I Blame Me

I blame Hillary for passively absorbing Trump’s “crooked Hillary” mantra instead of snapping back at him with “How dare you, you insulting liar,” or some-such.  I blame her also for letting Trump take Bernie Sanders’ concern for jobs and trade deals from the Democrats as if he will fix both.

I blame MSNBC for pairing the “crooked Hillary” mantra with their line-up of shows, letting the only quasi-liberal commentary we had be classically conditioned to their murder investigations and life-in-prison shows.

I blame Bill Clinton for letting the relentless ridicule and obstruction by Republicans of his era go largely unchallenged, as if that is a proper way to treat our president, letting them magnify that tactic with Obama, utterly blocking and insulting his every effort.

I blame Al Gore and the Democrats of the 2000 and 2004 elections, more eager to be the noble losers than to fight the Florida fraud of eliminating tens of thousands of black names from voter roles.

I blame ABC Nightly News for showing the freeze-frame of the video of the hapless, mentally ill black man daring to walk in a street, shot but frozen in a sort-of ballet pose, gracefully teetering on one toe, raising the possibility of police claiming self-defense, but not showing the 16 times he was then shot, opening the potential question: If it was the 16th shot that killed him, was that shot also fired in self-defense?

I blame Jon Stewart for being gone.  We needed the funny truth to protect us from this tragic one.

I blame The Walking Dead for making images of someone’s brains being bludgeoned by a baseball bat seem entertaining without admitting it leads us in that direction.

I blame Trump for saying he would bring the country together while assembling only the richest and meanest right-wing voices into his cabinet, running rough-shod over our entire government and society.  He should add Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and James Hanson to the table, making him a truly uniting and informational president, but he won’t.

Mostly, I blame me for being too reclusive for twenty years, letting the mythic and religious underpinnings of our society devolve into the same dismal view and outcome conservative religion and politics has inflicted for eons.

We are better than this.  We’re smarter, sexier, more inclusive and visionary than we’re told and expected, and I should be helping make that the reality we live into, not letting their flawed thinking about fallen humanity wear us into scarcity, stress, and strife, ruining the Eden we love and need.