Congratulations, from the other side.

 

"Why do I keep hitting myself with a hammer?  Because it feels so good when I stop."

I don't know who said that, but that's what I'm doing today. I keep looking at the news and reading the stories, because when I stop it feels good.  I have a lot to say, and I have a feeling people will disagree.  If you want to call me names, I don't care.  If you want to question my character and morals, I don't care.  And yes, people are doing that.  Here's just a few quotes:

 “(Bobby) Orr inflamed one of the most grievous if underappreciated wounds of the Trump era: the sad discovery for so many of us over the past four years that so many of our friends, neighbors, business partners and heroes are not who we thought they were.”  -Andrew Cohen, The New Republic

“Sadly, the voters who said in 2016 that they chose Trump because they thought he was ‘just like them’ turned out to be right. Now, by picking him again, those voters are showing that they are just like him: angry, spoiled, racially resentful, aggrieved and willing to die rather than ever admit that they were wrong. . . . It’s clear now that far too many of Trump’s voters don’t care about policy, decency or saving our democracy. They care about power.” -Tom Nichols, The Atlantic

So our heroes are only our heroes if they agree with what we do.  They aren't our heroes because of their great sports accomplishments. As for the second quote, I'd like to break that down.  Angry:  Four years... four years of anger directed at a President, his supporters, and anyone he came in contact with.  Spoiled:  Four years of NOT getting your own way.  Racially Resentful:  I'm sorry, but which organization is actively setting fires, damaging property and looting over racial resentment? Aggrieved and willing to die rather than admit they were wrong:  Um, which aggrieved democrat has apologized for the hundreds of news shows they went on SWEARING they had hard evidence of Russian Collusion that never materialized?  All of those things describe the party who hasn't been in the executive branch the last four years.

The idea, that something has to been done about "Trump supporters" should strike terror in the hearts of every citizen in this country.  There are people calling for truth and reconciliation committees to fix Trump Supporters.  We just moved from The United States of America to the starring role in a production of Orwell's 1984.  We get to disagree, and we don't get to decide that we have to form committees to, I don't  know, re-educate those who don't agree with us.  

Let me explain something loud and clear.  Those statements up there?  They are the reason we ended up with Trump in the first place.  Apparently, no one got that message.

I didn't support Trump in 2016.  I didn't vote for him. Forced between two equally horrible choices, I chose to write-in, for the first time since I was 18.  Then I stood back and watched the left eat it's own, and the right fight a civil freaking war between the "Trumpies" and the "Never-Trumpers".  It was fun, let me tell you.  Then I started to read what no one was talking about.  A salacious, unverified, patently false dossier had been used to obtain FISA warrants to spy on a member of the Trump campaign.  That dossier was paid for by the Clinton Campaign.  The full power of the Intelligence and Federal Law Enforcement communities was unleashed on one party's political opponent.  Remember Watergate?  This was worse, way worse.  From the same administration that used the IRS as a weapon, it's not a stretch to believe that James Comey appeared to be the reincarnation of J. Edgar Hoover.  And the more these people, Comey, Brennan, Clapper, McCabe, and our friend Adam Schiff appeared on news shows to crow about the hard evidence they had that never turned up, the more angry I got.  I didn't vote for the man.  I don't like the man.  This was wrong.  

I'm tired of having my moral character questioned, because I wasn't running around saying "Orange man bad" all the time.  I'm tired of being told I'm a racist, I was born a racist, and I will always be a racist (see Critical Race Theory), because I was born with white skin. I'm tired of being told that I need to sit down and shut up, because I have the wrong opinions.  I'm tired of family and friends deleting me from facebook, because I don't agree with them.  (I don't agree with them, they have said some horrible things about people like me, and yet I never deleted them.)  I have been personally attacked.  One person called me old and outdated.  And you see, this is how you get a Trump Supporter.  I don't like the man, and I voted for him in 2020, and all of you out there who made me feel less than human for my beliefs need to look in the mirror.  YOU are the reason I voted for Trump.  YOU made me a Trump supporter.  You want to fix that?  Then I suggest you look in the mirror.  It took you four years, but by golly, you managed to make me pull the lever for a man I really don't like.  Congratulations.  Hope this is what you wanted.  As I read this morning from someone on Twitter... you reap what you sow.  Hope you're ready for it.  

