Categories
2020 Election Politics

They’re Afraid

I know.

Ominous title, right?

Who’s they? Why are they afraid? And who or what are they afraid of?

We know who they are.

We know what they believe, what they do, what they fear, what they love.

They’ve made themselves pretty clear over the past four years.

And because of their actions, they’re afraid that their awful behavior is catching up to them.

They feel the heat as we continue watching voter turnout records shattering in Texas, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. They see the polling, and they’ve seen their former brethren turning on Derp Führer.

But of course, they always have to say something before fading to oblivion.

When one side’s views become so unpalatable that they have to strip the rights of ordinary citizens to vote, they resort to lies and intimidation.

They spread misinformation and bully others into acquiescence.

They separate and destroy families.

They appoint justices to the highest court who have no intention of following the law, hoping when the time comes that these judges will discard legitimate votes or prevent them from casting ballots at all.

They redraw districts, they purge voting rolls, even grind the government to a halt.

They dog-whistle, they race-bait, they tell the majority that they’re really the minority.

“Just give up.”

And when all of those ploys fail, they bulldoze the other party’s signs, they run busses off roads, they get the police to do their own dirty work, and tell their silent majority to police their own neighbors.

They tell you this because they know, they KNOW, you outnumber them.

They’re afraid because you will defeat them.

If turnout were close to even 70% of the population, the right would never win another election at the national level.

They’re too racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-democratic to win genuine support from anyone but their rich benefactors and loyal cronies addicted to perpetually reinforcing the ceilings of their own lives.

If this country does what it should do on November 3rd, 2020 and oust President Dumpster Fire, then shit will dramatically change. Not because the Democratic Party wants to make strident reforms, but because their voters will demand them to make long overdue changes that frankly might be too little, too late.

No matter what happens, progress always wins.

Dinosaurs become fossils.

They always have, and they always will.

Categories
The Game of Life

Unrequited Love in an Epidemic

I can count on one hand how many times I’ve dated someone with mutual attraction. It happened in freshman year of high school. I was barely 14 and my first girlfriend was ultra-conservative. Like, mission-trips-to-Africa conservative. She and I got to first base on, like, three occasions before like a coward, I broke up with her over the phone.

My second girlfriend during my senior year was hopelessly in love with me. She had awful self-esteem, had been abused when she was 12 and was bottling up years of frustration and rage that my breaking up with her likely nudged to its bold manifestations in college. She later told me she’d fucked multiple guys and even cheated on her first serious boyfriend.

Sometime this year, she got married.

In January, I finally got laid.

Over the ten years since that last relationship, I’ve fallen for countless women whom I found irresistible. They all had a similar vibe: nice, polite, funny, slight attitude, self-reliant, and 100% sure they had no feelings for me.

Failure after failure plagued me until losing my virginity, the one highlight that feels so long ago that I may as well have tossed the ol’ v-card during that long-ago senior year.

The fact that you, the reader, know this personal bit of trivia about me hardly makes a difference. The truth is that it never really mattered in the first place. All that changed is that I know what happens when one actually manages to score. Aside from that, it’s business as usual.

Living with your near-elderly parents fucks up your confidence enough. Adding a global pandemic on top of that hurdle makes the thought of dating a mere fanciful fiction.

I’ve been on five dates tops since moving back home, all first dates, all last dates.

It’s clear why I’m not finding any luck, it’s mostly low self-worth and fear of failure. That’s nothing new. What WAS new was how little I cared anymore.

Once I had sex, the world was quiet.

If I ever thought of someone whom I had a crush on, it was a moment of blissful fantasy before hastily snapping back to the present.

Until I ran across a recent crush’s timeline showing off her boyfriend’s recent on-air accomplishments, the career I just so happened to abandon after I met the two of them before they got together this past winter, when she was technically “available” or as close as one can be at a given moment.

Instantly, that quivering gut punch slammed my chest. The blood pumped through my ears, my vision clouding over with jealous conceit.

Unrequited love, my oldest tormentor and closest companion, rang throughout the corridors of my psyche with unpleasant familiarity.

Lockdown has turned my focus away from serious thoughts of courtship. I have crushes here and there, mostly on women I’ll never meet in person at the moment. A few are people I know or knew once, either from school or work.

All either finding their other, in the process of meeting that true love, or posting endless Instagram stories on baby’s firsts.

I’m but an astute observer scrolling by snapshots of their best moments – or joyful memories worth sharing in public while keeping the messy shortcomings of their union behind lock and key.

Stuck in neutral counting down the days until election night in fitful anticipation, this wound of my pride plunks me into annoyed action, the clacks of my keyboard pecking the air while a distant car accelerates down the expressway a few blocks behind me.

Like I imagine so many other self-flagellating souls on the Earth, I’m hunched over feeling sorry for myself with little to no desire to make the necessary changes to one day get back into functioning society with a semblance of a clue as to what I’ll do if normality ever does return.

But hey – I did get laid.

Take your victories where you can?

Categories
Baseball

Backup The Truck

The last pitch of the 2020 season fittingly sails by the flailing bat of long-past-prime Jason Kipnis’s bat, ending the strangest yet most predictable season in recent Cubs memory.

A team that squandered scoring chances with regularity swept at home by a franchise that hadn’t seen playoff baseball since the year American Idiot saturated the airwaves, Saddam Hussein had just been deposed, and the Cubs hadn’t won a pennant in 58 years.

Fast-forward to the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, a disease currently – and quite literally – plaguing the sitting President of the United States, has left over 210,000 Americans dead, and four years since the Cubs’ greatest franchise moment, and Brandon Fucking Kintzler strikes out the side to end the last season the 2016 core will likely stay intact.

Where they go from here is anyone’s guess. 2016 NL MVP Kris Bryant wants to get paid but has struggled with injuries and consistent hitting. Kyle Schwarber, the folk hero of the team who’d come back from an ACL tear in April to DH for the Cubs on the road in Cleveland, finished the year hitting 11 HR’s in 60 games………..but hitting .188 with 66 strikeouts, or roughly one K per game.

Jon Lester looked over the hill for the majority of his season, struggling to a 5.16 ERA in 12 starts. He’s a free agent, 36, and not worth even a one-year deal.

