Escalation

One of the things I hated the most about being a kid was feeling powerless. My parents split when I was four and my schedule was a beast - four nights at my mom’s, then three nights at my dad’s, three nights at my mom’s then four nights at my dad’s. The disruption to the rhythm made me anxious - the way things felt so different from one house to the other, the expectations at my mom’s versus my dad’s, being away from my mom for so long, never having everything in one place, always forgetting something I needed, listening to my parents fight on the phone or at pick-up, being locked out more times than I can count - having to wrangle my feelings wherever I was.

I grew up in the 70s and 80s and you didn’t talk back. That’s a generalization, of course, there were certainly parents who let their children “feel their feelings” - and they probably wore flower crowns and bell bottoms and listened to John Denver. My mom loved John Denver, I can still remember him blasting from our speakers in the living room as the record player spun -

Country roads, take me home

To the place I belong

West Virginia, mountain mama

Take me home, country roads

- and my mother would sing along even though she couldn’t hold a tune. It was the one thing she wasn’t good at as far as I could tell. She always wanted to be perfect, and there was something about hearing her sing off-key that was painful and a little scary - like there was a chink in her armor and we were both exposed because of it.

Fan of John Denver or not, my mother tolerated no back-talk, no messy feelings of any kind. That included sadness, anxiety and fear. I was allowed to be happy (but not loud) and helpful - anything else was dangerous. If I was grinding my teeth while I slept at night so intensely she could hear it in the next room, that was okay. Repressing my rage was acceptable, even if it wasn’t sustainable.

What started to piss me off as I got older was the hypocrisy, because my mother could do any damn thing she wanted. She could rage, she could get falling-down drunk, she could say devastating things that still hurt when I think about them, she could not come when I needed her most…but I could not step a toe out of line. I could not call her on her shit, I could never get an acknowledgement of the things that happened, let alone an apology.

I think in her mind adults did not apologize to children, or maybe it was more specific than that - I was lucky she had figured out how to keep a roof over our heads and she was going to be goddamned if I forgot that.

Also, my mother’s rules were hard to follow. Once I was babysitting for a little girl in our building. I was twelve, the girl was about four and I was supposed to keep her occupied while her mother cooked or read a book or talked on the phone. I did my best, but she wasn’t an easy kid. She didn’t like to read books, she didn’t like to play pretend games.

The last day I babysat for her, she marched into the kitchen, an hour earlier than I was supposed to leave, and announced to her mother that she was done playing with me. “I’m bored, Mommy, send her home!” she demanded, and her mother turned to me and said, “She’s done with you, you aren’t keeping her stimulated, you can go.”

You can fuck off now. Photo by Josh Duncan on Unsplash

I left immediately without waiting to be paid because I thought I’d failed and didn’t deserve anything for my effort - and when I walked into the kitchen my mother wanted to know why I was back early. I recounted what happened. I didn’t expect my mother to be sympathetic, I was trying hard not to cry and to keep my voice steady.

It was the way the mom had spoken to me, not the boredom of a four-year-old. My mother’s eyes got wide and fiery while I spoke, and she grabbed the phone and called this woman before I knew what was happening. “How would you feel if someone spoke to your daughter that way? She’s a child, you don’t just dismiss her! And be sure you pay her for her time!” Then she hung up and I stood there in the kitchen feeling stunned, grateful, and confused.

Needless to say I never babysat for them again, but it was dizzying. My mother would defend me in that kind of situation, but rage at me herself. I was hers to abuse if she so chose, no one else’s. Something like that. People are complicated. She loved me, too. She expected me to deal with all her paradoxes and help her into cabs when she couldn’t walk and hold my arms over my face and head when she was angry to try to protect myself, but she did love me. It was just twisted up love.

My dad was worse, because he confided in me like I was his therapist from the time I was four, brought me on dates with his “lady friends” after school like I was his wingman, treated me like an object to feed his own ego as I got older - but if I ever let him down by, say, having a need - he acted like a spoiled, disappointed child. He removed any chance I had at relating to my friends or feeling like a normal kid, but my god could he throw his own tantrums.

I have a zero tolerance policy for hypocrisy and double standards. If you’re going to be awful, please own it. I have so much more respect for that, than I do for people who smile while they drive the knife in, and act like you’re crazy for bleeding.

I’m in a thing with a friend, or I was. It doesn’t really matter anymore, but I fought the good fight and then I gave up. He posted some mind-bending thoughts in a public forum and I was stopped in my tracks, which isn’t a thing that happens a lot these days. I feel like we’ve all been shocked so much it’s now more disorienting to have a “normal day” when nothing insane happens - but this got me.

I entered the chat because I thought my friend must be confused, that he must not have investigated deeply to be saying the things he was saying. I felt certain if I sent him a couple of links we’d clear it up quickly, but no. I was the confused one. I thought I knew his heart, and now I’m wondering how many people we ever know.

