You Can Lead an American Horse to Water
And he will say ^^^^THIS!^^^^ rather than drink
It’s been two days now, but let’s cut the shit here.
It’s been forty-five years.
I haven’t published essays on here for a while now.
Oh, I have written essays this political season. Plenty.
I spiked them. Over and over.
They were good essays. Worked well. And like a poetry book, it’s worth less than shit to publish them when there is no audience. It’s why I didn’t hit post. It’s why I’m removing my poetry book from the market soon.
Not because they aren’t good.
Because people don’t want good. They want what edifies them, damn the cost.
That’s the lesson of this week.
If I did hit send on this one, it’s because I’d rather get this off my chest, damn the consequences. I don’t expect any of you to read it, enjoy it, or care. So if you do, and if you want to start some shit, take it on down the road.
I have a history of seeing things coming.
I have this because I grew up in an abusive household. If you cannot predict what is coming and avoid it strategically, you get hit. You get punished. You get called names. You starve. You can’t afford pants.
In 2000, when Bush was elected by the Supreme Court, I turned to my girlfriend and I told her that by the end of his first term, we would be at war with Iraq. I wish I’d written it down or recorded myself saying it. I have no proof. You’ll have to take me at my word or go fuck yourself.
When Covid hit, I looked at the statistics and I went to my whiteboard and I wrote a rough estimate of what I though the number of the dead would be. 50 million worldwide, and 835,000 in the US. I have a photo of that, if anyone wants to see it. Date stamped. This is when the news was saying we’d have 200,000 dead at most.
I underestimated. But I saw it coming.
In 2021 when Joseph Biden won the presidency, I decided to leave the country.
I was well aware that he was not the solution to the problem. He was a bandage over a gushing femoral artery. All of my liberal friends and the vast bulk of the country went silent and complacent.
They mocked and shamed me, as I was ridiculed when I suggested we would be at war in Iraq, as they did when I told them to prepare for a long shelter-in-place.
They did not prepare. They fell apart.
And then they got pissed at me for being okay, which I was, for the most part, because I saw it coming. Because I’d been through a lot of maligned time alone in quiet rooms. And the extent of many of their times alone in a room was the shitter.
They blamed me because of what they couldn’t do, and resented me for it, when introspection and peace with having to make effort for a larger cause even if it hurts is a thing one can cultivate and develop.*
*Not Americans, generally.
I knew, even before the insurgency at the capitol, that this problem was not one we could fix unless Americans decided to get off their ass and do something. There was no sign they would. They did not.
Every major protest movement that might have done anything since my birth has been brutally suppressed and silenced itself. Fuck my birth. Before it. For the last fifty years.
I know all you can remember, most of you (Americans), with your memories like mosquitos and your rose-tinted optimism, is the BLM protests, but before that came the 99%, before that the anti-war in Iraq movement, before that the protests in Seattle, before that the other anti-war protests. On and on and on with no change.
They all fail, because Americans, particularly liberal Americans, do not have each other’s backs. Not like the fascists do.
They have each other’s performative voices. And they have internal shame. They hate an ally more than they hate a fascist, if that ally differs on even one position.
I have lost and enraged more liberal friends for trying to help them work within the bounds of pragmatic reality instead of idealism than I ever could piss off any number of fascists. A fascist doesn’t care what you think. A liberal cares ONLY about what you think, hating you for every slight difference between you even if you are helping them SAVE THEIR LIVES.
If you think a liberal will get mad at you for suggesting that there is some legitimacy to the idea that homeless people create problems that must be solved in addition to requiring support and housing, just wait until you suggest that it’s wise to get to safety when fascists are about to try and kill you. Then you never cared about anything, your privilege is showing, and you’re a bastard.
Even though your opinions about equal rights, and feminism, and governance have not changed a lick, and are in line with everything your new moron opponent who should be a fucking ally believes.
They’d rather slap away a hand offering help because it’s wearing a tee shirt they dislike than work together to stop literal orange Hitler.
And for this, you are doomed.
I see that coming. You did not.
Maybe you do now. I fucking hope you do. But if you’re still on the fence after Tuesday?
Hear me.
Your very life depends on it.
The last major advancement we made through social upheaval was voting rights, which passed away just recently without so much as a whimper from the left. Do you even remember when, or how?
If you do, congratulations. Maybe you can point out Ukraine on a map. Maybe. But can you look at a blank map and identify Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia?
