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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Policies

When the Black Rapture-Seeker in Your Life is a #45 Fan…

07 Tuesday Jul 2020

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, earth, wind & fire, Pop Culture, Religion

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Tags

-isms, End-of-the World Predictions, Eschatology, Family, Millennialism, Policies, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies


Depiction of the Rapture, Evangelical-style, n.d. (Benjamin Hass via https://shutterstock.com).

What does anyone do when a loved one reveals themselves as a #45 fanboy or fangirl? This sounds like a question only White people have to answer, or one in which only a handful of Black folks must deal. Otherwise, the short answer is to kick them to the curb. “These people aren’t your friends,” after all, at least, that’s what your friends will tell you if and when this situation occurs. But one cannot simply drag family and cut them off when they do the American equivalent of “Sieg Heil!” in support of Donald J. Trump. 

I discovered that one family member has done exactly that. They didn’t vote in 2016, because they could not bring themselves to vote for Hillary. They supported the Muslim Ban in 2017, saw nothing wrong with another round of tax cuts for the wealthy and for trillion-dollar corporations, and favored closing the southern border to keep out “them Spanish people.” Of course, this loved one also calls those who are LGBTQIA+ “faggots,” “dykes,” and “things” like they’re the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009 edition).

Of the last seven times we’ve talked on the phone, six times we have argued. The arguments have varied from disagreements over the meaning of a particular piece of scripture to rifts over televangelists and their misogynistic, homophobic, and Apocalyptic messages. Recently, this person has gone after Gov. Andrew Cuomo and others for their uneven responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, but has refused to lay any blame Trump’s way. Another relative confirmed that this person had planned to vote for 45 in November. What a shame and a pitiful!

I honestly do not understand how anyone American Black in 2020 could think well enough of Trump to defend his three years’ worth of wannabe autocratic rule and mini-calamities. It makes no sense for any Black man, Black woman, or transgender Black person to spend time and effort voting for this disaster of a human being. Except if one is committed fully to patriarchy, to vanity, and to seeing the end of the world Revelations-style. Wanting the Rapture to come so badly as to ignore blatant systemic racism, misogynoir, and rampant discrimination against anyone not rich, hetero-, White, and male. As much as I love this family member, I do not like their politics and their worldview. By comparison, I might as well be Pollyanna.

In the post-Western world to come, millennialism should be among the first things its leaders should ban from public debate and discussion. Too many people believing in and attempting to bring on the Apocalypse because they think their God or gods will usher in a more perfect world with a more perfect humanity. As a Christian myself, it was always weird to see people so desirous of a new world order that they were willing to see billions of others die in order to see it through. Now, with a family member who has committed themselves ever increasingly to this future, I could stop talking with them. But what good would that do? This is more than a hearts-and-minds issue. This is about hearts and minds pushing policies that will bring the world the self-fulfilling prophecy of Revelations.

So, hell yeah, banning millennialism and end-of-the-world prophecies meant to spur others to push humanity and all life on the planet into actual doom would be a good thing. Because so many of us are the descendants of people who had to live through the Apocalypse, their version anyway. Indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere, in the Arctic, in Oceania, and in Australia who died at rates up to 90 percent upon first contact with disease-carrying Europeans between 1492 and 1900. The 12 million Africans kidnapped into Western-Hemispheric-slavery between 1503 and 1888. The European Jews the Nazis murdered between 1933 and 1945. For these groups and in those times, this was the end of the world, the world that they knew, the lives they hoped to have. If one has already survived an Apocalypse (small “a” or big “A”), or has known so many who haven’t, why would a prediction of a larger Apocalypse coming from people who couldn’t care less about your ass ever matter?

For those who are in the Apocalypse-as-self-fulfilling-prophecy business, their goal is to reshape the world in their own fascist, patriarchal, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, nationalistic, and capitalistic image. It’s certainly not about God’s image or the vision of anyone’s gods.

As for this family member, all I can do now is limit my already limited conversations with them. They’ve had their bags packed for the Rapture since the 1980s. I love them, but I definitely do not like them. I can only hope that they recognize that the Apocalypse in any form is never something someone should wish for themselves, or something to wish upon the world. In what remains of their time in this life, or perhaps, in their next life.

Glad Obama’s In, But Nothing to Celebrate

21 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work

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Tags

Capitulation, Centrist, Compromise, Domestic Policies, foreign policy, Glenn Greenwald, Great Recession, Inauguration, Inauguration Day, Long-Term Unemployment, Mitt Romney, National Security, Obama, Obama Administration, Obama's Legacy, Obama's Second Term, Police State, Policies, President Barack Obama, President Obama, Privatization, Rhetoric, Second Inauguration, Wall Street Deregulation


President Barack Obama takes his first oath of office, US Capitol, January 20, 2009. (DoD photo by Master Sgt. Cecilio Ricardo, USAF/Wikipedia). In public domain.

