Civilization Rant

DISCLAIMER: this incident happened years ago, during the first Trump regime. I will not provide enough details to track this person down, but if you manage to do so (or just recognize yourself), do not berate the person nor attack me. This is just something that happened, and I feel it is a symptom of a larger problem in our society.

I hear a lot of bullshit from Trump supporters, or MAGAts as they are currently known. For the vast majority of them it is willful ignorance that they embrace in order to nurture their inner bully. Trump speaks to them as deeply as some perverted form of “Jesus” speaks to…well, many of them too. Hence the confusion among them that often follows.

Then there are the others. Yes, there are others. Most of these people are those who don’t get out much. That can mean physically not getting out much, but it can also mean walking out the door and straight into a self-constructed brick wall, which is what many of them seem to do every day every day of their lives.

You’ve met them and probably not even realized what they were. Many of them are very sheltered little old ladies and men of all ages, festooned in polyester and marinated in fondly-held fiction. They don’t watch news at all, or swear they don’t, or else they are actually frightened to venture beyond Fox News. A lot of them don’t even know who the president is, or where the U.S. is on a map, or where they are in the U.S., looking at a map.

Some of the rest, however, will surprise you.

One I met was a college student, and not at one of those “religious” colleges that refuses to teach evolution, either. To be fair she had been raised in a strict white church, even though she and her family were POC. Just before we had the conversation I’m about to tell you about, she had told me, wide-eyed, that she was starting to think her church was racist.

And then a few days later, she told me about a student in one of her classes making a speech about Canada, and how she’d told both that student and the professor off. What was the student talking about? Canada as a sovereign nation.

This girl was, and probably still is, convinced that Canada is a U.S. state.

I listened to this bullshit for a minute while she boasted about how smart she was for standing up and telling these people off. She, a timid little church mouse and a POC who knew her place, had finally found her voice. SO proud.

And then I dropped the bomb on her: CANADA IS IN FACT A SOVEREIGN NATION. After arguing briefly, she never spoke to me again.

Part of this explains the general panic when Trump’s people decided to distract from his general incompetence and unfitness the other day by hinting that he’d annex Canada. When I heard that, I chuckled and thought of this girl I knew. She must be thinking, “why would Trump have to annex a state?”

What it comes down to is not just that our educational system sucks, but that I don’t think anyone can effectively penetrate the rubber rooms these people are living in.

Maybe it’s not such a problem, because even if they graduate college in spite of their incompetence, they can find jobs in the Trump administration. Maybe that’s the aim.

But the point is here that we have a large segment of our society that doesn’t accept accepted truths. A failure to agree on what’s true has been a large part of the success of Russia’s attack on our society.

I think we need to get back to “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” (Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution) but at this point we’ve such a hodgepodge of truths that it’s more like a quote from The Lion in Winter: “which truth is this? We have so many.”

Truth is the enemy of Trump. The trouble is getting everyone to agree on the truth. And that was the point of Putin’s attack from the start. It is up to us to correct it. It will be difficult, but starting with destroying the MSM, including Fox News, and moving forward from there will be a major help.

Filed under: bricks shy of a load, caffeinated squirrels, cry wolf, loose nuts, loose screws, lost marbles, porch lights out, Trump, wingnuts | Tagged: blog, Donald Trump, MAGAts, news, politics, Stupid, Trump, wingnuts | Comments Off on The Girl Who Didn’t Know Canada from…