Destroyer of Worlds, Really
Watching Our Dualities
From a Google Image Search - Craiyon
Police and the military in American streets, anonymous government workers who go to work in ski masks, “the enemy within”, we will resume testing nukes - what is going on in America.
We must acknowledge the dualities built into human brains. Our brains can be shockingly monstrous or syrupy sweet or adhere to all values in between. What is supposed to limit us in our ideologies and outward behaviors is what we often refer to as being civilized, or enlightened, or faith in a religious belief in a soul and perhaps an afterlife.
America is facing off with our dualities right this very moment. And the split couldn’t be clearer because our two major political parties represent the two sides of human nature. Democrats believe that government serves the people who pay into that government; they don’t only serve the members of their own party. Liberals try to stop our society from bottoming out with high levels of poverty, homelessness, food insecurity, and health challenges. They believe that preventing conditions at the bottom from worsening helps us all. The liberals learned lessons from past abuses, like slavery, employers who took advantage of powerless workers, loss of a job with no grace time to find reemployment (or huge numbers of jobs as in the Great Depression), ignoring the needs of the disabled and the mentally disturbed, disregarding how inflationary pricing affects low-income folks, not regulating exploitation by banks and credit card companies, allowing discrimination in hiring or admissions to higher education, and ignoring the plight of seniors. Laws addressing these issues were meant to be farsighted, democratic, and designed to keep the American society on an even keel.
Citizens, faced with changing economics and threats of climate changes, decided that these safety net programs amounted to money being handed out to the undeserving at citizen’s expense and to recipient’s detriment. They had help making this decision from Talk Radio and the internet and Fox News.
Republicans have provided this side of the coin, the side that says that meanness is kindness because it forces people to fend for themselves rather than allowing them to believe that they can rely on endless handouts (which, they say, are not even working to keep American society from declining in quality-of-life). These conservatives came to believe that all support programs were wrong-headed laws, institutionalizing some Americans. They opposed regulations that limited their ability to accumulate as much wealth as possible, like raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for programs for those who were not prospering, like capital gains taxes, and inheritance taxes, and business fees, and oversight of stock markets (actually, over any kind of economic oversight) - let the free market reign.
For some reasons that are difficult to comprehend, Evangelicals joined with conservatives to say that America was not as healthy as it should be because of moral slippage. We had forgotten the strictures of the scriptures. We told women who were dealing with unwanted pregnancies that they could abort their offspring, we gave credence to science that said gender genetics makes some sexual assignments that are not clearly male or female, or that some assignments do not match the map in the brain. We were punishing success and rewarding failure, we were “grooming” children to question their gender, and our colleges were turning out bleeding heart liberals who were stuck in the approaches of past liberal administrations, approaches which were turning America into an increasingly immoral place.
Because conservatives could see the power of using a moral argument to back up their cruel agenda they collected on a long-standing relationship with Evangelicals. In effect, they suggested that when Republicans took power, they would establish a new social order, and God would rejoin government in what might possibly be a white nationalist theocracy. Bringing God back into the picture may have introduced those seeking power to the idea of the efficacy of Old Testament retribution.
Republicans plotted and planned, sometimes in secrecy, sometimes in plain sight, and used the data collection skills of Evangelicals to eventually arrive at their gerrymandering war and the document offering the game plan for their government takeover, Project 2025. And they entrusted the whole shebang to a failed real estate mogul with narcissism. We are now entered on the “path not taken,” the path we learned did not lead to a society that would try its best to take care of all of we the people. We are reversing decades of experience in governing and choosing the most monstrous pathways to whatever utopian dystopia the conservatives have dreamed up, which may include turning anyone who can’t or won’t become a multimillionaire into a wage slave.
Our president, chosen by conservatives and Evangelicals, is starting to sound like Oppenheimer, who finally concluded that “[n]ow I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Trump has found a taste for blood and destruction. Threats of military in American streets don’t seem to be quite scary enough. Those masked men disappearing immigrants, refugees, and citizens alike don’t seem to be creating enough fear.
Even Putin seems like he doesn’t want to play the dictator game with Trump. He announces that he has made a new type of nuclear missile. These two guys want to play chicken, and we are just all collateral damage. They are Olympians; we are peons.
How do the billionaires feel about this? Are they protected from nuclear destruction? Are their bunkers deep enough, their food supplies large enough? When did our con man in chief turn into a stone-cold killer, instructing our military to blow supposed drug dealers out of the water? Are we scared enough yet?
How do we like our dualities now? We don’t even want to move to the middle. Let’s throw in our lot with the progressives if we haven’t waited too long already. Halloween is fake fear; right in front of us the real thing is playing out. Some say it’s performance. Hopefully performance will not spill over into reality. How the Evangelicals could have signed on to this gets to be more of a mystery every day.
Thankfully we still remember that the generous side of our nature was working to produce a livable society and with few tweaks to get the wealthy back in line could set us back on a path to adapting to climate changes thus improving and prolonging livability.
We really need to see the Epstein files, and so much more.