The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 479
Where Everyone Gets a Dose of Puppy Love
PRESENT DAY 63: America Awoke
A great awakening took place in America in 2016 as a result of Donald Trump’s unexpected stolen victory in the presidential election. One was good, the other bad. In fact, the good awakening happened as a result of the bad. The bad awakening was Trump’s proclamation that racism, misogyny, prejudice, religious bigotry, hatred, xenophobia, shamelessness, malice and dishonesty are feelings not to be overcome but to be embraced and acted on, which is nothing more than what Trump had been doing all his life. Trump brought out the worst in America by enabling and encouraging all of the negative, harmful and damaging human traits that we ought to be struggling against. If you were a religious person, you might describe that as the anti-Christ. It was a great awakening in the sense that all of those toxic human urges to which we are all subject were given permission to be expressed by a demonic demagogue whose only interest in any of this was to enrich and empower himself and it didn’t matter at whose expense that might be. Of course, it is at the expense of all of us, even the MAGA zombies who have been duped by Trump and including all of the MAGA Republican officials who, duped or not, in agreement or not, see in the evil of Trump opportunities for personal enrichment and power. This has even extended to the Supreme Court where we now have little Sammy Alito and Uncle Clarence Thomas openly embracing the overthrow of the American government. We’ve now got Amy Coney Barrett now openly proclaiming that the Constitution exists only to serve her own personal Christian beliefs. We’ve got Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh now openly saying that equality is not an American ideal and that steps taken toward creating equal opportunity for all are not to be allowed. We’ve got a chief justice who either sits back and allows this abrogation of everything the founders intended to happen or he’s all in with it. It really doesn’t matter which because this evil awakening on the part of those who are supposed to be upholding the Constitution and American ideals is now threatening to end the possibility of freedom both here and around the world. But it was as a result of this awakening of evil that honest America also woke up. The baby boom generation had been resting on its laurels. We contributed to the ending of the Vietnam War. We supported the civil rights movement at least enough to get the Civil Rights bill of 1965 passed. Enough of us supported the feminist movement that progress was made toward equal rights for women and the same could be said for gay rights and now gender rights. We thought that since it was obvious that everyone ought to have equal rights, we were naturally on a path that was leading toward that, forgetting the history of evil that America is based on. It even led us to believe the ridiculous notion that the arc of the universe bends toward justice. MLK said it and we wanted to believe it in the same way that Christians want to believe that they're going to heaven. But there’s no evidence of either. Christians by definition will never wake up to their faith based delusions but rational people have now had to wake up to the fact that the arc of the universe could bend either way and, indeed, it’s now bending in the opposite direction of justice thanks to the Trump MAGA movement. Rational people were not able to pretend that police brutality didn’t really exist after watching a cop murder George Floyd on video and seeming to enjoy doing it. The George Floyd murder contributed to the honest, compassionate awakening but only intensified the Trump awakening of hate because the only way to deny what you see with your own eyes is to intensify the blinding hatred that you prefer because it plays into all of those negative feelings that Trump has awakened, encouraged and empowered in you. As I said three days ago, “woke” is a good thing as it’s been used by the MAGA mob. But they, too, might be described as “woke” but in a truly negative sense. What they’re now woke to is the pure evil of their leader. There is no good in Trump. As his niece, Mary Trump, has said, Trump is that rare individual who has “no redeeming qualities” at all. In Trump good is evil and evil is good and that is mesmerizing for those inclined toward evil in the first place, that long tradition of hatred that has always been with us in America and around the world. So how did we get to where we are today with close to half of the American voting population now unwilling to reject a narcissistic criminal? How did we get to the point where we’re on the verge of voting out democracy, the one thing that gives us the freedom that we all enjoy and that has been the hope to which oppressed people worldwide have always aspired? It’s not that something in America has changed. The evil that Trump has called out has always existed. It’s just that honest America is now more aware of it than ever before. Every time Trump rears his ugly head, he rears the ugly head of everything deplorable, hateful and violent in America. Trump even turned flag waving into an act of treason. It’s impossible now for the honest and compassionate to miss the evil that has always been here. We can ignore it no longer. We can no longer pretend that it will be vanquished by some sort of natural progression toward love, equality and generosity. The arc of the universe has snapped back after 75 years of bending in the right direction. A black president was too much for those evil forces to stand. How far toward hell they are able to bend the arc of the universe depends in large part on the election this fall and in our ability to cleanse the Supreme Court of the evil that now resides there. Alito and Thomas must be impeached and removed at the very least. The election of Biden alone may not be enough to save us. It may simply be putting off the inevitable if we cannot deal with the corruption of the rule of law that the Trump fascists have already accomplished. Yes, it’s good to be woke even though what we’ve awakened to is a real horror. At least now we’ve looked into the face of evil (Trump) and know that it must be resisted in every way that honesty and compassion allow. Beyond voting, humor is one of the best methods. Fascists have no sense of humor. Trump hates humor. Like so many in the post Tarantino / Howard Stern world, he thinks insulting and demeaning people is humor so let’s use real humor against him every day. Therapy Dog Tails, for one, is devoted to that mission.