Dumb breeds dumb.

The last couple of weeks have shown the true thoughts, feelings, mindsets, and prejudices of some Utah Democrats – men, women, and various pronouns – and had disgusted me past a point of chalking it up to difference of opinion, or shitty grammar. All from people who were pretending, up until this sequence of events, to be decent human beings.

Here’s what set me off on this today: J.K. Rowling just dropped a searing feminist tweetstorm everyone should read

The last few days in particular, I’ve seen women called whores, cunts, and bitches (with a few various other insults mix and matched for sickening variety) for little more than asking that victims not be attacked and shamed.* The victims … what they’re getting is is near criminal abuse.

Cleaning Up

I’m purging and blocking this week. I’m killing contacts in my phone and email. I’m walking away from people I worked with, worked for, trusted and respected (and, not for nothing, a few ass clowns where this was just a matter of time).

You can be angry without debasing a minority, a gender, a pronoun. You really can. I have been insulting people my whole life with acrobatic linguistic dexterity and the few times I’ve slipped, I’ve regretted and done my best to apologize for. “Shithead”, “FuckWit”, “Republican” – these are simple, entry level insults, with no gender, sexual, or racial bias. You can use these without victim blaming or slut shaming. You can be a combative asshole without being a cowardly, shameful example of how evolution has, in specific cases, totally and epically failed.**

Abandoning Principles

Democrats, Liberals, progressives … whatever label the left decorates itself with is supposed to mean something MORE than the base societal standards that fall short so often. Fight. We’re supposed to FIGHT. Fight for the oppressed, fight for the underdog, fight for the victim, fight to make the world better and brighter than we found it.

Democrats are supposed to be evolved. Look at how much the party has changed over it’s lifetime. The Robert Byrd’s are dead, and the Republicans have taken on the mantle of oppressor, bigot, and bully. There was a brief window where Democrats lived up to mission and potential. Sometime during the Bush2 years, but beginning during the Clinton trials, we abandoned the FIGHT for polite complicity, and we are damned for it. Willing volunteers to our own demise and downfall.

Finger Pointing

I blame a lot of different people and groups, but I have a special place in my finger pointing for George Lakoff and his worshipers. They abandoned the FIGHT for “pretty please” and founded a political religion on whining, and acquiescence. Those zealots ran off the fighters to consolidate a mighty power base of impotence, incompetence, and profiteering from purposeful defeat.

So, this last couple of weeks, I’ve watched people I liked and respected total abandon their masks, and embrace the ugly side of their pathetic true nature. Over the last year, I’ve watched people who should know better rage against the youth movement getting active in the political sphere, and part of what seems to be fueling the ugliness comes from fighting against the status-quo of rolling over and accepting defeat. These kids (I’m 45 this year, I get to call them that) have drive and conviction. They’re here to FIGHT, and they – and their convictions – are being shat upon by people aging out of any potential effectiveness, however unrealized.

Whatever should have happened, however this scandal should have been handled, is forever lost and the damage this has done cannot yet be weighed or measured. I can only pretend at hope that the ugly reality of the last couple of weeks can be defined, and then shunned, and then hounded out the party – for the good of humanity, no matter how little they constantly prove they deserve it.

—-

* adding insult to injury, I got dragged into the dipshittery and blamed for it because these same people assume that seven original women, and then more after (including a few men), couldn’t possibly stand up for themselves without a man organizing it. Total bullshit, on several levels.

** this is an advanced intermediate insult. Work up to something like this. Stretch first.