Yu Darvish should win the Cy Young award this year but won’t because racism.

Kyle Hendricks LOOKED like he was gonna have a Cy Young season until he began serving up homers with reliable regularity.

Jeremy Jeffress already far surpassed anyone’s expectations having wresting away the closer role from Craig Kimbrel (though that wasn’t much of a struggle for JJ).

Kimbrel, meanwhile, finally just started to look like a semblance of his former dominant self. But is his contract worth keeping on the books? Also, if it isn’t, who the hell would take him?

The club’s two biggest sparkplugs, Javier Baez and Willson Contreras, at times seemed unfit to play Double-A let alone the show. Their combined postseason output of 2-for-12, one walk, a HBP and 5 strikeouts (all Baez with the last one being a called third following a Heyward leadoff double in the 9th inning) suggests that perhaps they need new approaches at the plate or new jerseys in a different organization. I personally love both Willy and Javy, but their fucking mishaps in the box and this past season in the field are tiresome and frankly intolerable.

Adbert Alzolay should be in the rotation if not perhaps the back-end of the bullpen, and the team ought to find some pitchers who can throw 100+. But with Theo Epstein now being a free agent, who on Earth knows what direction things will go.

As far as I’m concerned, I’ve no patience. A team that walked away with the pennant and eked out one of the most exhilarating come-from-behind World Series triumphs in the game’s history is now just that – history.

The Cubs need to shed so much of this roster while also adding just the right number of contact-first hitters, fire-balling pitchers all while balancing the budget to re-sign the right guys. And as of this moment, I couldn’t tell you who those people even are.

As armchair GM, that’s way above my pay grade.

Play that lonesome loser’s tune.

Categories
2020 Election Politics

A Call To Arms Against The Autocratic Despot

Holy mother of Jesus H. Fucking Christ.

It’s not a dispute, there’s no debate anymore.

Donald John Trump, the 45th President of the United States of America, is a Nazi.

More specifically, he is a white supremacist fascist seeking to rip the country into pieces just so he can avoid millions of dollars of debt he’s been ducking for at least a decade.

This man has no morality.

He has no soul.

He has no good bone in his bloated body.

The bastard is a Proud Boy, an aficionado of the right-wing warmongering terrorists hoping to launch their dearly beloved race war and reclaim what they believe is rightfully theirs.

A country built by African slaves on top of land stolen from indigenous Native tribes, buttressed by day-laboring Asian rail workers. Poles, Irish and Italians to staffing steel factories throughout the industrial North. The Slavs and Eastern European Jews selling anything from produce, insurance, tailoring suits and dresses, Central American and Hispanic migrants picking our fruits and vegetables across swathes of American farmland, chauffeured from home to work to the club by first-generation East Africans, Arabs, Sikhs, and every skin tone under the sun.

This country, an island of misfit toys from former empires and authoritarian hellscapes.

This land, OUR land, which has failed to reconcile it’s ugliest past and allowed to metastasize the abhorrent, repugnant, vile, beguiling, deviant, and irredeemable menace of odious cowardice wrapping itself around the flag of the Union while foremostly displaying the banner of betrayal and white separatism.

This country does not belong to them.

It never did.

Do not let them have it now.

VOTE.

Categories
Politics

Fight

Devastation.

Numbness.

Fury.

Desperation.

Abject defeatism.

I’ve got nothing.

Absolutely.

Nothing.

Last night at around 7:30 pm, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. The death of such an important figure in history would normally be met with grief, sorrow, and gratitude – and those emotions are being shown throughout the country right now.

They shouldn’t be beset by fear, tarred with toxic hatred, or drowned in core-shattering anxiety.  

And yet, in the undisputed Worst Year Ever, we the sane of this country are not so much mourning for the fallen Supreme Court justice than the inevitable end of America’s most important civil rights statutes with a swift, hypocritical self-fellating shoe-horned judicial appointment, putting at risk millions of women’s access to abortion, equal voting rights for all races, and people’s rights to affordable health insurance.

The Rubicon has been crossed.

The other shoe’s thudding crash to the ground echoes throughout the world.

We have officially reached the worst-case scenario.

Jews are told to ask for forgiveness as a way to start the new year on solid moral ground free from the millstone of our day-to-day misdeeds since we humans are imperfect beings who sin. Be they sins as small as telling the odd white lie or gossiping behind a friend’s back, we’re told to seek apologies for any harm we’ve inflicted on those around us. It’s an embodiment of one of Judaism’s core tenets: tikkun olam or “repair the world”. In other words, leave this Earth a better place than it was when you arrived. Be the change you wish to see, but with a more of a Jedi flourish.

This Rosh Hashanah, I have no intention of asking the scores of internet trolls I’ve told to fuck off and eat shit for forgiveness. I don’t wish to ask G-d for penance after spending the better part of this lost year fighting with strangers online, and openly hoping for the deaths of countless politicians and pundits whom deserve not a minute more of breath.

I’m shamelessly resolute in wishing ill-will on Republicans seeking to vandalize the Supreme Court as a final fuck you to the millions of Americans who’ve rejected them time and time again only to be rewarded with the most brazenly un-democratic electoral process exactly as it was intended – to strip the populace of true power over our elected leaders, leaving them accountable to only their messianic cult of crony capitalism and its chief operatives.

For the first time in my 28 years of life, I am prepared for battle. I’m ready to fight for every goddamn piece of this nation, its principles, its potential.

I don’t know exactly HOW I will channel this new-found courage, but I’m sure as shit not going to apologize for thinking and feeling this openly incensed.

The other side didn’t wait for RBG’s body to be lukewarm before announcing their plans to consign her and her legacy to oblivion.

And if we’re going to repair the world, then we’ll need to annihilate the corrupt political machines ruining it.

The planet burns as a virulent pestilence sweeps from nation to nation. No amount of self-reflection or contrition will hinder these immediate and destructive crises.

In this year of 5781, I choose war. Not because I want it, but because it has chosen me. It’s chosen all of us. To pretend otherwise is a dereliction of duty to your children, their children, and so on.

This is our last chance to repair the world before it’s too late.

Alav ha-shalom, Justice Ginsburg.

Categories
Blogs The Game of Life

Allow Me to Re-Introduce Myself…

Originally, when I wrote my first post, I had no intention of using a nom de plume.