President Barack Obama takes his first oath of office, US Capitol, January 20, 2009. (DoD photo by Master Sgt. Cecilio Ricardo, USAF/Wikipedia). In public domain.

Don’t get me wrong. I wholeheartedly supported President Barack Obama for election in ’08 and again in ’12, as my blog posts and my thousands of tweets show over the past five years. I’ve admonished neo-cons, naysayers, liberals and racists on my pages over the past half-decade for their ridiculous statements about the president’s ancestry, motivations and policies.

But, even with all of this, I’ve gleaned flaws in President Obama’s approach to domestic and foreign policy, to his administration’s continuing Bush’s work on the semi-police state, to his whole-cloth acceptance of K-12 education “reform” and backing off on regulations for the for-profit higher education institution world (see my posts “Can Do No Wrong” [March ’10], “Bad Conversations and Education Reform” [November ’10], “The POTUS and The Last Airbender” [December ’10],  “For the Love of a Lockout & an Impasse” [July ’11], “Emancipation and Compromise” [this month] and “Why Obama Is Only A Failed Centrist President” [this month]).

The recent fiscal cliff solution, the extension of widespread surveillance powers over our email, cell phone calls, text messages (and, presumably, blogs, tweets and Facebook pages like my own as well), and the ho-hum approval of $633 billion in appropriations for the Defense Department’s budget this year, though, give me even less of a reason to celebrate President Obama’s second inauguration.

Crowd at National Mall morning of President Obama's inauguration, January 20, 2009. (DoD photo by Senior Master Sgt. Thomas Meneguin, USAF/Wikipedia). In public domain.

Crowd at National Mall morning of President Obama’s inauguration, January 20, 2009. (DoD photo by Senior Master Sgt. Thomas Meneguin, USAF/Wikipedia). In public domain.

Without a doubt, he was a better choice than that dumb-ass sycophant Mitt Romney. If only because Romney’s entire raison d’être as president would’ve been to allow the rich and corporations another round of economic rape, destroying the American middle class, and pushing the working poor and welfare poor into oblivion in the process.

Obama’s win in November, however, was a sigh of relief for me, not really a jumping-for-joy moment. Now, after witnessing the fiscal cliff debacle, it is obvious that the next four years will be more of the same lukewarm, milk-toast domestic proposals, hardline national security and military policies, and half-baked rhetoric that we were all a part of in President Obama’s first term. By 2017, if I’m still alive to write and tweet, here’s what will remain before us as major crises when Obama leaves office:

National debt; universal health care reform; higher education reform; student aid; student loan policy; minimum wage; living wage; union-busting; long-term unemployment; long-term underemployment; de-industrialization; Wall Street/banking deregulation; housing/mortgage crisis; comprehensive immigration reform; federal tax code; rendition and torture; warrantless wiretapping/surveillance; drone strikes on innocent civilians; upgrading the electrical grid; crumbling infrastructure (roads, bridges, water and sewage systems); PreK-12 education reform; social mobility; green jobs; environmental pollution; cap-and-trade; global warming/climate change; nuclear proliferation; Medicare/Medicaid solvency; religious tolerance; racial/ethnic tensions; women’s reproductive rights; over-incarceration of poor men and women of color; police brutality; gun violence; violent crimes; domestic terrorism; cybersecurity; military-industrial complex; racial/gender/age/sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace; school privatization/high-stakes testing/charter schools/voucher programs; border security, the War on Drugs, prison-industrial complex; voter disenfranchisement; decriminalization of marijuana (and other drugs); post-trauma stress disorder for war veterans and the poor; lingering effects of the Great Recession; funding for public mental health facilities; high-speed rail; food security and policy; prescription drug abuse; Big Pharma; Social Security “reform;” obesity/diabetes/high-blood pressure and other long-term illnesses; and GMOs.

Aerial views of the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy,  New Jersey coast taken during a search and rescue mission, October 30, 2012.  (Master Sgt. Mark C. Olsen, USAF/Wikipedia). In public domain.

Aerial views of Hurricane Sandy damage, New Jersey coast [climate change as example of crises that will go unaddressed during Obama’s second term], October 30, 2012. (Master Sgt. Mark C. Olsen, USAF/Wikipedia). In public domain.

Now, you tell me. Do I really have any reason to see today as a day of celebration?

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