How GD Stupid and Ungrateful Are We?
We are taking one of the greatest countries in history and destroying it by letting extremist dummies ruin it
The glory days are over. We can almost start pretending they never happened. The generation that stormed the beaches in Normandy and hit the islands in the Pacific is now in the history books, except for the last few hanging on for dear life in nursing homes.
The sad thing about these surviving elderly Americans who delivered our country through some of its most trying times is that they can no longer provide us with the lessons needed to appreciate how dangerous and wrong Donald Trump is for America. The Americans today supporting Trump were the ones who slept during high school social studies.
They are the dumbasses who never paid much attention to Aunt Lottie (born in 1900), Uncle Charlie (born in 1918 and a navigator in a B-17 in World War II), or “Gram” (born in 1912) when they told stories about the America they grew up in. They never asked those asked these walking history books questions about the past. There was no intellectual curiosity and zero interest in understanding the nuances and intricacies of how things went from what they were in 1900 to what they are today — the three people I mention here had vacated my physical life by 2005. However, their voices, lessons, smiles, and laughs still echo in my mind every day I inhabit this planet.
In many cases, though, their children and grandchildren, the baby boomers, messed it up for the rest of us. Born into an era of unprecedented economic expansion, the times (without going into the minutiae of that era) were, in many cases, sound.
It is so good that today, baby boomers still control excessive wealth even though fewer and fewer of them are adding value to the economy. The wealth sits in their coffers, making them even wealthier.
Why do I bring up the frozen wealth in their hands, though? Well, it was this very same cohort of Americans who, after deciding to blow up the whole traditional American way of life, which mostly was good, a mere 15 years later elected into office, the man whose obsession with wealthy Americans led us directly to Trump.
Today, thanks to the Reagan policies, which became for Republicans like the teachings of the New Testament, income inequality is as bad as it was just before The Great Depression. It is these Republican policies and the endless tax cuts for the rich that have led the country to the economic and social malaise it is in.
The people who now regularly vote for Republicans because of hot-ticket items like abortion, guns, and immigration vote for a party that does all it can to ensure that the entirety of the U.S. economic system makes the rich richer and the working-class Americans poorer.
Any American living from paycheck to paycheck and struggling to cover health care costs should want a job protected by organized labor. Republicans, though, have done such a masterful job at manipulating the language that unions are considered by many as being the first step to communism.
The kids of the baby boomers, many of us reading and writing here, were raised by parents who lived in that wealthy America. An America that gauged the epitome of success as how much you own — how many times did I hear from boomers, “he only buys the absolute best” and said in a way as to suggest that this makes this person somehow god-like. I recall telling my father about how I was accepted to Columbia for graduate school, and even though I could see he was proud of me, his excitement paled in comparison when he told me how my cousin had bought a 1960 Corvette.
“Dad, did you hear what I just said?”
“Yeah, great. That’s great. It’s gonna be expensive. But the Corvette, though, huh?”
We later talked about this moment, and he apologized. He admitted that he had handled that wrong with me. He was good at seeking to improve his ways. Yet, he fell for the Reagan bug and was on his way to being Foxified, but he died in 2003. Amway had infected him long before his death, and I think he would have voted for Trump the first time.
However, attitudes like that and parents who weren’t open to change or self-correction have led us to the next generations. Now, there are the children of Generation X, Millenials, and so on. Lauren Boebert and George Santos could both be children of Gen X. The DNA pool has been so watered down since last century that most of the Republican Party is pro-Trump.
Trump. If he ran for president any decade before the 2010s, he would have been laughed out of the room. But today, stupid dominates our national gene pool. Brains that have gorged on intellectual candy from Fox News, that have grown fat and lazy, making them incapable of reasoning and deep thought, crave entertainment as fact and facts as entertainment.
America is the walking stupid, and half of our country, if you can believe the polls, plan to vote for a man who makes their lives harder, more dangerous, less economically secure, and endlessly bad.
We have destroyed a good country with endless potential. Unless we can remove these rejects of evolution from the gene pool, we are doomed.