I poured out a heartfelt anti-New-Year’s-Resolution-resolution to be unapologetically honest about my thoughts, beliefs, values, the whole shebang.

Before I posted it, my mentor gave me some feedback. They didn’t have anything to say other than one piece of advice:

“Don’t write it under your name.” Why, I asked incredulously? “Don’t close an open door. You can write what you want in the meantime, and if someone finds out who you are, then you can own it. But you don’t want to put yourself in a place where you can’t move out from.

“Keep your options open.”

And so, the two of you that read this on WordPress on the first day of the new decade saw the name Samuel Brody appear on your computer screen for the very first time.

It made sense. This way, I could get out my frustrations, throw the proverbial penny in the fountain of the World Wide Web while maintaining my privacy. Win-win.

Then March happened.

And then April.

May.

And so on…

This piece took so long to write that when I completed the first draft, Black Lives Matter was still some radical leftist movement yet to be deemed safe enough to be cosigned and co-opted by the likes of Hardee’s and Starbucks. We didn’t know about Putin’s bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan. Sarah Cooper and Mary Trump weren’t publicly-recognized household names. Michael Flynn was still going to jail. Carl Reiner, Ennio Morricone, Kelly Preston, Jerry Stiller, Little Richard, John Lewis AND Chadwick Boseman were all still alive. Confederate statues were still untouchable. The Redskins were still a thing. Trump’s Gestapo wasn’t wreaking havoc in Portland, or anywhere else for that matter.

Now, after months of virus, deaths, racist murders, fascism, and circular firing squads online and on network TV, we’re starting the cycle of insanity all over in the worst version of Groundhog Day. The “president” and an entire political party now in denial that the virus is a massive present-day crisis, infection rates skyrocketing thanks to moronic white trash protestors storming small towns in the name of liberty, and OH FUCKING LOOK! Yet ANOTHER unarmed BLACK MAN SHOT MULTIPLE FUCKING TIMES IN THE BACK for DOING NOTHING WHATSOEVER.

Sorry, that’s a lie.

Jacob Blake was being black while stopping two white women from fighting. So, for his troubles, he got harassed by an overzealous mangy racist piece of shit with a badge, tried to leave, then got his liver, kidney, and spinal cord pumped full of lead.

In front of his three kids and fiancée.

And the Thin Blue Line horde thinks he should have complied while effectively being stopped-and-searched out of his OWN FUCKING CAR.

Then, to no-one’s shock whatsoever, riots broke out in Kenosha once the local SS started shooting rubber bullets and tear gas at peaceful demonstrators. The next night, the racist Kenosha PD allowed a 17-year-old self-described militia man and aspiring cop with an AR-15 shoot and kill two demonstrators and then escape back to his home in Antioch, Illinois before he was eventually apprehended.

So, not only did they paralyze a 29-year-old black man with his whole life ahead of him, they let Hitler Youth come in from out of town and KILL the people they’re sworn to protect.

The same people they were gassing and beating.

This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me.

I’ve dealt with depression, anxiety, and existential fear my whole life. Never have I been so consistently depressed, constantly anxious, and endlessly fearful for so long.

Aside from having my favorite distractions from the real world postponed and stuffed away in an attic for six months, nothing has quite terrified me more than the real chance that A) I can get sick and die due to my type-2 diabetes. B) I get sick, am put out of commission for weeks, pull through but not without possible life-altering lung scarring or heart damage. C) One or both of my parents contract the virus and die. Or D) we all sit in shelter for the entire summer, watch hundreds of thousands of people needlessly perish, see that incompetent sociopath tangerine lie his ass off into the hearts and minds of panic-stricken Americans, and watch as we not only lose every sense of normalcy we’ve known in this country, but then hand the next four years (read: decades) to QAnon all because the fascist and his enablers know that mail-in ballots will prevent them from suppressing the vote in order to hang on to their gerrymandered power. Pair that with naive dipshit super-liberals and equally infuriating “bOtH pArTiEs SuCk” non-participants who’ve duped themselves into thinking Democrats and Republicans are remotely the same right now, and you’ve got the perfect storm for yet another minority-rule electoral disaster.

On multiple fronts, the COVID-19 pandemic scares the ever-loving shit out of me and has ground my nerves down to nothing but frayed burnt ends.

I spent the first week and a half of the shutdown clashing on Twitter with #NeverBiden Bernie Bros, MAGA bots, anyone that tried to downplay President Fuck Nugget’s atrocious botching of our response to the virus, etc.

When I wasn’t rooting around for trolls, BBC’s coverage of the pandemic showed me the colossal scores of death and suffering around the planet. I learned about the crisis in Italy. I watched Indian day-workers walk hundreds of miles back to their villages with nothing in their pockets. I shuttered as more truck-loads of bodies were loaded up in refrigerated cabs in Queens, and later again in Phoenix, Miami, Oklahoma City, Atlanta.

I kept thinking why in the living hell did I not go out and see my friends more often before this whole Kobayashi Maru of a year erupted in our faces.

So, as some folks drowned their boredom in Animal Crossing memes and Tiger King marathons before moving on to endless TikToks and The Last Dance and a myriad of other mind-numbing content, I continued working as if everything was the same while being reminded every waking moment of my life that things were most definitely NOT the same, nor did it ever feel like we would get back to where we were pre-COVID. I finally got some sports back, but by then it was too late to bring me more than fleeting relief.

My long-term relief involved eating a steady diet of microwaved homemade nachos, pizza, burgers, any high-carb no-vegetable smorgasbord of foods listed under the “DO NOT EAT” section of diabetic starter guides your doctor hands you when you’re first diagnosed.

Then, my family purchased an air fryer, and we began loading up on chicken tenders and mozzarella sticks, and one time some broccoli. I’ve gone from watching my weight and walking nonstop during my lunch breaks at my office two years ago to now working out of our guest bedroom-turned-my-permanent-office, my only periods of rest spent smashed under the covers on a recliner with a bowl of Chinese food watching Ghost Adventures, John Oliver, Desus and Mero, Trevor Noah or something in between.

I’m nowhere near where I want to be.