That war “ended” just two years ago, kiddos. As will Ukraine when it becomes Russian territory, and every American promptly forgets where it was, if they ever learned.
And if you think that we’re keeping gay marriage, getting abortion rights back, if you think pay is gonna go up and unions will return, well, do please let me know what you’re smoking, because I need something to get my mind off what will actually be happening. Spoiler: None of that shit. None of it.
What is my point?
That I saw what you clearly all cannot see, that America is incapable of saving itself. And that our options are either to fight, or to leave.
And I shouted it multiple times and was dismissed and ignored.
Don’t.
Americans are not fighting. They haven’t. They’re too comfortable, too safe, too full of bread and circusses. They will sit and watch while posting their disapproval on social media and doing exactly nothing as Mexicans are deported, as women are made into second-class citizens even more than they already are, as America slowly turns into a wealth-as-power totalitarian dictatorship in the vein of Russia, with the only real change being who the divine leader is when the present toadie for the rich dies of old age. Then a little bird will land on a ledge and tell the next leader chosen by the rich that He is Risen, and on we go, boot stamping on the human face forever.
This is reality.
Hate me for saying it. Cry, as I have. Do whatever the fuck you want to get it out. Shoot the messenger. Pillory the man trying to save you. I’ll take your arrows. I’ll take your scorn. I’ll take your silence.
I can, because I saw it coming.
You can lead a horse to water, but if it is an American horse, it will not drink, it will nip at the person trying to keep them alive.
That’s what you all do, when you’re not fighting, when you’re doomscrolling.
It didn’t work out.
“C’mon,” I heard as I packed. “What are you even doing? Don’t you think that with Biden in, it’s gonna get better?”
I didn’t. I knew, and SAID LOUDLY, that he was a centrist who would put up no guard rails, and cause Trump to come back and win.
Many, many times, in every single forum I had.
Then came the anger. The condemning. I had disturbed their bubble of false optimism. I had harshed the mellow high Americans live in with pragmatism in the name of protecting them. I had pointed out the flaw in the idealism people cling to over reality, because there was a LITERAL FASCIST rounding to come back and take another, better swipe.
What a bastard I was, to them.
I lost friends.
I lose a lot of friends for this shit.
I am so very alone for being right. And very sad.
But fuck it. Because I am safe. And I want you to be safe, even if you hate me for it. Truly.
Hate me, but be safe.
Maybe motherfuckers might listen now, but I have another prediction to go along with all of our other new problems.
They won’t.
I might get a few friends come to me asking how to move to Canada, as multiple have, and then I’ll give them a detailed path to follow that isn’t as hard as it seems to be, which they will promptly ignore and never follow up on.
That’s happened a good half dozen times.
But fuck it. I don’t care if I’m maligned for this, or if it doesn’t move the needle. That’s not why I’m writing it. That’s not why we hope, or write, or aspire, or create.
A stop sign is not there because people won’t roll through. It, like everything good people do, is a statement of intent. We don’t want people to crash to death. They’re still going to roll through and do it, but I can still put up a sign in the hopes someone might see it.
And I intend to say some shit right the fuck now. So listen, or piss off.
Plug your ears and go la la la.
Run away from the truth.
That’ll stop them fascists. I mean, it’s worked so far, right?
Right?
Yesterday, a dear friend of mine in Canada who left America at the same time I did, posted on social media. They held out a hand to help others who wanted to leave, offering resources, information, an ear, care, and love.
They were shamed for this by someone I had personally witnessed them help a myriad of times, financially, interpersonally. A lopsided, one-way relationship of giving.
But that giving wasn’t enough.
Why?
Because the person who left had gotten themselves to safety, and that wasn’t fair. My friend shouldn’t have brought it up, so the reply went, because SOME PEOPLE CAN’T LEAVE, and this is RUBBING THAT IN THEIR FACE.
Never mind that this person was not forced to read the OFFER OF ASSISTANCE, never mind that the post in question ACKNOWLEDGED THE PRIVILEGE of coming to Canada, and never mind that the person in question would bend over backward to get this person who couldn’t leave here if that were even a possibility.
Simply existing and being safe was the crime.
Cannibalism. The poor eating the poor. A privilege contest when there are brownshirts at the door.
Fuck that, and fuck her. And fuck you, if you’re with her.
“That’s a little harsh.”
Is it?
I KNOW your initial sympathy is with her, becasue so very many people have expressed this sentiment when I try to help them leave. “As for ME, I will STAY for my trans friends!” The implication being I have abandoned them at all.