No Sports Zone

   Every year, at some point, a sports related blog shows up here.  In the past I've tackled Bob Costas and his annoying political rants during half-time, the sports team formerly known as the Washington Redskins and their embattled name, and the ridiculousness of the franchise tag in football.  I watch sports, a lot, and so I have opinions on things that happen that are sport related.  This post is to let you all know that, with the return of all major sports, there will be no sports writing, because I am giving them up, with the exception of the NHL, and that's still up for debate.  Why?

   I watch sports to escape reality.  Everywhere I go, every time on turn on the tv, every time I log into a streaming site, every scroll of Facebook and Instagram, I am pummeled by the reality of what is happening right now.  Commercials about how we are all in this together, documentaries on race in America, Black Lives Matters banner on every social media and streaming site, COVID-19 warnings on everything, and I haven't even talked about the news.  Sports is an escape from that.  It's a few hours to forget the very real problems of the world and just be entertained.  A long fly ball that goes over the fence, the buzzer beater in the final seconds of the fourth quarter, the five minute race to score a goal in overtime, the two-minute warning.  They are all moments that make you forget, even if for only a little while, the reality outside your door.  Except, now, they aren't.  They have brought that reality into the games we watch for fun.

  I am not advocating for fans in sports stadiums.  That isn't going to happen.  At this point, unless every city signs on for some level of fan attendance there should be no fan attendance.  I don't care that the NBA is playing in a Florida bubble, or that the NHL has retreated to finish it's season in the frozen tundra of our northern neighbor.  (Honestly, it's July, it's 95 degrees.  No amount of air conditioning makes it cold enough for ice.  The frozen tundra is the only place you should play hockey in the summer.)  Empty baseball stadiums are fine, and with baseball's fan base, most of these teams will be playing to something only slightly emptier than usual.  Football will take a hit with fan attendance (most teams), but they'll survive.  It's a multi-billion dollar industry.  They can make it one season.  

   What I'm advocating for, or most likely, simply refusing to participate in, is the politicization of sports.  Sports are meant to entertain.  They entertain across a wide diversity of people.  Different colors, genders, political affiliations, religions, sexual orientations.  Sports should be, and always has been, the greatest way to unite people.  Maybe not Eagles and Cowboys fans, but most Eagles fans I know would defend their fellow black, gay, transgendered, wiccan Eagles fan against any Cowboy fan.  United, not divided, in their hatred for all things silver and blue and from Dallas.  But not now.

   Sports leagues have decided that in order to appease the rich, white, grievance mongers, they need to play along.  So now, we have Black Lives Matter painted on basketball courts, white people kneeling for the national anthem in solidarity, and the NFL allowing social justice slogans (except for ones defending police, innocent unborn lives, and gun rights), on helmets where two years ago the wrong color shoes to honor a dead parent was a reason for a fine.  They have opened the door and allowed politics to invade the very space people go to escape politics.  They have damaged my calm.  

   There will be no sports blogs, no score posting, no Facebook posts gloating about a win, because there will be no sports.  I will find a good book, a good puzzle, a good afghan pattern, and I will be doing something else with my time.  Think I'm just blowing hot air?  I gave up football for 5 years to protest bad coaching and a washed up quarterback.  That was nothing compared to my safe place being invaded by all the things I wish to leave on the other side of the door for 3 hours.  I'm done.  I devote half of my day to the real world, 8 hours to sleep and 3 hours to not dealing with the read world, because I need a break.  If my escape insists on shoving it in my face, I will remove that escape and find another.  If more people do this, sports will get the hint and go back to entertaining us.  If people keep  watching regardless?  Well, I guess sports and I will have reached an impasse and I'll officially file for divorce.