I wanted so desperately to be hired as the play-by-play guy for one of the infinite number of Minor League clubs currently facing impending doom after losing their entire 2020 season. Three years since my journey to that small-town Single-A club and I still can’t get the job I studied for throughout college. A career I saddled myself in thousands of dollars of debt trying to qualify for. The field for which I sacrificed a large chunk of my social life. A feckless pursuit of an unattainable dream that at the time felt more like an eventuality than a hope against hope.

But none of that matters now.

This may be the understatement of the decade, so forgive me for being Captain Obvious here. When you watch the world sputter to a grinding halt and see your country experiencing societal upheaval and fascist takeovers reserved for CNN special reports and PBS documentaries, your priorities change. You understand that things you thought were of the highest importance really weren’t, disaster movie mythos happens in reality all the time, and that above all, you merely inherit your life and your name.

Everything you truly desire, loathe, beseech, discard, hold dearest in your heart and contemplate raptly in your mind comprise your soul, guide your movements, deliver you to your ultimate purpose. Your environment shapes you into your ultimate true form. And while these things all make up who I am, they ultimately cannot replace the purpose of my name. It’s the first thing we learn about ourselves when we can hold memories of longer than two milliseconds. It’s how our parents, grandparents, teachers, adults, cousins, friends, enemies, all know us. It’s the most basic aspect of one’s life but one for which we’re remembered long after our actions.

And if you’re worth but a mere iota of that name, you use it to combat the ills of our world. You voice your objections to tyranny, stand in the face of angry oppressive mobs seeking to put you and everyone you love behind bars or in a mass grave for being born under a certain creed, religion, skin tone, what have you. If men like John Lewis put themselves in front of police batons only for their skulls to be caved in, why can’t we all have the balls to stand by what we believe?

I’m the only person I know on Earth with my specific name. I could share it with a long-lost 3rd cousin somewhere in Ukraine for all I know but as long as I’ve lived, it’s been mine, no other’s. The single-most important possession I own. The first thing that makes me unique.

So, with that in mind, allow me to re-introduce myself…

Hi, I’m [Harm to Ongoing Matter].

Yes, I know, weak sauce. I hooked you in and made you think you were gonna learn my “real name” right? This was all just an emotional ploy to get the currently zero readers of this blog to read 1,000 words of rage-fueled prose.

I wish this were an elaborate troll job. Sadly, it’s the reality of living in a world where corporations have so much power over their employees’ lives that said worker bee feels it’s too risky to openly voice their anger at fascists and their enablers, be they Republicans or Democrats or any other political party under the sun, to avoid being deemed “intolerant” of certain worldviews by HR.

So, in essence, your employer will be cool with you “joining the conversation” and writing about how scared you may be but will hope and expect that you conclude with some trite kumbaya-Why-Can’t-We-Be-Friends non-messages, nothing with any meaningful value or weight.

Though my current company is overseas in a different part of the world, I am too afraid to risk my 401(k) and steady low-paying full-time job in the middle of a pandemic which is not only causing waves of mini-genocides within our communities, but also an economic genocide of our job market.

So, now you know. I’m angry, wanting to tell you WHO I REALLY AM without hiding behind the fake name I came up with in about two seconds before launching this blog, but far too fearful to suffer the consequences of corporate respectability politics. You know, the same respectability politics that the current administration and its fiendish acolytes use to justify their incredible displays of racism they spew on the regular!

So, since I can’t tell you my name, I will tell you true facts about my life.

I was born 28 years ago in a Chicagoland suburb you’ve probably never heard of. I lived there for 9 years before moving to Atlanta. Heartbroken, I swore to myself that I would never be anything but a proud Chicagoan, the contrarian to all my redneck Georgia peers who had the nerve to be born in a state where slavery once existed (again, I was 9).

In somewhat militant fashion, I kept a contemptuous façade for my new home: puny, insignificant, a mere blip on the map that could never compare to my City of Broad Shoulders (and systemic racism, and eight-month Hoth winters).

By junior year of high school, I came to understand that my life was in Atlanta, my friends and loved ones only a few miles down the road and not whole states away.

Don’t get me wrong – culturally, I am SOOO damn Chicago to near parody, especially with sports and politics. But if you dropped me in the middle of Michigan Avenue with no phone and a map, I’d be as familiar with my hometown as a Trump doing actual work.

I spent four years at Georgia State University studying to be a journalist, landing a job at a radio station that laid off its whole workforce ten days after I received my diploma.

I went to the Carolina League to work for a team, developed a crush for a woman I convinced myself was my soulmate, watched her ultimately discover her actual soulmate, and navigated around a selfish, awkward, childish minefield of my own making. It was my true education, the one most get when they go out-of-state for school.

Thanks to the way things ended with the team, I missed the chance to see my Cubs win the World Series in person. Not a bad tradeoff in the end since I watched that surreal and now-ancient-feeling moment with my mother and father, the two people I love more than anything on this planet.

And then, well, you know…

That election crushed me. I’m not over it. I’ve been angry, FURIOUS, dispirited by the lack of accountability Trump is held to on a daily basis. Other people can live their daily lives without dwelling too much on the circus, but I can’t. I can thank the 2000 election for this political hypersensitivity.

The first winner-by-minority-rule contest of the modern day devastated my mom and dad. They’d lived through Nixon and Reagan just to see yet another GOP blowhard pandering to the religious right bumble into the Oval with calamitous, yet predictable results.

When Barack Obama became president, it truly felt like the dawn of a new day. Like we were going to be South Africa post-Mandela. Blinded by my upper-middle class childhood atop my privileged perch from the first-world, I quickly realized that Mandela’s victory didn’t fix South Africa. And by no means did Obama’s election deliver us to a post-racial utopia a la Star Trek and “I Have A Dream”.

Instead, we got 1985 with Biff as mayor – only our Biff is somehow more petulant, disgusting, and even less caring of the people he rules over.

And we’ve yet to find our Marty McFly.

Some still think Bernie Sanders, perhaps the Doc Brown of this metaphor, should be the nominee.