The worst part of it happened after we went back and forth for a while, and other people jumped in, too - after I realized it wasn’t a mistake and he actually believed these things and felt this way. He persisted with the “we don’t all have to agree, we can have different ideas and still think of one another as decent” line - with angel emojis and comments that people need to do more yoga and not get so reactive and emotional. Then he texted and said, “I hope you still love me.” Heart emoji, heart emoji.

I don’t need my friends to agree with me on everything, and that’s good because they don’t. That would be boring for all involved. But basic things that have to do with human decency and empathy and a willingness to acknowledge actual American history? Yes. Unless you’re stone cold tripping and don’t know what planet you’re on, I need us to be able to agree that slavery happened, and that it was horrific.

If you can’t do that, it isn’t that you don’t know the truth, it’s that you’re actively and willfully trying to pretend it isn’t a thing we need to talk about anymore. We’ve gone from the PragerU videos of an animated Christopher Columbus teaching kids that slavery needs to be considered in the “context of the times when it happened,” and that it was, “better than dying, no?” - to people who want to wipe it from the history books altogether.

It’s not that I’m “emotional” or “reactive” or “sensitive” or that I need to do more yoga - it’s that I’m repulsed by the idea that there are people in this world who want to engage in revisionist history. Maybe I had too much of it growing up. Too many people telling me the thing I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, and experienced with my own body for years on end wasn’t happening, hadn’t happened. That it didn’t mean what I thought it did - I was somehow misinterpreting the events I’d lived through or TAKING WHAT HAPPENED OUT OF CONTEXT. Bruises must have appeared by magic. My mother’s drinking wasn’t that bad.

Bibles started arriving in Oklahoma schools this week in case you haven’t heard. They aren’t the $60/each golden Trump bibles Ryan Walters wanted, but they are a travesty nonetheless. Let’s pause for a minute, though, because what is even happening with Ryan Walters? Not that I care, but it’s the hypocrisy, again. He who claims schools are “peddling porn” - got caught with naked ladies on his office television during a school board meeting, but says it wasn’t him, it was those pesky radical left lunatics, somehow beaming steamy Jackie Chan scenes to his television.

Sometimes I have to step off this timeline and guffaw so I don’t die from sadness. Jackie fucking Chan from “The Protector” circa 1985? Because if he was watching that on purpose, I’m dead, and if someone chrome-casted it to his television I’m also dead. Anyway, he swears it wasn’t him, but he stepped down as Oklahoma’s school superintendent today so he can head some league or alliance or - I looked it up - so he can be CEO of The Teacher Freedom Alliance, some conservative tough guy cosplaying thing he made up to take down the teachers’ unions. Yeah, that’s the problem in this country, it’s the teachers’ unions!

He’s been voraciously denying the whole porn scandal, saying the Sheriff’s office investigated and cleared him, but then the Sheriff’s office said their investigation had just begun and nothing had been cleared. These folks just lie. They say things and hope no one will check, or if someone checks, people will have stopped listening.

“A lie can travel around the world and back again, while the truth is lacing up its boots.”

That quote is often attributed to: Mark Twain or Winston Churchill or Jonathan Swift or C.H. Spurgeon. But it was probably Jonathan Swift - if you happen to be someone who cares about the truth and doesn’t think of it as a malleable thing you can change when you want to.

Anyway, the thing about the Bibles is they seem to be pretty standard King James Bibles until you get to the back. There you find the Bill of Rights and the Pledge of Allegiance and the U.S. Constitution. Except you don’t. Because they decided to use a version of the Constitution that includes the Three Fifths Compromise, and excludes the 11th-27th Amendments.

Hold my beer. I’m not drinking a beer, but if things are going to continue to be this off-the-charts-unhinged, maybe we should start putting MDMA in the water. Or LSD. Something to help take the edge off. It’s weird for me to be saying this. I don’t drink to speak of, maybe once in a blue moon. I don’t do drugs. But maybe if everyone got high af we could all get along. That’s how desperate I am at this point.

You wanna know what’s in some of the left-out Amendments real quick? I think you do! Here’s the CliffsNotes version, feel free to look this up if you want to go deep. I want to highlight the parts that really ought to freak everyone out, but probably, somehow, will only freak out half of us.

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11th Amendment:

Limits the jurisdiction of federal courts over states. Aw shit, what? That’s right, citizens in one state can’t sue another state, nor can citizens or subjects of any foreign state. Let’s say a man from Alabama comes to California on vacation, and goes to a mall and an escalator SUDDENLY STOPS DEAD IN ITS TRACKS, and that poor wretch has to walk up the steps and deal with the trauma of what could have happened if he lurched forward onto his stupid orange lying face. He’s an imaginary man so his face can be stupid, orange, and lying, those are the rules.

