Wingnuts Would Turn Their Shining City on a Hill into a Pile of Excrement

They want superstition and ignorance. They want demons not medicine. They want might makes right, not equality for all, war and hate rather than peace and love…

 

“You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.” – matthew 5:14

It’s hard to hide a big pile of garbage, too.

Do you remember when we lived on a planet where the future was so bright we had to wear shades? Sure there were problems. There are always problems. But the Western World had embraced first the Renaissance, and then the Enlightenment and principles of individual human rights.

We found ourselves, despite the long Cold War, in a world of hope, where medicine and medical care were improving, life spans increasing, science was the word of the day, and superstition was being shoved back into the distant 13th century where it belonged.

We had surmounted demon-obsessed and superstition-based medieval medicine. We had defeated the plague, cholera and other diseases. We created vaccines which many now refuse to take. We are being told once again that demons make us sick, as though the germ theory of medicine were only a passing fad.

What happened?

Reaction. It looks, for all the world, like wingnuts are finally reacting to the Renaissance and Enlightenment about 400 and 300 years after the fact, respectively.

It’s almost as if they decided that, doggone it, the sun DOES revolve around the Earth, the world IS flat, and demonic possession DOES cause disease. And oh, by the way, only god makes borders and if you violate them, you spit in god’s eye.

Wingnuts have gone god-centric.

Definitely a loss of privilege contributes to their collective mental imbalance. Wingnuttery is about the status quo. And let’s face it, everything that has happened since the dawn of humanism in the 1400s, on through the very secular European Enlightenment, and on through the idea and its implementation that all human beings are equal – and all religions too – has upset the status quo applecart and then some.

It seems they just can’t take it anymore.

And so we’ve come to the point where anything we say they don’t like, anything we do they don’t approve of, every action we take they insist we don’t take, is in some way a persecution of them. Heck, they are saying they expect to be rounded up and shipped off to FEMA camps any day now, if not rounded up and simply shot. They’re almost giddy with excitement at the possibility.

They’re going to be waiting a long time, because nice as the thought is when they say crazy shit about women’s bodies have magical abilities to destroy a rapist’s sperm, and about treating women as sexual chattel, and about atheists and blacks and Latinos and alternate religions like my own, it ain’t gonna happen.

Liberals actually believe in liberty. All the conservative projection in the world – and there is a LOT of it – isn’t going to change liberalism’s defining characteristic. The American Revolution – and yes, it WAS a revolution, social and cultural – was a liberal revolution. A wingnut revolution is an oxymoron.

You CAN have a wingnut counter-revolution, and that’s what the tea party amounts to. All those reactionary forces coming together in the smallest minds available to rail against change, mostly without any understand of that change, and of the historical forces which brought them about.

Education be damned, these people want to feel, not think.

And corporations and religions are more than happy to cash in on the ignorance train. There’s money in them there pockets.

OUR pockets.

So here we are again at a crossroads, with superstition behind us and science ahead of us, and it’s almost as though, while we balance on the tip of continuing our journey into a bright new future, these cretins are tugging us backwards.

They want superstition and ignorance. They want demons not medicine. And they want might makes right, not equality for all, war and hate rather than peace and love, a dystopian ugliness unmatched since the 13th century. Punish collectively. Punish the children. Punish those who refuse to believe.

Just punish somebody, dammit. Declare war on somebody.

The much sought after Shining City on the Hill is covered in excrement. It is a pile of waste, both figurative and literal. The shine is coming from a gummy sunlight streaming through poisonous clouds to strike the steaming wet surface of waste.

Let that be our Manifest Destiny. Ain’t it beautiful?