I’d have rather seen Elizabeth Warren head the ticket as opposed to the old white guy best known for being friends with our first black president (and also his VP I guess). But having been in politics since 1973, Vice President Joe Biden is also famous for lending a hand in the passing of some problematic criminal justice bills, overseeing the Anita Hill fiasco, weirdly massaging women or smelling their hair…

Then again, Bernie – the other old white guy left in the Democratic field – refused to walk back his over simplistic analysis of Fidel Castro’s “universal education program” (A.K.A. government-mandated propaganda) at the beginning of the Cuban Revolution for some idiotic reason because 2020. So, while remaining ideologically more palatable with far less of a demerit-filled legislative record, Bernie immediately scared away any sane DNC party officials wanting to win back Florida. Unfortunately, it’s now down to an old out-of-touch despot-in-waiting egomaniacal orange man or a well-meaning less out-of-touch old white man with 99.9% less fascist intentions.

To Joe’s credit, his platform is the most progressive since FDR’s, and he’s managed to convince a swathe of conservatives and right-leaning moderates that the greasy Kentucky-fried trust-fund-baby-in-chief indeed does not, nor will he ever, care about them, their well-being or even if they’re still breathing or taking corona-dirt naps.

He’s proven that he can give a presidential address, and with his softening stances on bankruptcy laws and marijuana over time, Biden has shown the capacity to at least hear the progressive movement out. Will he budge on healthcare? Probably not, and even if he does, he sure as hell won’t say so publicly until after he takes the oath of office (G-d willing).

So now, on the precipice of the destruction of everything I hold dear in chaotically desperate hope of something to save our souls, I’m mostly tense. My back is killing me. My shoulders are rounded, my neck knotted worse than a giant ballpark pretzel.

I’m struggling to find my purpose, a captive viewer to an unyielding and catastrophic news cycle, no light shining a path towards more than sheltered existence. The election will either be the worst day of my life, or the day the sun rises for the first time since we had a black president. Until then, I can only ruminate and obsessively worry about the outcome.

As a rule, I’m not claustrophobic. The last however goddamn months it’s been might have changed that. So, as long as I’m still on this planet drawing breath, I choose to be myself, TRULY unapologetically…but in a guarded manner from a safe distance.

In my earlier draft, I originally promised to write something slightly more uplifting after this post. But let’s be real here. There’s next to nothing positive enough to outweigh the thick and heavy blackness enveloping our societal psyche at the moment. It’s all dark as fuck.

Instead, let’s just play it by ear. Stay safe, and for the love of G-d wear a mask.

Categories
2020 Election Politics

Conventional Wisdom: Thoughts on the 2020 DNC

After four nights of touching montages featuring “real Americans”, condemnations of the current administration’s lack of regard for American lives, and a plethora of former Bush-era enemies and middle-of-the-road centrists preaching the return of unity, I really don’t know what to think of the Democrats.

I’ve supported them my whole life, and have voted for them since I first could do so 10 years ago. But after feeling a surge of hope that perhaps finally the country was going to see the light, I don’t know.

And that’s honestly more frightening than having zero faith.

I feel like the team Biden has put together should be able to make the case for an end to Trump’s nightmare regime. But seeing some of the party’s most popular young voices silenced to make way for the likes of anti-abortion conservative John Kasich and sexually-assaulting billionaire fuckboy Mike Bloomberg gives me more than a bit of a pause.

The average speaker on the screen this week appeared to be at least 50 years old. Now, perhaps that’s because Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are a combined age of 155, but this can’t be good when you’re already facing the geriatric rage monster of the #MAGA Republican Mob.

Even with mounting evidence that Trump is up shit’s creek and being sucked into a destructive whirlpool, I can’t ignore the Democrats effectively white-washing meaningful street activism while hawking up on military circle-jerking and wrapping themselves in the flag (though still at least not trying to fuck it). Montages of Joe Biden rallying the same troops HE VOTED TO SEND INTO IRAQ. Watching these beautified shots with inspiring piano music, strings, and then that obnoxious over-use of Springsteen’s “RIIIIIIIISE UUUUUUUUP” after every single damn montage…

It’s all so fucking fake!

Phony!

Sleepy.

Pointless.

Worst of all, out of touch.

Trump isn’t in touch with reality. Then again, are we so sure that the DNC is? Sometimes, I really don’t think that’s the case. We’ve seen hordes of protesters demand that our leaders acknowledge and end systemic racism at its root sources, reverse climate change before it’s too fucking late, and march to literally save school-children’s lives from the threat of being gunned down during home room or honors biology.

What do the Democrats focus on?

“Unity.”

They spent 15 minutes playing up Joe’s faith and love of G-d. They trotted out former Obama-Biden Administration opponents and roadblocks who demand that we now listen to them after they spent 8 years hinting that our most recent president was a Kenyan-Muslim subversive.

Meanwhile on the last night, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss as the MC took every other minute to rip on Trump as other good comedians have done the past 3 ½ years. Perhaps this will be effective, and maybe it won’t feel icky that in one joke, she made light of a fascist president sicking American troops on peaceful demonstrators just to take a Mussolini-esque strongman portrait, wielding his unread Bible like an orange grim-faced statue.

Hopefully, the other seemingly tasteless jokes actually landed with the rest of those viewing.

After 3 days of optimism, I plummeted down from my cloud nine into a shadowy heap of abject fear that these fuckers are gonna piss this thing away. As I first wrote in the very first post on this site, I’m worried that we are spiraling towards a world where Trump becomes the American Hitler thanks in part to a weak opposition party just like the one Adolf demolished on his way to dragging Germany into 12 years of black, dark, blighted evil filled with chaos, lawless pilfering, looting, and genocide.

By the end of the big Zoom meeting of Ex Candidates Island, I was so fucking terrified.

When Tammy Baldwin tried pumping up the crowd from home, I was looking at my phone waiting for Joe Biden to end this once promising week with a loud and wet fart.

Then, like a ray of sunshine breaking through a stormy grey sky, it was like the lights turned on for the first time since 2017.

Of all of the years that I’ve seen Joe Biden in action, NEVER did he EVER sound LIKE THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. For good reason considering he was VP to the best orator since arguably Martin Luther King, Jr. for eight years, but also because Joe Biden has never been that guy. He’s been the attack dog, the bodyguard, the hype man.

Never was he The Man.

But last night, he didn’t give an acceptance speech for his party’s nomination.

He gave an inauguration address:

“I will be a president who will stand with our allies and friends. I will make it clear to our adversaries the days of cozying up to dictators are over.