Because of the 11th Amendment, the Supreme Court would not hear that case. A state cannot be a defendant in a lawsuit. Without the 11th Amendment, though, it can. And when the Supreme Court is in the pocket of the president, that’s probably not a good thing, just spitballing over here.

13th Amendment:

Section 1.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Hey, seems like a REALLY IMPORTANT AMENDMENT for kids to learn about, dontcha think? Also, see the part I put in bold? Yikes! That’s scary, right? You can still be enslaved in the United States of America as punishment for a crime. How would that work, you might ask. Ever heard of the prison-industrial complex? If you are not well-versed in this subject,

Ava DuVernay

’s 13TH is a film I cannot recommend enough, and Netflix must agree because they made it free for everyone:

Should be required watching for anyone who was lionizing a certain individual in the last few weeks.

14th Amendment:

This is a big one, it’s packed with juicy goodness, things like the Citizenship Clause that says if you were born here or naturalized here, you’re a citizen and states cannot abridge your privileges or immunities. No citizen can be denied life, liberty or property without due process of law.

If you want to know exactly what “due process of law” means, it means you as a citizen cannot be denied your life, your freedom, or your property unless normal and fair legal procedures are followed - things like having your Miranda Rights read if you’re arrested, getting your “day in court” so you understand the charges against you and have an opportunity to defend yourself (and the time to procure and meet with an attorney or have one provided to you).

It also means that the laws themselves have to be fair and reasonable, that the government has to have a compelling reason to believe you’ve broken these laws, that they’re not just “guessing” or “assuming” or thinking you look like someone who might break a law based on your race - which is why it’s so incomprehensible the Supreme Court decided “roving patrols” don’t violate the Constitution, because yes they fucking do.

I want you to know that I saw a video earlier, it was a young family at their legal immigration appointment in NYC - doing it the right way because I know that’s so important to so many people - Mom, Dad and two little kids. The daughter looked about nine or ten, the son looked maybe six? They were all dressed up, he had a little button-down shirt and black slacks, and the kids were standing right there, watching in horror as an ICE thug grabbed their dad. This took place in a vestibule, and the daughter was clinging to her dad and all four of them were crying, and these ICE agents had no mercy. The kids were crushed against the wall behind their mother, one of the ICE agents was grabbing the mom by her hair.

They wrenched the dad away from his family as the mom and both kids begged them to stop, and then this absolute pig of a man assaulted their mother. Just picked her up and threw her down onto the ground and then stood over her, threatening her while she cried and begged for some compassion. I am not attaching it here because I was sobbing while watching. It was traumatizing and I am not going to assume you can handle that right now, but it was one of the most soulless things I’ve ever seen, and if this is what half our country wants, I will never understand and I want no part of it. If you can watch that and think “good” I truly worry for your humanity, you’ve lost the thread.

The Equal Protection Clause, also part of the 14th Amendment, says states must apply equal protection of the laws to all citizens within its jurisdiction.

There’s also the very pertinent and obviously unenforced “Disqualification Clause” which says if you engage in insurrection or rebellion against the United States then you can’t hold civil or military office. So…yeah. What’s happening is I want to put everything in all caps, which is definitely a very bad sign. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Moving on.

15th Amendment

States can’t deny citizens the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Of course there’s the letter of the law, and the application. You’ll have to read up on Jim Crow laws if you want to understand why The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was so necessary, and the entire Civil Rights Movement, and how it was not a mistake on any level. The only person who could get a sentence like that out of their white mouth is a person who thinks life was better (and would be better again) when Black people had fewer rights. Lovely.

Gonna skip ahead to the 19th Amendment and I sure hope you know this one! The 19th Amendment prohibits the federal government and the states from denying anyone the right to vote based on sex. It was passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified on August 18, 1920. Women fought for decades to get the vote.

The 19th Amendment was the result of a decades-long women’s suffrage movement, but before you get too excited and think it included all women - Black women in the South were still largely denied the right to vote no matter what the Constitution said…because of Jim Crow laws, discriminatory laws, and intimidation. Things like literacy tests and poll taxes. Once again for the white nationalists in the back, The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a necessary and hard-won part of the Civil Rights Movement and something every child should learn about.

20th Amendment

Term limits for presidents, procedures for succession if the president dies in office, dates a presidency begins and ends. Of course these guys are talking about a third term because they don’t care about the Constitution, or they want to start using this version at the back of the weird Bible.

22nd Amendment

A president can only serve two terms. SO odd these Amendments were not included.

23rd Amendment

DC can vote even though it can’t have statehood. For reasons.