**The NHL has, so far, kept itself out of the political fray, but I suspect that will change.  For now, I withhold judgment on that.


   

The Nuance of History

  "The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history."  ~Georg Hegel

   Today in the United States of America, as people dismantle statues and monuments of our history, that quote seems appropriate.  We seemed to have learned very little from history, and I'm wondering if we even bother teaching real history anymore.

   You see, history is more nuanced than boiler plate slogans.  It's not all black and white.  People go to war for something, but they don't all do it for the same reason.  There was this show that aired on one of those channels... National Geographic, History, Discovery.. I can't remember which one.  It was called Seconds from Disaster.  It's tagline red "Disasters don't just happen.  They are a chain of critical events. Unravel the clues and countdown those final seconds from disaster."  That's history.  It's not one event, but multiple events, some happening years, even decades, before, that lead to that moment we all remember.  And we try to boil it down to one thing, maybe because it's easier to understand.  It's easier to understand the Revolutionary war in the context of Stamp Acts and Tea Acts.  It's easier to understand the Civil War in the context of slavery and abolition.  It's easier to view World War I as an event caused by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.  It's easier to blame World War II on Hitler and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.  None of those things accurately describe all the events and issues that lead to the final outcomes.  

   So I'm back to, do we even teach real history anymore?  Real history requires more than one year to study.  It's the only way to grasp the complexities that resulted in the fall of the Roman Empire.  For a long time, Spain was the naval powerhouse of the oceans.  When did it switch to the British Empire and why?  You might think that's not all that important, but that rise of the British Empire is the reason we have a country today.  Understanding that, and the Spanish conquests, are our history.  Does anyone know why Napoleon decided to sell of what would become known as the Louisiana Purchase?  Today we wouldn't call it such, but Alaska was once known as Seward's Folly.  Turned out that 50 some odd years of cold war with the Soviet Empire (and that's what it was), made Seward look like a genius.  Do people realize that New York abolished slavery before England did?  That great British Empire didn't fully abolish slavery until 1833, some 30 years before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.  Funny enough, they allowed slavery to continue in areas controlled by the East India Company.  

   World War II was a direct result of the Treaty of Versailles.  That treaty beat down the German people and their economy so badly that they were ripe for a savior, and Hitler convinced them he was exactly that.  Pearl Harbor is what dragged the Americans, kicking and screaming, into the war, but that was a war that was predestined from the moment Versailles happened, twenty years before the German invasion of Poland that set off World War II.  

   Nuance.  Details.  Little tidbits of this and that.  They count down the seconds from disaster and the seconds to glory.  We've lost them.  As we watch people tear down more and more statues and monuments, we are losing more of them.  Monuments aren't always pretty.  They don't just lift up our finer moments.  They remind us of our darkest ones.  We have them so we never forget.  Auschwitz is still standing today, a horrific monument to mass genocide. Dachau is also.  My son visited Dachau.  He said he felt sick the whole time.  It's not something he'll ever forget.  People say the same when they visit the Holocaust Memorial, the battlefield at Gettysburg and the beaches in Normandy.  Monuments to horrific times in our history.  

   If a statue has the power to offend you, we better start tearing down every single statue in our country,because I'm positive it offends someone.  You can let it control you and you can tear it down, or you can stop and see how far we've come.

   For one moment I'd like to speak directly to my bothers and sisters through Jesus Christ.  People are flawed.  Even great people.  Moses, David, Solomon, Peter, Paul.  These men, great giants of the Bible, were all flawed, deeply flawed.  Should we erase them from our Bible?  Do they no longer deserve a place in our religious heritage?  If they still deserve that place, is it possible that our great, but deeply flawed founding fathers also still deserve a place?  Or are they relegated to the dustbin of history, because we suddenly in the past 5 years, realized how flawed they were.  If you didn't know that already, you've just learned the best argument against government control of education, because I learned that in a Christian School.

