How to Survive Four More Miserable Years of Hate and Chaos

Authoritarians can never be wrong so the problem will have to be you

One of the things that really captivated me when I first moved to Peru was the opportunity to be free from all the oppressive judgment that you have to endure in the United States.

If you’re feeling as if the walls are closing in you have to get to a better atmosphere. Particularly if you’re at a point in your life where you’re trying to discover a few things about yourself. You need to capture a little space to breathe.

I grew up in an abusive household. In my 20s I had self-esteem issues that developed as a result. They come from having to endure that everything you did would be interpreted as negative. You never received the benefit of the doubt. Everything that went wrong was attributed to some sort of flaw in your essential character.

That’s abuse.

That’s how you get people to be obedient to you. It’s done by breaking them down.

I feel a strong need to protect my children from this sort of treatment. I hope that what I’m going to be able to achieve over the next four years, as we return to yet another era of hate and chaos, is to convey to my own children that they are loved. I need to establish within them their own sense of self-importance so that they understand their value.

These things must never be in doubt.

We fabricate reasons in the United States for people to put aside their own autonomy. We create things like debt so that people are pressured to surrender their time, their expertise, their joy, their lives all for the profit of others.

The people do this because they’ve been lectured about obligation. They owe a debt to soldiers. They owe a debt of money. They owe a debt to a patriarch. They owe a debt to the country.

Debt, debt, debt.

Any claim a debt is owed to us in turn, is denied.

This is the essential cruelty of Christianity. Everybody’s told that they’re born in sin and that you have to spend the whole of your life making up for that sin.

Debt.

But the truth about Christianity is that it’s an appeal for authoritarianism. It’s a demand that you surrender your autonomy based on a lie about the divine. It’s not appeal for goodness. It’s because of American Christians that we haven’t embraced a society that heals the sick or feeds the hungry or educates the ignorant. Our Christian society fights for the opposite of all those concepts.

People affiliate themselves with religion out of fear and to avoid the punishment they feel is the righteous consequence for those who don’t adhere to the ultimate authority. This fixation on abuse or for finding reasons to think of people as less than other human beings, this is the ultimate failing of the United States of America, and it always has been.

We’re told to revere the Constitution, “We the people of the United States of America,” but it doesn’t stand for we the people. It stands for we the rich, white, cisgender men.

I’m all of those things except rich, so it’s embarrassing to me to have taken so long to understand the fundamental misdirection of what we’ve been told. The lies we’ve been told. The promises of prosperity that will forever go unfulfilled.

“Work hard and prosper,” really means work hard and die in poverty.

The rich are hoping you don’t figure that out until all your strength has been used up.

All we get is lies in the United States. We elect liars. We listen to lies in the news. We read lies in the papers. Then we wonder what’s wrong with us if we ever see evidence that the things we’re told are simply untrue.

There’s a mechanism to distribute lies and there’s another mechanism to make us doubt ourselves when the consequences of those lies become impossible to ignore.

This is the mechanism of control.

The truth is that there is no accountability for rich white criminals and there never has been. The Constitution protects their freedom at the expense of ours. It’s frustrating now to look at what’s going on in our country. I still believe in the promise of our country. I just wish that it were a truth instead of an ideal.

Let’s face it, we’ve had long enough to implement the necessary changes.

Perhaps the most frustrating part about this is that nothing we’re seeing today is new. The nation has been openly racist before. There have been brief, flickering moments when we’ve felt ashamed of our racism, but never enough to eliminate it.

This is what this country has always been. It’s a country that was built by stolen labor that made a few privileged white men rich, even though they didn’t deserve to be rich. Even though they had no skills or special talents, other than cruelty, other than the ability to watch human beings suffer and not think of those that suffered as human beings.

They thought of them as “sinners.”

They thought of them as “other.”

They thought of themselves as “God.”

Their descendants have carried on now escaping accountability for their crimes, which include rape, which include stealing babies from their mothers, which include selling and enslaving their own children. Which includes scoffing at the mention of making the reparations that would save the soul of our society.

That’s the history of this country, and we don’t talk about it. I think maybe this kicking the can down the road is about to catch up to us.

There’s always a push that we should forget about the grievances of the past, and we should try to hope for a better future.

Hope is dangerous. It sometimes deprives you of the ability to act.

I don’t think a better future is possible until we address the crimes that form the backbone of our history. We have to be accountable for the things that we’ve done. We have to learn from our mistakes. We have to recognize that they happened. We have to aspire to create a better world. Not just rely on the power of empty promises.

My kids have had the opportunity to see other societies. They’re very capable in Spanish. They’ve observed that when they’re abroad and they speak English, it’s like they’re the star of the moment. But when they’re in the United States and they speak Spanish, they’re shunned, they’re treated with aggression.

I think the idea of merit is not what the United States has ever been about. Instead, we have a frustrating system where it’s predetermined which groups should succeed and which groups should fail.

I felt that was the case growing up, even with my advantages. I’m fully aware that others have had more to overcome than I did. But we can extrapolate the existence of further injustice from the evidence of our own experience.