Fuck you. I will be here for my trans friends TO THE DEATH. You will be there to the FACEBOOK POST. Literally eat all of my shit.
Consider what she is ACTUALLY saying with this reply. With this shaming for putting a hand out.
Hitler’s making his camps. There are many Jews who need to get out of Poland. You’re in a community meeting and they read a letter from a fortunate, prescient Jew who got out, to America, which (at that time) was a safe haven. They say they will send resources, and do what they can, and that they stand in solidarity with their brothers and sisters and hope they can help them find safety.
Imagine a person in the back stands up and says “Well I can’t leave, so shame on any Jew that gets to safety!”
It’s a lot easier to see why this is stupid and perhaps EVIL when you SEE WHAT IS COMING.
Fuck that person. And if you support that person, fuck you. You’re part of the problem.
Yes. Privilege is a thing. Yes. I have privilege. Yes, I am one lucky and privileged motherfucker to get here to Canada.
That doesn’t mean it was wrong. That doesn’t mean it was easy. That doesn’t mean it was shameful. That doesn’t mean I have abandoned any of my principles or allyship.
And it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get out if you can.
Anyone trying to make you a victim of the fascists, to die on a cross to serve a notion of guilt for things you never did and never would do, is an unwitting ally to the fascists. A useful idiot. A dangerous, dumb motherfucker.
Full stop.
If you hate me for that, fine. Hate me.
I will still try to help you. I am leading you to water. I understand that a bridle chafes. I don’t do it to stand over you, or ride you.
I do it to help you not die of thirst.
Please. Drink. Do not die so you can show how much you sympathize with people who cannot be helped.
Mourn them. Aide them as you can.
Don’t die for nothing.
We’re going to need people willing to die for something, and very soon.
Hitlers do not leave willingly. They certainly will not leave MORE because you really disapprove of them while in concentration camps to show your historically performative allyship.
Really.
“I can’t leave my people behind like you did. I just can’t.”
Did I? Is that what I did?
Tell me, have any of you had any trouble getting in touch with me? Asking me for help? Seeing my face?
We live in the age of the internet, Jan.
I vote.
I give.
There’s not a single person I knew before I left I haven’t been in touch with, except the people who excluded me from their life or stopped talking to me for the crime of KEEPING MY SON SAFE FROM FASCISTS.
I didn’t leave anyone behind. Y’all left me, and for what? To cut off your own nose to spite your Facebook faces?
The fuck out of here.
“I don’t have resources like you do. You don’t understand.”
The fuck I do not.
In case it is unclear, I am a god. Damn. Writer.
I have operated at a loss for twenty-five years. Every year it is dubious whether or not I can even afford to continue having a website. I have never not been hand-to-mouth. Not once.
I have been a construction worker. A Gamestop Employee. A personal assistant. I once was forced to use a Safeway bag to stimulate the bowels of a man who could not afford a care nurse as a caregiver for below minimum wage. I delivered papers. I delivered cabinets.
I went bankrupt. I lost everything for my craft.
And there’s also all that abuse I survived. The poverty.
I do fucking understand adversity, and fuck you for invalidating it.
And even if you’ve been through more, it’s not a goddamned misery competition. Even if I’d likely win, most of the time, were we to hold one.
Yes, I have privilege. Every white man does.
I have also walked through fire.
If you want to diminish that to make an argument to keep people from making themselves safe, you can kiss my ass.
You know why? BECAUSE MY ASS WILL STILL BE HERE FOR YOU TO KISS.
Privilege won’t mean shit when we all have jackboots to our face. Where the argument comes from is never as important as its soundness.
But if it is to you, be assured, I am not saying this is easy, or fun, or does not require sacrifice.
I will say it’s more possible than you or almost anyone I talk to thinks it is. You don’t need to be rich, or connected, or wealthy (clearly, fucking look at me). What you do have to be, that most Americans are not, is willing to actually do something to achieve a positive end.
That’s the real problem, not my safety.
When I came to Canada, my family gave up two thirds of our income, half our belongings, and almost all of our friends. We’re still paying down the debt. Our student loans didn’t disappear when we crossed the border. We still struggle for groceries. We’re one lost job away from catastrophe.
Life if full of risks. If you take none of them, you have no business shitting on me for wanting to be safe, because you choose safety over risk yourself. The difference between us will only be outcome. You’ll still be in America. I’ll be here.