Under President Biden, America will not turn a blind eye to Russian bounties on the heads of American soldiers. Nor will I put up with foreign interference in our most sacred democratic exercise — voting.”

Holy shit! A PRESIDENT?!?!? WHERE HAS THAT BEEN FOR 4 FUCKING YEARS?!?!?!?!

OK, yes, I know I just talked about my discomfort with Democrats becoming all Support Our Troops saps, but I mean FUCK.

With good speechwriters and a team of consultants, any politician can give a solid speech. Yes, there’s little chance that Joe Biden wrote this speech 100% on his own (given that during his first presidential campaign 33 years ago, he was dead-ass caught plagiarizing).

But every once in a while, you still need someone to give that damn speech.

At the very least, America has a great option for a new president in terms of just being normal. Nothing too transformative, nowhere near as insane or incompetent, and without the 24/7 Twitter-rant shitstorm rife with vile and wonton disdain and hatred.

That said, Biden’s platform is by far the most liberal platform we’ve seen since FDR. No, it isn’t the best we can do but it’s not nothing.

What’s also not nothing is the worrying trend that scared me shitless earlier in the evening.

If these dorks lose this damn election, we’re gonna have to pull a Belarus and literally shut shit down.

And even if they don’t, it’s pretty clear that their contempt for the left will only get worse as ex-Republicans look to re-shape the Democrats into their former party.

Biden’s line about being a president for all Americans while highly regular, normal, and what we dearly need does sound alarm bells, bringing back the dreaded days of Barack Obama reasoning with unreasonable terrorist Republicans gridlocking Congress out of spite. And with all of these ex-Republicans running around Biden, they will absolutely try to coax more conservative Wall-Street-friendly half measures that won’t do what Biden promised so eloquently in his Convention-wrapping remarks.

We can’t let that happen.

It goes without saying, please dear G-d vote for Joe.

But if he does win, don’t you take your eyes off of him or his cabinet.

We will still be on our own.

Categories
Coronavirus

Thanks, Assholes.

Maybe you didn’t understand what was happening here the first time around.

Fair enough, neither did I.

We’ve never had such a pandemic unfold in our lifetimes.

You were confused by some conflicting stories from the outset, signs of infection that weren’t particularly unique to COVID, or perhaps like the majority of us, you just didn’t know better.

All valid, all somewhat understandable.

But when they told us to wear masks, what did you do? You ran up state capitols with guns and screamed in the faces of anyone you could corner about mY uNaLiEnAbLe RiGhTs to get haircuts, eat at Applebees, hang out at ­­bars, high five your bros, piss without washing your hands, dry hump women at nightclubs, etc.

When they told us to stay inside, what did you do? You protested on street corners and did pushups on the sidewalk. You pushed “Plandemic” and other certifiably psychotic lies, shouting to the globalists “You won’t catch me with no burka on, SOROS!”

All you motherfucking limp-dicked pea-brained baskets of dogshit did was undermine the entire lockdown. We sacrificed 3 months of our lives ultimately chasing and then eating our own fucking tail to bring us back to Outbreak Day.

So now, instead of losing 3 months to this godforsaken pandemic, we’re about to lose not just summer, not just sports, not just TV shows and movies or the vast assortment of real-world distractions we stupefy ourselves with to make it through the day. We’re going to lose brothers, sisters, cousins, friends, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, grandparents, godparents, ENTIRE GENERATIONS.

The virus erroneously portrayed as the “one with so many names” by President Bonespur von Jackboot, SARS-CoV-2, is a variant of a coronavirus we encountered back in 2002. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) debuted and scared us shitless right before intelligence was officially murdered here in the States by the Trump Party.

This was no goddamned hoax.

This was no weaponized biochemical pathogen engineered in a Chinese laboratory.

This was a newer version of something that the entire planet not even 20 years ago knew of and eventually defeated, vastly mitigating its collateral damage.

Now, we’ll be lucky if society survives through to October.

To be clear, it’s not just Americans contributing to the outlandish number of deaths at the hands of COVID-19. Brazil, China, the UK and others all bare considerable blame as does any country that underfunded the World Health Organization or other similar medical research bodies that could have seen this coming far before allowing a pandemic to halt the world in its tracks.

But thanks specifically to you rotten self-entitled anti-science snowflakes and your illiterate elected officials, I now have two friends fighting off COVID. They’re young, so perhaps they’ll make it through unscathed. But also thanks to you fucks, I’m missing meeting my best friend’s newborn son, his so far just once-rescheduled bachelor party, and more than likely his wedding in which I was to be a groomsman.

Through your own callous narcissism, you’ve made life for those us who might live through this thing unlivable, confining those with chronic illnesses to four-room prison cells once known as our homes. Make no excuses for your deranged bullshit. You have to live with the fact that you contributed to a preventable disaster. You, like so many Trump loyalists and James Woods/Ted Nugent lab accidents of your MAGA subspecies, have the blood of our 136,000+ and counting dead neighbors on your hands.

Hopefully G-d will forgive you.

The rest of us will await the day of your more-than-deserved comeuppance.

That is, if you don’t kill us first.

Postscript

Phew! Sorry, I’m just a touch frustrated right now.

I realize that I suddenly changed the format and look of this blog prior to the site’s most popular post from Juneteenth (sarcasm).

You’ll note that the site is now Diary of a Mad Millennial, a subtly blatant rip-off of a Tyler Perry movie. This blog is supposed to have an iota of sports discussion but given 2020 and its general 2020-ness, I’ve had next to no sports to write about, and thus have poured into this space my vitriolic mini-screeds over current affairs. This is either me doing a less than ideal form of self-therapy or perhaps I’m just losing my mind.

At any rate the blog formerly entitled This Site Has No Name (with the unchanged URL as proof of its one-time existence) is now this void of sorrow and anxiety I call my proverbial Internet timeshare.

My home is on Facebook like any other well-adjusted 20-something’s, duh!

Until next time…

Categories
Racism

Black America Deserves Dignity

It’s a daily struggle finding any words in my personal vocabulary to suitably convey my unrepentant hatred of Donald Jackboot Trump and his gaggle of criminal miscreants, the vilest administration since Reagan.