In my little conservative rural community education was regarded with suspicion. I was consigned to the fringes for calling out contradictions, both in my family and in my community.

However, I managed to persist in a belief that what I was doing was important and right. In order to think this, you have to deny the patriarchs. You have to deny the authoritarians. You have to learn how to hide your true thoughts. You have to see your oppressors not with fear, but as the absurd and pathetic clowns that they truly are. They can’t survive derision, but you have to disguise your rebellion, or they’ll punish you.

Their cruelty knows no limits.

My kids have the advantage at least of having free access to my approval and my love for them and my pride in what they do. I praise them. I don’t hide it. I never punish.

I assure them that they are valuable. I do my best to establish a basis so they don’t succumb to the control of crushing debt, or the love bombing of religion which is designed to exploit the cruel vulnerabilities our hostile society labors to install.

I’ve tried to forge for them an armor to protect them from our national lies.

The system is designed to keep us docile, to keep us in a state of self-doubt, so we won’t trust our own recognition of all the contradictions we see everywhere. This renders us incapable of demanding to be treated better. We allow ourselves to be exploited.

Look at the cruelty inherent to our system of healthcare. Billionaires know that parents will work themselves to death to pay the bills to save their babies. In that state of desperation, gripped with the fear of impending loss, we thank our oppressors for doling out the medications and treatments that should be ours by right.

There’s not a real chance of getting ahead here.

The media is controlled by forces that present a narrative. I’ve seen how normalized it is for the media to deny verifiable facts. They spread lies. People respond with frustration. They respond with theatrical exasperation.

When you mention things that are verifiably true to your neighbors, they doubt you because they’ve seen the opposite on television.

There’s no distribution of the actual facts. Instead, we get the distribution of opinions. All this culminated in the disaster of the 2024 election.

It’s a shame that our society is willing to sacrifice prosperity, it is willing to sacrifice a chance at happiness, a chance at moving forward, all for a tired and familiar lie.

This isn’t a country that should be seen as a world leader. Not today. This country is regressive, it’s not a shining light upon a hill. We have plunged the world into ignorance. It’s a hard thing to see the surface closing in over our heads.

Today, we look upon a future in which it’s going to be harder to express your beliefs, harder to say things that contradict the existing narrative.

It’s already the case that in many public schools, people insist that Christianity is valuable and positive for the community. But where is the impact? Where is the morality? If the United States is a “Christian nation” then shouldn’t that be taken as a proof that Christianity has failed?

Kids are shot in schools. Pregnant women bleed out in hospital parking lots. There is no positive in that.

In a fair society, we’d have the counter-arguments that the inherent concepts of sin and punishment represent an ideology of cruelty. Oftentimes people say, “We can disagree and still be friends, right?” But that sentiment applies to the proliferation of hatred, and not the arguments against it.

We must push back against the authoritarian ideologies that strip us of our basic human dignity. I have a right to tell my children that they don’t have to listen to anybody who tells them that they are flawed, or that they owe a debt, or that they should put aside their own aspirations, and observations, and their perceptions, of what is right and true.

I have a right to tell them that they don’t have to submit to the demands of any rich white man, which in the United States is the image of God.

God is not a divine feminine here and never has been.

All we have is an ideology of cruelty based on the false premise that anybody can work and become prosperous. But that has never been the case. Equal rights have never been extended to all groups. It was always just for the rich white landowners. The Constitution was conceived to protect their rights.

The human beings that the Founding Fathers enslaved were deliberately left out. They were cruelly denied the same protections. Neither were these rights and protections extended to women.

Today, the American public stands by and cheers as their rights are stripped away from them in pursuit of an authoritarian ideal. This has happened because a plurality of the voting public has been brainwashed to obey divine authority.

But authoritarianism has never once in the history of humankind ever functioned.

They’re taking us back to a time of failure and misery and oppression — cheering and chortling all the while.

I’ve lived beneath the mantle of that kind of oppression before. But not to the extreme level all of us are about to experience. I’ve lived in this country. I’ve lived in an abusive household. I’ve lived in a defiantly ignorant, conservative community. From those experiences I recognize the mission statement.

It doesn’t matter what you do. There’s never enough obedience to protect you from punishment.

Punishment is the point. They’ll find a reason. They’ll invent one if they have to. This is the consequence of treating people with less dignity as some sort of an ideological objective.

Biden and Harris built the greatest economy this nation has ever known. There is still a lot more to do, but the economy was strong. Wealth inequality still existed. Changes still needed to be made so that people would have the advantage of getting the things that they’d worked for and earned. We had problems, but we also had hope.

But rather than stay the course and work responsibly in the interests of all, a plurality of the voting public elected to turn our national ideology towards supporting the undeserving rich — putting them in charge.

This is the exact path that created all our problems in the first place.

But rich, white, powerful men can never be wrong. They think of themselves as Gods. So the problem has to be you, and over the next four years they’ll work diligently to fabricate the evidence.

Put on your armor. It’s not going to be pleasant.

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