People make the argument that I am only here because I am RICH and POWERFUL and LUCKY and PRIVILEGED, I am convinced, do it because if I am none of those things, and I still did it, that means that THEY can leave, they could leave, and if they can, and aren’t, well, what does that say about them?
It means they could have done something and didn’t.
And Americans hate that reality. They hate being shown that their inaction has debilitating, long-term negative consequences they will have to face.
Now.
It was soon.
Now it’s now.
You all, all of you, could have done more. I could have. We could have struck. General strikes. We could have protested, really protested, and demanded commonsense gun laws to protect our children. We could have stopped the wars. Ended Gitmo.
Hell, even voting was too much for a few dozen million of you fuckers.
How’s that protest nonvote working out? Did they get your message? Do we have a third party now?
You sounded stupid saying that shit in 2000. Now it’s criminally negligent.
We are twenty days of general striking away from solving any problem. Even now.
Instead, Americans refuse. When something they don’t like happens, they get their asses to Facebook, they open it up, they find a meme that says something they could never articulate poorly, but slightly better than they could, and they smile, typing a big fat ^^^^THIS!^^^^ before going back to Agatha All Along. Which of course they will later go back onto Facebook to call revolutionary. When we need a revolution.
And wouldn’t you know it? It was you all along.
The call was coming from inside the house.
Hate me for it. Go on. But see it. See the water.
Drink, you coward.
America is ending.
It’s going to end slowly. It always does. It’s a slow-moving coup. A shithead cold war.
First they’ll come for the immigrants. And the women. And the queer community. Well, more than they already have.
So if you know any of them, help them leave. Encourage them to. Go with them. If you are one of them, and need help, talk to me. I’ll do what I can.
Get out.
Go, horse, to the border. Look at the water.
Drink.
One thing I have learned in my life of taking risks and fucking up and losing friends and failing and failing and failing and failing is that we have less to lose than we think.
Which is oddly hilarious, because Americans are losing everything, and yet they believe they are preserving everything by doing nothing about it, or nothing to protect themselves from it.
“I can’t leave my job.”
“I can’t leave my hometown.”
“I can’t leave my gramma.”
“I can’t leave my community.”
The fuck you can’t. You not only should, you must, if you can, when your life is at risk. When that community is doomed.
“I’ll stay in this marriage for the kids.” leads to fucked up kids and a squandered life.
Yes, even if he promised he’d stop hitting you for four years. And did. Most of the time.
You can leave. You can do something.
Bring those you can, mourn those you can’t.
Standing in a burning building to flip off the flames and burning is stupid.
Not selfless.
Yes, even if gramma dies. Holding her hand while you both burn sounds really great in a story.
In real life, that’s two corpses, not one.
This does not invalidate the worth of your gramma. It accepts the truth that there are things we cannot change no matter how much we want to, no matter how wrong it is that they are going to happen.
They are. I hate it. You hate it. But it’s going to happen.
Saving yourself doesn’t mean you don’t love the people who can’t be saved.
It means you’re saving someone, rather than no one.
You aren’t abandoning your community. Your community abandoned you.
You did not create the situation that ensures your gramma or disabled friend cannot leave. You would never. If anything, you’d create the opposite. But you are not in power.
You might not be in power because you didn’t strike, because you didn’t try, and yes, there’s some responsibility for that, but that responsibility doesn’t mean you now have an obligation to die for a mistake you acknowledge.
And it doesn’t mean there’s a path to saving them that will somehow magically appear.
The fascists have won America.
They have not won Canada, and other places.
We can debate whether or not we let them win or not later, once we’re safe, after we’ve retreated to a safe place to begin the fight.
In World War 2, that was retreating to America, where some of us went back to Europe in green and fought, some of us sewed parachutes, some of us gave war bonds, some of us wrote stories.
Now it’s anywhere but America.
The place to regroup from the burning building is not inside it.
It’s somewhere with WATER, MOTHERFUCKER.
So drink.
A friend just wrote me over chat and said that the reason this election happened, perhaps, was too many exclusionary tactics.
The fascists take people who are desperate and unhappy and they give them a group to exclude, in this case, immigrants, women, and that makes them feel powerful, and they vote to be the elite.
There’s also a thought among many centrist liberals that we need to somehow fold these fascists into our loving arms, and teach them to reason their way out of positions they were never reasoned into.
They suggested that perhaps the solution was to be less exclusionary, in some fashion.
A good initial thought, and I thank them for it, but exclusion isn’t the problem. It’s the way it’s being used. And who is using it.
