Anyone who knows me knows that the holiday season and I will just never get along. November and December are awful for me year after year and nothing ever seems to change it. I've been down this road before...the fake happiness, the overwhelming capitalist nightmare of Black Friday and Cyber Monday and whatever other commercial madness that comes along, fake friends, fake all of it.
This time around there's another wrinkle that is making me miserable. I call it 'Casual Cruelty' and in the last few months, a wholly depressing number of people have perfected the practice. It consists of just being mean and not really thinking anything of it...hence casual but cruel nevertheless.
I've heard people in common conversation say things like, "Immigrants should just be rounded up or shot if they try to come in illegally" or "If someone gets in my way protesting something, I'll just run 'em over" and "I'll fight in the streets if anyone tries to give me a shot"...like asking for the salt...casually offering to kill someone for the unconscionable sin of being someone else or disagreeing with them. Not even a thought of what that might be like. Who you might be doing it to. Why you'd even think like that. People just do. Apparently, everyone needs to die for everything.
Ask someone to wait a minute...get shot or beat up. Forget a turn signal...get rammed. Work on a school board...get death threats. Teach...get death threats. Work in food service...get death threats. Work in healthcare...get death threats. It never ends.
The idea that people 'deserve' what they get is just awful.
Asylum seekers were just asking to have their kids taken away and lost when they had the audacity to seek asylum here. Addicts deserve to suffer because they 'chose' that life like it was picking a color for the kitchen walls. Women should carry every pregnancy to term because they weren't chaste enough for the Evangelical crowd. Lazy people on public assistance should be cut off and pull themselves up...get a third job, forget medical care and just 'want' to be successful enough because needing a hand is a character flaw. We can't 'afford' to help people because if they were us they wouldn't need it so it must be their fault.
Casually Cruel. Name calling. Bullying. Intimidation. 'Karen' going ballistic over nothing at all. 'Fuck Biden' flags on thousands of front lawns. Petty, adolescent, self-absorbed, entitled cruelty for the sake of it.
A scowling madman spreading hate and more cruelty nightly to legions of the dedicated. Millions of nodding followers thinking this is all ok. Just say 'socialism' and anything goes. 'They' who are not 'us' must have brought it on themselves.
People deciding it's good to ban books they don't agree with. People who've never read 'Fahrenheit 451' or '1984' and never will because they're gleefully burning copies of them by the dumpster-full.
Whole swathes of people deciding that we should teach only that which doesn't cause 'distress'...to white people.
People who've never read the Constitution railing about our 'Christian' country and threatening anyone who doesn't subscribe with execution.
It's evil and it makes me absolutely furious that there's even a debate over it.
