How The Republican Fixation on Punishment Will End up Destroying Us All

If you want to build and improve our world, you have to embrace the ideology of compassion

Hello Friends,

Well, the Republicans are at it again. They're attacking the whole world on their way to attacking their own citizens. I'm seeing a lot of words in headlines like “punish,” as in “They must be punished!”

This is our grievance minded president who feels that the whole world has always treated him unfairly. He's mad at everybody, even the people who voted for him apparently.

“Punish, punish, punish!”

He seems to view himself as an avenging angel unleashing righteous anger upon the world. He always betrays his supporters eventually. The closer you get to him, the greater your inevitable fall.

You'll get yours because cruelty is the goal. It always has been. It always will be.

The United States of America has long been a nation of bullies. That's why we have the largest military in the world. Any time some other country “gets out of line” we can rattle our saber at them, and stomp our feet, and howl like a toddler who has been denied a toy who’s screaming in the street.

The whole rest of the world is like an exhausted parent who has to gather up the child in embarrassment and get out of there. Maybe they just buy the toy and hand it over so they can get two seconds of peace.

This is what we are.

This is how we appear on the pages of history.

But of course, the second anyone actually writes those pages, the United States throws another temper tantrum. “Now you're making us feel shame about our past! How dare you!” So the books are burned, the truth is erased, and the toddler is allowed to prance and preen like a rooster. He never learns. He's completely indifferent to the pain he creates.

That's us today.

Our chief toddler executive just unleashed tariffs on the whole world. It's to destroy the world. It's to destroy us. To hell with the global economy. In his mind, they have to be “punished.”

Because that's all they think about is “punishment.”

They keep wages low because they claim we don't work hard enough.

When we do work, they refuse to pay us because they claim we didn't work well enough.

When we get sick, they refuse to treat us because they claim we deserved it.

When we get old, they refuse to let us retire because they claim we didn't earn it.

This list goes on and on. It's all punishment all the time. We can never do anything right. No matter how much we grovel and how hard we perform, they're always angry. They always smirk at us from behind their golden desks. They always deny reality.

Meanwhile they rake in all the wealth and luxury while we and our families are forced to suffer.

That's the republican way.

A vote for them is a vote for punishment.

They justify it by saying it's punishment of the guilty. But to them, we are all criminals. We are all liars. We are all cheats. We are all losers.

We must be PUNISHED, PUNISHED, PUNISHED!

That's what they promise, and they're delivering on that promise today.

Punishment is their answer to everything, except when it comes to their own transgressions. When it comes to their own culpability, they deny any reality that displeases them. Then we're back to grievance again, and that creates more people that in their delusional minds are in need of punishment.

Rinse, wash, repeat. It never ends.

They punish, punish, punish until the whole world has been beaten down to nothing and they are all that remain. Then they turn on each other. All the while, they scream that liberals are to blame.

When are we going to learn from this?

When are we going to learn that when you embrace an ideology of punishment, you too will feel the sting of the lash?

Screaming and yelling and beating looks impressive, but it's an illusion. It's a lie. It accomplishes nothing. We've got to relinquish the mindset that insists there's such a thing as righteous rage.

There isn't.

The only thing righteous is compassion. The only way to correct a wrong is through understanding and reason, not irrational denial and hate.

We've got to help each other.

We can't blame each other. We can't hurt each other. We can't smirk and insult and bully each other. We can't elevate people to positions of power who do nothing but sow the seeds of discord and denial.

Our kingdom is collapsing because the man at the controls is an agent of chaos. He's incompetent, he's been handed everything. He's never had to work. He cackles as the walls come down around him and the flames consume us all.

We've got to stop being so dazzled by the promise of punishment. We have to stop wasting our resources on weapons of mass destruction.

Slapping people in the face is not the answer to everything.

In fact, it's the answer to nothing.

Let's read and teach and love instead.

We've sown the wind and now we're reaping the whirlwind. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.

I'd prefer to defend the right of my children to see.

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