It’s been a while. Sorry about that. With all the distractions and changes between November 9 and January 29, it’s nearly impossible to take in everything that’s happening. There’s another name for these things: Bread and Circuses.
We are so used to paying attention to entertainment, to the spectacle, we’ve lost the ability to concentrate on what’s important. And the far Right know it. In fact, they’ve been working extra hard to ensure we’re too distracted to see what’s really happening here.
I stored a lot of these links when they hit my feed, way back in November. So much feel-good or buck-up media attempts out there, to shore up the losing side of the election, to try and make us feel better. From Dave Chappelle’s appearance on ‘SNL’ and Kate McKinnon’s appearances as Hillary Clinton to that piece about the Kids who sued the US Government Over Climate Change, we thought we had plenty of reason to think things would still be okay, and that this was just the usual more conservative swing.
There’s so much at stake, with freedom of the press (a right so important it came in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution), to assemble peacefully, to separate church and state. And now these rights enshrined in our Constitution are at risk, along with so many other rights we have as citizens of this country. In classic Orwellian double-speak, the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA) is just one of the concentrated attacks put forth in the 115th Congress against our citizens.
How did we get here? Well, if you think it’s all about the Republicans and President Obama, or Trump and his rise to power, truly, you’re missing the big picture in a really big way. There’s a lot more to the story, and it starts with George H. W. Bush, in the Reagan administration.
There are pieces to the puzzle we’re missing, and I know it, but I have to wonder, given the sheer number of racist YouTube clips and other samples from around the Internet, whether Congressman Keith Ellison’s remark in July, 2007 regarding similarity between Germany’s Reichstag fire and America’s 9/11 attacks was correct after all.
I could review all the ways in which the Saudi attack on the US worked to damage our civil liberties over the last 16 years, but reality shows that we’ve simply incorporated all those reductions in rights presented as necessary in passing the USA Patriot Act and other legislation designed to “keep us safe” from terror.
We are witnessing the forced erosion of rights, from the gutting of the Voter Rights Act and CrossCheck purging voter rolls, to cameras tracking our every move on the streets and in our homes, and now the new “Muslim Ban” enacted last Friday, coupled with all the threats designed to keep us “safe” from harm, we are already living our lives in Oceania.
And now, thanks to the massive distraction of Trump’s Muslim ban, this has happened:
Trump orders ISIS plan, gives Bannon role in revamped National Security Council
Enjoying those reality shows? I can’t watch anymore.
Real life is reality show enough for me.
There’s only one message here: If you’re not terrified, either you’re not paying attention or you are part of the problem.
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