponent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to President in 1980.
The Republicans enjoyed the White House until 1993 when Bill Clinton took over. It was during the Clinton administration that the second player in this fold comes into play: Newt Gingrich.
These two men, in my view, took an unwillingness to change with the times and turned it into a full-blown Culture War, with their Republican Party as the aggressors.
That Culture War has spiraled. It has gone beyond making Democrats look bad. It’s well past blocking Obama’s agenda. It has developed into US citizens attacking and fighting one another.
We, as countrymen within these United States, have forgotten who our enemy is. The trans person is not your enemy. The Catholic is not your enemy. The people who work for a living are not your enemy.
It is those in power, those that refuse to lose and let go of that power, as well as those who want a piece of and to be apart of that power, that stoke the division into us. The Powers That Be who want us angry and against each other instead of them.
Right now, for all intents and purposes, it is working.
This might not mean much to you now. This might not mean much in a few years when this becomes a time capsule for the political atmosphere in 2025. But it cannot go on with us watching idly and saying nothing.
The Pirate Party, in our platform, promises to make sure that our government is transparent and accountable to the people. But we have a responsibility to hold ourselves accountable to each other.
We, the citizens of these United States of America, cannot turn to violence among one another. You have far more in common with a trans person from the city as a farmer from the sticks than you do with Elon Musk. Your black neighbor will understand you better than Donald Trump could.
Let us never forget who is behind this divide. The Republican Party and the right wing in this country are not “punk rock”, they are not “counterculture”. They hold every major branch of government. They are the government. While I hold contempt in my heart of the spineless democrats who not only allow it to happen, but also emboldened the worse candidates via the Pied Piper strategy, the blame does fall squarely to a group longing for a pre-Civil Rights era.
Do not fall for their propaganda. Remember that they want you divided. Remind them that we are the United States and they are subservient to us, not the other way around.
Love thy neighbor. Beware of false gods.