The Torchbearers

 Some times I think the conservative movement has become a fiery runaway clown car with no brakes careening off a slippery cliff of caca into the bottomless bowels of some sort demon lair of the unhinged straight-outta-marbles geriatric white wonderland of festering fear. It is here where nothing makes any sense, up is down, hate is religion, poverty is criminal, charity is immoral, violence is kindness, vaccines are the disease and covid is the hoax, voter suppression is protection and voter turnout is undemocratic, and lies become fact by merely increasing the decibel level. And Trump is their God of desecration.

And then I remember that America is still the best hope. Out of all the world leaders, this pustulating ulcerous political system of ours isn't sending people to concentration camps (currently), or re-educating Muslims by raping them, or throwing journalists off balconies and calling it suicide, our descending into open warfare with military tanks rolling through towns and gunning down people. I know that is an extremely low moral bar...but that is usually how civilization goes on. It's isn't the altruistic societies that thrive. It's the brutal and hypocritical people who hold on to some bare minimum ethos just long enough to defeat disease, war, famine, poverty and the usual killers of civilization. 

What we are experiencing is nothing compared to what my parents experienced, and their lives are nothing compared to my grandparents. As you look back, there is some ascending generational line for my people, my family, my race, this nation. The longview is hard to see, but there is a certain part of the country that knows it's losing. They are thrashing about in the death throes of the demographic shift, twisting their logic in knots to gerrymander, suppress, and legislate lies into existence. They are fiddling with the margins in trying to siphon off votes against a rising tidal wave. They have lost the popular vote in almost all the elections in the last 20 years. 

While our assbackward democracy allows a minority to cling to power by its finger nails, it does not/can not reverse a death spiral. There is no dark Constitutional alchemy that can be found to reverse things for conservatives. They will continue to cling to the edge until their fingernails break...but they can not thrive. We are thriving. They shoot us down and we continue to thrive. They suppress our votes and we come out in Georgia and flip a conservative state. They undercount us, overpolice us, and erase our struggle from history...and we continue to thrive because the driving force of this nation isn't in legal tricks or disinformation. It is something immaterial, ineffable and untouched by lawyers and pundits. I know it because my people should have been wiped out by now if we depended on material things, rights, and justice. We should have been exterminated by their virulent hatred. But we thrive. It is mystifying to me how my grandparents and great grandparents did it. But then I remember that I don't have to know exactly 'how' they did it. They carried the torch through an American obstacle course of police dogs, red tape, screaming mobs. I just have to continue to carry their torch forward until I can pass it off to the next person waiting in the darkness. Don't pay attention to social media's reactive rage cycle or the pessimism pundits who say things are worse than they have ever been. It's Just. Not. True. It's not true statistically, it's not true historically, and it's not true spiritually. Carry the fire of your ancestors forward. The torch is not dependent upon us for fuel. We are merely carrying it. The fire has a mind of its own. And its fuel comes from a higher octane than hate.