If you are going to stay and fight, meeting a fascist in the middle is the worst possible thing you can do. They will move the goalposts until you are standing in the Kommandant’s office.
The only solution is to become more exclusionary, in the right way. To use the tool they have abused so willfully, for justice. To create coalitions of people who will actually fight, rather than performatively exclaim on the internet.
In 2015, I declared on every medium I had that I am no friend or ally to anyone who supports fascists, or fascist-adjacent people. I have repeated that message, and lost more and more people I am better off without. I had figured that every thinking person would follow suit.
I was treated as unreasonable, and many of my liberal friends to this day have not excluded their fascist relatives.
“But it’s my Dad.”
He is in a Nazi uniform. He’s not your Dad. He’s a fucking Nazi.
I am now taking the further step to say that if you are someone who shames others for seeking safety, for declaring the obvious, that the American experiment has failed, and that escape is wrong, you’re an ally of the fascist, and you should fuck off, and cut me out of your life, because I have no interest in you clinging to me to drag me into the water so we both drown. You’re toxic.
We are not allies. You are materially aiding my enemy and the enemy of all free people and preventing people from saving themselves, in the name of pointless guilt. You are threatening my life for your shit philosophy, which makes you functionally indistinguishable from a fascist.
The best time to leave was years ago
The second best is now.
If it’s too late, it’s too late, but you can try. Try something. Do something, rather than what y’all have been doing.
Look up the immigration policy for the nation you wish to flee to. Begin saving what you can, if you can. See what careers that country needs.
Every immigrant about to be punished by America for existing already knows how this works. America needs migrant workers. So they become migrant workers.
I know it’s hard, from your position of, dare I say, privilege, to imagine yourself hucking boards or picking lettuce or mining, but hey. Take it from a guy who moved cabinets and built houses, there are plenty of fucking Socratic geniusses out there getting fucked for pay. Yes, you, even special you, can be one, for a better life.
If that’s too much for you, consider what that says about what you think about immigrants.
About me.
It was a joke I heard all through college, “Yeah, I have an English Degree. You want fries with that?
I know you went to college, and you really don’t want to dig ditches. I know you feel you deserve more.
Well then, chum, maybe you shouldn’t have sat around with a thumb up your ass while the country declined. But here we are.
Humble yourself for the sake of your children or spouse or your family or yourself. Be humble like the immigrant you now are.
Study the trade that appeals to you most, or the professional path you have three credits in and could potentially pick back up with five years of work
Pick it back up.
Fight to move. Work to move. Make effort for once. Ask your family and friends and community to support you. If they won’t, take out loans you intend to default on. Better in default than in America in ten years. Rob, cheat, steal.
Do whatever you have to do, debase yourself however you have to, to go to a place where women will be treated as human beings. It’s your only hope now.
I know, I know. You hate it. I hate it. I mourn my country. You’ll mourn your country. Fuck it. You’ll be alive to do it.
Drink.
When I left the United States I weighed 233 pounds. I woke up screaming in the night with heart palpitations and considered suicide regularly. It wasn’t Covid.
It was fascists, and the last 40 years living in the states. I’m sure I’d be dead from stress now if I’d stayed, or suicide. How I arrived there is a whole separate essay for another day. I mention my poor health before I left for an express reason:
I have spent three years here in Canada, coming up on four, and everything has changed for me.
I excercise regularly because my head’s right. I am at peace for the first time. My friends and neighbors are not constantly engaging me in purity contests or dehumanizing people. They locked down. They paid for vaccines. The tests were free. When I got Covid and bronchitis at once, it did not bankrupt me. They cured me.
We face our challenges, but the shift in paradigm between the United States and Canada cannot properly be stated in words, the gulf is so significant. Until you are apart from the chaos, you will never truly understand how bad things in the US were even before Trump returned.
The pictures tell the tale. 2021, my first day in Canada:
Today:
You can’t see my body at this angle, but I’m down 60 pounds. I used to wear an XL shirt. I now wear a medium. I’m in the best shape of my life. I weigh less than I did when I was 16.
I’m happy generally, and I don’t even know how to handle that.
Shit’s good. Shit’s real good. Up here.
Down where I used to be? That’s hell. It’s the only stress left in my life, whenever I turn my attentions and efforts south, which is often. But it’s offset by life here. I have the strength to fight and actually engage and do shit here, in ways I never could in the states. And I do.
You can join me. Find your calm. Your peace. Your Canada.
My blood pressure dropped from 145/100 to 120/80.