   History can't be the thing we never learn from, because if it truly is that, then we are doomed to repeat it, again and again.  More slavery, more genocide, more human rights violations.  Taking down statues doesn't erase what happened, but it can erase it from the minds of the people who need most to remember where we were and how far we've come.  People who need the nuance, the honest conversations, the uncomfortable truth.  

   History can't be....

In Which Amy Makes People Mad (again....)

I'm sitting here, having scrolled through Facebook and Instagram, and I'm shaking my head.  I have a few things to say, and if any of you wishes to respond with words, such as "racist", "white privilege" or anything of the sort, please don't and delete me.  I think I'm done being nice, not that I've ever really been accused of being nice.  I'm known for speaking my mind and letting the chips fall where they may.  Now I'm speaking my mind and actively asking people to walk away rather than use words that do not advance the conversation.

1. Social Media has made us mean, stupid and lazy.  People spew words at other people on social media that they would never say to a person's face.  It's safe to denigrate the character of individuals and whole groups of people when one can do it from the comfort of a chair, in the safety of their house, behind the shield of a computer screen.  If after this is posted you want to call me names or make aspersions to my character, send me a private message and I'll give you my address.  Come say it my face.  Otherwise, I'm not interested.  People accept the things they see on social media and even websites, without bothering to pay any homage to due diligence.  We have the whole world at our fingertips with the internet, and yet we blindly share things as if they were true, when it would take a total of 5 minutes to find out they weren't.  I responded to one post today that was just like that.  Tip:  No one is covering anything up if the information you are claiming is being covered up was widely available on the internet five years ago.  We share thirty second videos, only to find out that they were edited, and when the full video is shared the story is completely different.  The damage is already done.  Tip: the correction never gets the attention the original viral video got.  We think that changing our profile picture to include a yellow or pink ribbon, a rainbow, or most recently a plain black square is doing something.  Tip: It's not.  No change has come about because you went dark on social media for a day, or you posted a picture of yourself with a rainbow over your face, or you stuck a cause colored ribbon up instead of your latest selfie.  You know what does bring change?  Doing something.  Turning off your computer, getting off your butt, and DOING something.  If you are looking for a list of things you could do to help change what you want to see changed, use the internet for something other social media. 
2. Refusing to see someone's skin color is not the problem.  It has never been the problem, and it will never be the problem.  I refuse to see skin color because at the end of the day, skin color is only an outer covering.  We are human beings, no matter what the outside looks like.  I can say this positively, with no doubt in my mind, because some of my favorite people on this planet do not share my skin color, but that's not why they are my favorite people.  They are my favorite people, because they jokingly call me "boss lady" from February to November.  They are my favorite people, because when I could barely breathe with anxiety last year, they sat and talked to me and kept me grounded.  They are my favorite people because of who they are, not what they look like.  Don't tell me because I refuse to see people as part of a group OTHER than people that it somehow makes me part of the problem.  A jerk is a jerk, red, yellow, black or white, and there are plenty of those in every skin color.  If there are purple aliens I can guarantee that some of them are jerks and some of them are cool people I'd want to call my friends.  If you force me to see your color, you are forcing me to see you as different, and my faith tells me that we are all the same in God's eyes.  We all have different talents and abilities, but we are still the same.  I will NOT "other" people just because it's the newest thing we are supposed to do.  
3. Stop telling me that our police department, justice system and everything else about these United States of America is infused with systemic racism.  Why?  Because when I ask you where the systemic racism is, there is no real answer.  They use words like "structural barriers" but what are those barriers, what causes them, and how can we change them?  No one really wants to have that conversation besides asking white people to accept their white privilege.  Then what?  Me accepting that I have white privilege doesn't change any of the things that need to be changed.  I can decry my own skin color until the day I die, but it won't give a single person of color a leg up.  Name the structural barriers for me, tell me what causes them (and white privilege is NOT an answer),and then we can figure out how to change them.  You need to have a concrete cause before you can ever come up with a solution on how to fix things, and frankly, racism can't be the cause.  You want to say it's the root cause, then fine.  You won't ever fix that. You cannot change people's hearts, only God can do that. There are tangible causes that can be fixed, and by golly, white people can even help fix them. I can break this down further, but I'd rather not write a six page blog.  
4. Stop calling people who disagree racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, etc  as a knee-jerk reaction. Some of us would really like to have an intelligent, productive conversation about things, but the second we stray from the acceptable line, we are (insert character denigrating name here).  I loved having someone who claimed to be a liberal, tolerant person tell me that the only reason I didn't vote for former President Obama is because I didn't want a "darkie in the white house".   I was called a homophobe for eating at Chik-fil-A.  I've been called xenophobic, because I think our immigration laws should be enforced.  I'm a gender traitor because I'm not pro-abortion, don't believe I should have to finance your sex life, and don't believe in the patriarchy.  At least not to the extent that I'm supposed to in order to be a card carrying feminist. All the people who claim I am intolerant refuse to tolerate me.  Family has deleted me from facebook.  Not for calling anyone names or personally attacking them.  They have deleted me and won't speak to me because of what I believe.  Wow. I have never harmed anyone based on their sexual orientation, religion or lack thereof, skin color, or political beliefs.  I never will.  But I will not be called names, or have my personal character crapped on, just because you don't agree with me.  The only way to get effectively deleted from my life is to personally attack me or any member of my family or extended family, or anyone involved in my softball league, which I include in my family (brown people too...imagine that!)
5. Violence is not the answer.  By violence I mean looting, rioting, beating people up, or killing people who you think have wronged you or someone like you.  We have a justice system, and as imperfect as it is, when we stop acting inside it and start acting outside it, we have become little more than tight-wearing vigilantes, who often hurt the good people as much as they hurt the bad people.  If we want change we have to do it with some measure of restraint, otherwise, you lose any moral high ground you have.  Please don't talk to me about the Revolutionary War.  I don't believe the majority of our citizens are clamoring for a war.  If we keep having violent riots every time something bad happens we will have a war, and that kind of war, a civil war, is trouble that we've not known.  Not in our lifetimes.  We get to have different opinions, different beliefs, different pretty much everything.  We have to find a way to work through those differences without resorting to violence.  We have to learn to effect change in ways that do not harm other people. I had a history teacher who explained individual rights the best way.  Stand where you are.  Reach your hands out as far in front of you as you can and as far behind you as you can.  That space, right there, that's where your rights exist.  Same thing for everyone.  Your rights stop where mine begin.  Mine stop where yours begin.  Don't infringe on my rights, I won't infringe on yours.  If more people realized this, thought this way, acted this way, we'd solve most of our problems without a single piece of legislation passing.

