Occasionally, certain groups of people need to be forcibly extracted from their shared psychosis. They must have their heads forcibly yanked from the depths of their collective asses and shown the light. It just so happens that a large swath of ultra conservative Republicans are in dire need of this surgical extraction today.
It is no secret to anyone with more than a passing interest in political theater that the Republican Party panders to and is run by an aging base of rich white ultra conservative men who operate under a delusional sense of the good old days. When I refer to the good old days I reference a magical make believe time as portrayed on TV shows like Leave it to Beaver or Donna Reed where a happy, white so called "nuclear" family with one dad who is a REAL man's man (whatever that means) goes to work at his good paying 9 to 5 job, comes home to his wife; a tortured soul whose duties (aside from cranking out babies like a factory) are to dutifully clean the house in full makeup complete with pearls and high heals and to have dinner on the table like a good woman should. A world virtually devoid of anyone ethnic or forward thinking; in short, a simpler time.
Yes, those are the good old days some uber conservatives yearn for... and weren't those good old days great?! Of course they were; at least if you're the man of this fantasy family. Otherwise you're the wife stuck in a monotonous world of servitude; relegated to a regimen of dirty diapers, cooking, cleaning and fuck me, get the shotgun I'm going to blow my brains out.
I hate to break it to any delusional grey hairs reading this, but our fine country has never been a thriving utopia and virtually no one conducted themselves in ways as seen on those ridiculous shows. But for right now lets ignore the fact that virtually no one outside of maybe the Romney clan ever lived like that. Lets ignore the lack of nuclear families, brown people, crime and the nonexistent black kids armed with menacing bottles of Arizona iced tea requiring lethal force be used against them. They didn't exist in those bullshit idealized fantasy shows just as they don't exist in the false memories of the ultra conservative ideologue.
In reality, America is a diverse country made stronger by a steady infusion of diversity from cultures spanning the globe. We have never lived in an all white vacuum devoid of diversity and while the opportunities available to minorities have steadily improved from nonexistent to pitiful to sorta..kinda.. equal (but not really) there has always been the prospect of a better tomorrow and the potential for each of us to do better than out parents no matter the color of our skin or the configuration of our genitals.
And that's the crux of the uber conservative idealized yesteryear; it's centered around greed and racism and its nothing we haven't seen before, right? Except it really is different this time because this deeply ingrained mindset of intolerance permeates congress. To this day we have unilateral obstruction from the minority party (the Republicans) the likes of which the country has never experienced before. And it is no coincidence that the number of filibusters has increased from an estimated 8% to 70% during the 2 terms of our very first black president. How interesting that the tea party patriots (a division of extremist Republicans) have routinely carried signs with images of the president portraying him with a bone through his nose or hanging from a noose or with his face atop Adolf Hitler's body all during election season.
No other president in the history of America has encountered such racist, bigoted and hateful discourse from the opposition party and it has become abundantly clear that a portion of the Republican Party has no compunction about sinking our ship just to drown the captain. Except the country is the ship, the captain is the President and all of us are on board doing a whole lot of nothing to stop them.
Rather unsurprisingly, Republicans have opposed some of the most groundbreaking and important legislation in our country's history such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which outlawed racial, ethnic and gender discrimination. They've fervently opposed Medicare & Medicaid, social security, and more recently women's reproductive rights, the rights for same sex couples to marry, and even the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) which virtually all independent reports estimate will dramatically decrease healthcare costs and the deficit, but Republicans in their infinite wisdom have opposed it; all of it.
How can these elected officials summarily reject policies that the electorate is begging for and in countless cases is perfectly in line with their own supposed goals? Because each of these proposals represent a change to the status quo and change is different and different is BAD! Bad Bad Bad!
Yes, the Republicans frequently find themselves in what I can only assume by now must be a familiar position - standing with feet firmly planted on the wrong side of history. I can only wonder how they continue to garner such strong support from people who are neither white nor rich when time and time again the Republican party has proven they couldn't care less about you! Why do "we the people" continue to reward these ancient racist do nothing jag offs with unending terms in office?
I have no answers, but maybe one day enough of us will wake up, pull our heads from our collective asses and effect the change this country needs… or maybe not. Only time will tell, but if we use history as a guide we can expect to smell shit for quite a while.