I went from the couch to running 7.5 miles non-stop, because you can do that, when you go to a place where you’re not in constant fight-or-flight. You have the bandwidth.
I laugh. All the time. I laugh and I sing and I catch fish and you deserve this too.
Let’s see what my blood pressure is right now, even as stirred as I am writing this.
Yep. Pictures don’t lie, folks. The high diastolic is caffeine.
And I’m as pissed off about this election right now as I’ve been since I heard them shooting the press from my back yard in Portland.
Which they do in America. They shoot and beat the press.
But it could be worse. They may not have a free press soon.
DRINK, YOU SONS OF BITCHES.
Drink for your health. For the health of your kids.
“But what about my friends who can’t/won’t leave?”
HELP THEM, YOU SONS OF BITCHES.
Duh.
Send money. Talk to them on the phone. Hold out a hand for when they’re ready to try to leave, if they can, or if they can’t, prepare to break the law to free them if the shit gets hot.
In other words, DO ALL THE SHIT YOU ALREADY DO IN AMERICA, THAT I DO FROM HERE, BUT FROM SAFETY.
“It’s not the same on Skype as it is in real life.”
You’re right. It’s hard. If only we had THREE YEARS OF PLAGUE AND REMOTE WORK TO TEACH US HOW TO DO IT EFFECTIVELY.
That’s sarcasm, asshole.
More to the point, your discomfort at how hard shit is and will be has become immaterial, motherfucker. We’re in it now. You’re going to struggle. You’re going to have to do a lot of shit you aren’t ready to deal with.
I’ve been doing it my whole life, I know how much it sucks, but I know you can.
Because I did, and I ain’t shit.
Go seek succor and comfort for your inability to cope from a fascist as opposed to an ally. See how that shit works out for you. I’m here to help you, but you’re going to have to really, really make a sacrifice and try, instead of post your feels on Facebook. You’re gonna have to GIVE UP SOME SHIT and LOSE SOME SHIT and realize that you have less left to lose than you think, and less by the day.
We are at war.
DRINK.
No, not booze, you idiot.
The water.
Here’s another, perhaps the most uncomfortable truth, of all of this. I already mentioned it, when I said the call was coming from inside the house, but now I’ll drill down.
I’ve seen a meme reposted many a time. The meme about the NAZI BAR. And of course, because it’s America, the Twitter handle it appears to be sourced from is @Iamragesparkle. It’s extra hilarious that it was posted on Twitter, because Twitter’s a fucking NAZI BAR.
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, "no. get out."
And the dude next to me says, "hey i'm not doing anything, i'm a paying customer." and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, "out. now." and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, "you didn't see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them."
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, 'oh damn.' and he said "yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people."
Here’s the truth. Whether you like it. Whether it makes you comfortable. Whether it hurts you. Whether it helps you. It’s just the truth.
America is a Nazi Bar now. It’s not one Nazi.
It’s a PLURALITY and ALL THREE BRANCHES OF GOVERNMENT.
Doesn’t matter what you are. You’re surrounded by Nazis.
And here’s what you’ll hate me for saying. Go on. Doesn’t make it less true:
You are a patron at that bar, so long as you stay willingly.
You are sitting at a Nazi bar. And you’re not trying to get up.
They’re more than half of you. And they have bats. And the bartender is with them. And the cops.
If you can leave, and you stay, thinking you can persuade Nazis, you’re not only wrong, you’re stupid.
If you think staying to help the people trapped in a cage on the other side of the bar is anything beyond throwing away your life for nothing, you’re not only wrong, you’re stupid.
Shoot the messenger. Hate him. Blame him while you burn.
Chase me, if you want. I can run further than you can to get away.
I did.
You can do that, all you want, for as long as you want, because I AM HERE.
I didn’t run because I’m a coward, or because I don’t care for my queer friends, or because I abandoned my principles, or any other shit you might say about me so you can rationalize staying in a Nazi Bar.
I left because I can look at a fire and say that it’s hot. And that there’s no solace in burning for nothing.
Why does that bother you so much? Ask yourself.
That is, unless you have something that looks like it might be effective in America right now to combat this.
The minute something rationally possible presents itself, I’ll come roaring back, along with anyone who’s still alive.
Be there with me when the time comes, instead of dead.
Come with me to rescue those we have to leave behind. Put the mask over your nose, stabilize your breathing, and we’ll go back and put the masks on everyone left behind we can when there’s any option to do so.
Drink.