24th Amendment

No poll tax. The government can’t screw around with citizens’ right to vote in elections. It can’t be harder for some people than others. So we should talk about the SAVE Act. It’s an attempt to make it a lot harder for women to vote. A Real ID would not work as identification which is so strange since you can use it to fly! You’d need a passport or birth certificate - but if your last name doesn’t match the name on your birth certificate - because maybe you got married and changed your last name (a thing women do, but men tend not to do because patriarchy, woot woot) - your birth certificate wouldn’t work. You’d need a passport.

Last time I checked, passports were $250, and that’s assuming you can get an appointment - because so many government agencies have been gutted. If not, you could pay to expedite your passport, but then we’re talking about a thousand dollars. In any case, if a woman has to spend $250 so she can vote, that’s a poll tax. Not that they care about breaking laws or violating the Constitution, but women should care. All women.

25th Amendment

Wish I felt better about this one. If the president gets sick or incapacitated mentally (are we not there?) the Vice President takes over. If the VP is spineless and part of Project 2025 and has a lot of billionaire friends who don’t believe in Democracy and if the VP would like a national abortion ban and basically thinks women belong at home popping out babies then you’re shit out of luck. Too bad the Founding Fathers didn’t plan for this, but who could have, really?

26th Amendment

Says 18-year-olds can vote.

27th Amendment

Congress cannot give itself a pay raise that goes into effect right away. There are not too many senators who deserve a raise right now. I can think of five, maybe, trying to fight for our country, and for their constituents.

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Okay so, I’d say it’s deeply concerning these Amendments were not included in the Constitution at the back of the Bibles that should not be at public schools anywhere in our country in the first place - because of the whole separation of church and state thing, and the fact that not everyone is Christian, and if your Jewish friends or your Muslim friends or your agnostic or atheist friends have kids, they pay taxes just like you do, so why should their kids have to learn your religion? I mean flip it around and ask yourself if that would be okay with you. It’s possible to teach ethics and morality without religion, and I’d offer it usually goes better when you do.

Here’s more on the Bibles from Aaron Michael Baker, an AP Government and Politics teacher in Oklahoma. I like him, he’s very calm as he talks about the downfall of Democracy:

@aaronmichaelbakerRyan Walters sent me the wrong Constitution! #ryanwalters #oklahoma #oklaed

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Oh hey, also, two thirds of the human beings who were illegally swept up and sent to Alligator Alcatraz have disappeared. As in, their families can’t find them, and they’re not in the ICE database, they’re just…gone. Please remember these are people who were denied due process. They never had their day in court, they just had masked men throw them into unmarked vans and that was that. And people are just going about their business and it’s not even a huge story because we have to listen to a grown man whine about an escalator and a late-night comic.

This is not a normal way to live. I don’t know what to do because I have a son in college here. I’m not leaving him, but I think it’s time to go, I do. The whole world seems to be tilting right, but not like this. This is ugly and the people who continue to support this are not seeing it.

I saw a man post under a clip of Anderson Cooper. He was talking about the Kimmel thing, and how this president is threatening to go after ABC again. The guy in the comments said, “Where were you all when the president got banned from Twitter? Fascists.” And no - Twitter is and was a privately owned company. They decided the potus had violated their terms of use by inciting violence with his tweets. You might remember January 6th and a noose and a bunch of people screaming “Hang Mike Pence!” and the insanity and destruction that day?

People defecating on the Senate floor and racing through the halls searching for Nancy Pelosi - and Michael Fanone who was beaten to almost an inch of his life. I can only imagine what Fox News would have said if that had been a bunch of Democrats causing that kind of violence, mayhem and destruction. The words that would have been used, and the consequences people would still be facing - as they would deserve to. But not when the situation is flipped. Nope. Everyone gets a pardon, and a new job terrorizing their fellow citizens.

Fascism is when the government goes after individuals’ freedoms, not when a privately owned company decides a user has violated their terms of use.

The hypocrisy is exhausting. How can I love people who don’t care about me, my daughter, my son, my friends, the way people are being harmed…our country? I can love some of you from afar and hope the haze of rage and violence passes, but I don’t want to have coffee with you, not right now. And if this is who you’ve decided to be, I’m not going to want to have coffee later, either. I’m not mad at people who are barely getting by who voted for this. I wish they’d voted differently, but I can understand. I get why they were angry and done and looking for something to change.

But people with nothing to fear and no skin in the game and no worries about health insurance who are sitting pretty and asking if I still love them while they talk about how we can agree to disagree? No, not right now, I can’t say that I love you.

That doesn’t mean you didn’t break my heart, though. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about you anymore, it just means I’m going to put some distance between us, because the things that are happening in our country are so unbelievably devastating and if you aren’t seeing that, I can’t get too close to you. You aren’t a safe person for me.

I’m gonna take a couple Tylenol and call it a night.

Sending you love, friends.

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