The “President” continues surpassing his endless diarrheal stream of racism, idiocy, authoritarian rambling, and so on.

Then, he pulled that Juneteenth stunt.

Yes, believe me, I have been EXHAUSTED by this lone year. That’s not even acknowledging the years before 2020. I’ve been mired in daily hatred of this son of a bigoted bastard. But then I saw this video from Kimberly Jones, and she mentioned something I’d never heard about before.

Tulsa.

Over the whole of my time within the public education system, not once did I learn about Black Wall Street, the massacre of an entire district that was A) not Harlem and B) in Oklahoma of all places. I didn’t get the reference. I quickly read the cliff notes version on Wikipedia, and shook my head for the millionth time. Like most white Americans, I learned of yet another tell-tale racist crime against humanity inflicted upon our black brothers and sisters by white mobs that included Klansmen and local police. A crime conveniently left out of History class when such information could have helped a young impressionable and naïve boy understand the racist swamp that sadly is his homeland.

So, when Trump announced that his first Nuremberg Rally since COVID-19 arrived in America would be on Juneteenth AND in Tulsa, I blew a gasket.

I wrote a barely-coherent barrage of obscenities in the Word doc I used as the basis for this piece, and left it untouched for about a week.

During this brief writer’s block, I noticed my cousin sparring with her zombified peers on Facebook. She lives in Nowhere-In-Particular, Wisconsin. Population: Too Many. Average State Ethnicity: Alabaster Dipped in Hellmann’s Finished with a Touch of Aryan Impotence.

I think this should be separate from the White/non-Hispanic designation on the Census. Then the so-called proud whites afraid of being erased out of existence along with General Lee’s many disappearing statues could have their master race they’ve so desperately cried for since forever.

I noticed her getting bogged down by trying to address the suffering of all minorities, Jews included. She meant well, but I reasoned to her that in the scheme of things, Jews have surpassed our people’s wildest dreams on this island continent of chaos we call home.

And we owe our success to Black America.

Kimberly Jones addressed conservatives’ sycophantic obsession and nervous protests over the George Floyd protests and ensuing clashes with the police, completely ignoring the reasons why these uprisings were even happening.

Her words clapped louder than thunder (emphasis mine):

“..the social contract is broken. And if the social contract is broken, why the fuck do I give a shit about burning a football hall of fame, about burning a Target?!

You broke the contract when you killed us in the streets and didn’t give a fuck.

You broke the contract when, for 400 years, we played your game and built your wealth. You broke the contract when we built our wealth, again, on our own, by our bootstraps in Tulsa and you dropped bombs on us.

When we built [wealth] in Rosewood, and you slaughtered us.

You broke the contract, so fuck your Target.

Fuck your hall of fame.

Far as I’m concerned, they can burn this bitch to the ground. And it still wouldn’t be enough. And they are lucky that what black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.”

If you’re Jewish and you’ve lived in America your whole life, have you ever felt this type of rage? This weight of destructive oppression? Have you woken up, looked around your home, sat in your car, trailed off at your cubicle feeling, KNOWING, that your neighborhood was owned by Nazis? Your businesses presided over by the descendants of Ramses and the men who pilfered your people’s spirit into the desert sands of Goshen?

Have you passed street signs bearing the names Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, Rommel?

When was the last time your kids played rec league baseball at Schutzstaffel Veteranen Memorial Park?

Are you an alumnus of Eva A. P. Braun High?

Do you remember the last time you stood in front of a faded statue of Der Führer?

What’s your earliest memory of seeing that sinister-shaded burnt orange flag boasting the black bars of the Master Race atop the state capitol building?

Or those miniature flags sprouting from Luftwaffe graves, memorializing fallen Stormtroopers from Normandy, Casablanca, Aachen, the Bulge?

Stalingrad?

Better yet, how about that lovely wedding at Auschwitz? Perhaps the Cotillion at Dachau, or that peaceful weekend getaway to Bergen-Belsen?

Remember all of those moments you had to stifle your utter contempt, devoting every cell in your body to prevent you from ripping your own vocal chords to pieces from bellowing at your great-grandparents’ tormentors to burn in the deepest pits of Hell?

Did you grow up under a mythical depiction of heroes from the Third Reich prominently flaunted on the side of a mountain overlooking your family picnic at the park during your brief moment of equality, when you thought only of the PB&J sandwiches your mother packed instead of the disapproving, even fearful gazes from Adolf, Otto or Gustav?

Has there been a night you feared that brownshirts would surround your car, drag you along a dirt country road to a nearby gas chamber, your loved ones screams fading in the dark?  

Be honest with yourself: we have never experienced the level of crushing abuse in this country that the average man and woman of color has dealt with for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Did your bubby and zayde live in domineering fear during the Holocaust? Depending on your family history, they may well have.

Even if that is your case, you didn’t inherit that same fear.

When the war ended, the Nazis were purged.

There were the Nuremberg Trials, Simon Wiesenthal and his hunters, the vast numbers of executions and gutless suicides of SS schweine too cowardly to face their victims in person without the protection of their watchtowers and sheds, the showers or the ovens.

They were ostracized, banned from the Rhineland. Criminalized. Driven to the shadows. De-legitimized. Forced to change tact, return as new versions of their vile old selves.

Here in America, the Confederates were greeted with reconciliatory overtures of peace, brotherhood, acceptance. Just a heated racket amongst family.

An honest moment of brief shame.

Reconstruction was intended to reconstruct the South into a closer version of what America sought to be when the Declaration of Independence announced our intention to leave a clueless king and his brainwashed enablers behind.

But we only rebuilt the same repressive system that facilitated the slave trade in the first place.

Slaves became sharecroppers.

Jim Crow obliterated the newly-gained agency granted to freed men and women.

Segregation divided and weakened the community, consigned them to drug-infested crime-ridden ghettos.

To add more injury to gaping sores, the side that “freed” them upheld that barbaric system of dehumanizing horror and perpetual second-class status in their own metropolises.

All of this suffering, all of this brutalizing, government-backed wars, skull-cracking tyranny, and the goddamn bastards in Congress had the nerve to erect statues of Lee and Davis in the very city both men sought to raze in triumphant Dixie dominance.

Lynching STILL isn’t a federal crime.