We, as people, have a way of making life far more complicated than it needs to be.  We have to have a cause to fight, an axe to grind, an outrage to be, well, outraged about.  We have to have mircroaggressions (words) and macroaggressions (actions), trigger warnings, safe spaces, and protective bubbles.  If the utopia some people are clamoring for actually descended tomorrow, there would be a whole group of people complaining about something else.  Does this mean everything is fine the way it is?  Obviously not.  We've spent the last 3 months holed up in our houses waiting for the grim reaper to knock on our door.  We have two black men and one black woman killed when they should still be breathing today.  I would hazard a guess there are far more than that, but those don't really raise our awareness, which is sad, but yet again, another subject for another day.  We have a highly dysfunctional, bloated federal government, and as we have recently discovered, highly ineffective and unprepared state and local governments.  We the people keep electing the same dipwads (sorry, but there's no better word that wouldn't cause me to start using heavy doses of profanity) and expecting them to do something different.  The only way things get better is if we, the down and dirty everyday people who actually make this whole experiment in self-government possible, start doing something different.  Talk to each other differently, listen to each other differently, and start expecting more from the people who are getting fat and happy not doing the job we elected them to do.  That's how things get better.  

Take care, stay safe, and be better, because I know we are better. I believe we are better.  And I believe we can be better still.