Black America, despite white supremacists’ best efforts, managed to not only survive all of this bloodshed, each hate crime, the next massacre and the five ones that always lurked in the shadows, they have damn-near reached prosperous emancipation before cross-burning forces conspired against them. Through it all, they are still standing.

Could we have done the same in Europe?

Thankfully, men like my zayde made sure we never had to find out.

Thanks to Black America, we have America.

It’s their suffering, their pain, their anguish, the blood and tears of their ancestors that made this land of marginalized outcasts and Dreamers possible in the first place.

If they didn’t build it, we would have never come.

Maybe it’s time we as Jews, as proud Americans, as members of this self-destructive species called humanity that we level the playing field for good.

Instead of assimilating into modern-day Kapos, braindead mannequins, or capricious gits, why not live the truest form of tikkun olam and make our world better than it was yesterday?

Black lives matter.

Always.

Categories
Politics

The Real Antifa

The American Cemetery on Omaha Beach in Normandy

Zayde never liked talking about the war.

He never really had much reason to now that I think about it. He made a great life for himself and his family after coming home from Europe. My Zayde (grandfather in Yiddish – “bubby” for grandmother) was the son of a Ukrainian tailor who ran his own dry cleaners and laundromat. Because of financial woes, Zayde willingly dropped out of high school to support the family during the Depression. Despite the rise of Mussolini and Hitler across the Atlantic, he couldn’t enlist until after Pearl Harbor. America stayed out of the war until they had no other choice. I wouldn’t be shocked if he’d have enlisted sooner had the U.S. entered in say 1939. As it was, he joined in 1943, finished basic training, and then left for England. There he and his regiment waited until they were called upon to join the fight.

That was 76 years ago today.

Zayde didn’t storm the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, but he came in as part of D-Day plus two. He never gave us specifics, so we don’t know if the bodies were still strewn across the beaches, but I imagine that it was gruesome. I didn’t know much about his role with the Army until I stumbled upon the official copy of his discharge papers buried under mountains of old photos and documents, papers collected over the course of many moves and home office reorganizations. Until recently, I didn’t know the name of his unit or that he worked as a radar operator. Before this significant find, I only knew that he detected land mines, built and destroyed bridges across France and Germany.

He and his regiment spent 10 months trekking through war-torn French towns and villages where, according to him, some locals greeted the Yankees with boiling hot water dumped from the windows of their tattered homes. They pressed on, survived winter in the wilderness, may or may not have fought the Battle of the Bulge, and made it to the New Year. In April 1945, they liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp along with British and Canadian forces. Being the only one in his unit who could speak Yiddish, Zayde interviewed the survivors as well as some of the captured Nazi officers.

Years later when Bubby cooked lamb chops for dinner, Zayde protested and left the room. This little quirk of his continued well into their parenting days with my dad and two aunts. They didn’t really know why their father hated lamb chops. Bubby said he ate them before the war.

We later learned that the smell reminded him too much of the stench from the ovens at Belsen.

He came home with his M1, a Gewehr German rifle and Luger, and a National Labor Day pin presumably lifted from a dead Nazi’s uniform. Bubby forced him to get rid of the M1 and Luger as well as the Gewehr’s bayonet. Zayde pulled the firing pin out of the Gewehr rendering it a now-broken antique tethered by a small rope to keep the wooden frame and steel mechanical parts together.

He did keep the pendant, creepy face and all, with the infamous little Nazi eagle lurking menacingly beneath.

Zayde told my father that he took home these grim mementos to ensure that no-one could say that it never happened – undeniable physical proof of a genocidal regime that unleashed terror upon the world.

I finally understand why he felt the need to keep those souvenirs.

Let’s be clear about one thing: the original anti-fascists were the Allied Forces. They were young Americans in Illinois, Great War veterans from Colchester, Maquis rebels scheming in the safety of the French Alps, Canadians from across the Plains, and Australians of the Outback.

Present-day Antifa is a loose collection of like-minded fascist-hating men and women who protect peaceful protestors from alt-right scum, the violent bastards who want to beat and intimidate society into tolerating the intolerable. They have no intention of engaging in the civil discourse required for a free society to exist. The Proud Boys, Boogaloos, Richard Spencer’s new Hitler Youth. The “All Lives Matter” crowd.

Antifa prevents these shits from menacing peaceful, non-indoctrinated demonstrators. And because of this, Antifa is vilified by self-proclaimed deplorables.

And, naturally, they’re being scapegoated by the men in power who’ve benefitted from the support of such white nationalist neo-Nazis, a scapegoating unnervingly reminiscent of the Third Reich’s old strategy. Why else do you think Jews, communists, Catholics, homosexuals, and other “non-Aryans” ended up in camps?

Then, it was the stab-in-the-back theory. Now, it’s just daily tweets flowing from out of the Oval Office bathroom. Hence why Trump is now calling peaceful protestors “terrorists”, demanding that police “dominate the streets” to re-instill his idea of law and order. He’s even mused on camera about George Floyd’s happiness from the grave over America’s sparkling new jobs report released yesterday.

We’ve been heading this way for awhile now. Hell, as has been documented by no doubt millions of articles, the man began dehumanizing Mexicans on DAY ONE. He has repetitively derogatorily identified his perceived enemies before, during, and after his election, and he’s continuing to slander the opposition probably as we speak. This draft-dodging coward literally represents the antithesis of what it means to be an American, a President, a leader, or even a decent man.

Like all fascists, Donald J. Trump is the true enemy of the people.

My Zayde didn’t go through the trauma of witnessing piles of flesh-covered skeletal corpses as a young Jewish man to secure an authoritarian’s ghastly desire to callously quell peaceful demonstrators he deemed to be “fake protestors” just to take a stone-faced picture with a bible in front of a church to convey some weird strongman tough guy image for his masturbatory death cult. We’re perilously close to becoming the very thing we helped to destroy.

On the anniversary of Operation Overlord, the mission seen as the beginning of the end of fascism in Europe, who would’ve thought we’d be fighting a fascist in the White House? 76 years after D-Day and we’ve arrived to this disgusting moment in history. The battlefield may be here now, but the aim remains the same. Crush the fascists, save the world.

Zayde, I won’t let you down.

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