Ammo Grrrll poses the question WHAT ON EARTH HAPPENED AND HOW DID WE GET HERE? She writes:
Waking up in Biden’s America each morning is like psychological Whack-A-Mole, the game I used to play at Chuck E. Cheese when my son was small. It wore me out back then and the Internet wears me out now. The daily assaults on our liberty and insults to our intelligence come at us like horizontal sleet in a blizzard. You can wipe it out of your eyes one day only to be buried by an avalanche of even more depressing news the next:
Open borders. A murdered Marine in Times Square; a Washington Post op-ed applauding the most degenerate public behavior as good for children; a legislative attack on suburbs that could scarcely be more harmful if it were waged with Biden’s dream of nuking Americans. No-bail career criminals sometimes being “arrested” for violent crime three times in one day. Consequence-free looting and arson while 500 Capitol trespassers languish in solitary confinement for months, let out of their cages for an hour a day.
The question is – and it’s a crucial one – how in the WORLD did we let all this happen?
The first way is the same way I put on 30 lbs. since high school. Okay, I put on the Freshman 15 in college and lost it that summer. Almost all of it. Except for the last 3. I got married and gained 10 lbs. — at the reception. Lost 7. Then, a pregnancy, with a big baby, and oopsie, up 45 pounds this time. But I have discipline and I lost 35 of it within a year. You see where this is going? The STARTING WEIGHT for every diet got pushed higher and higher, what I like to call “The Over-Blouse Window.”
For the first 18 years of my life, I NEVER was unable to tuck my t-shirt or blouse into my jeans or skirt. But, little by little, year by year, it’s over-blouses now, over-blouses forever.
Perhaps the most apt metaphor for how the cultural changes occurred would be in the attitude toward gay rights. I am almost 75. The word “gay” still meant “happy.” I had some guy friends in school who seemed a bit effeminate, but they were nice kids. One such pal did turn out to actually be homosexual in adulthood, but a couple were just not good at sports. My best childhood friend – many years later and after two abusive marriages to men – switched teams. She was still my best friend from age six until she passed away.
When there was a push for “commitment ceremonies” for gay people, I was all for it. It wasn’t a “marriage” because that was a very particular millenia-old relationship between one man and one woman. No lesser Light-Bringer than Barack Hussein Obama agreed with that and ran on that (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). Most people were not opposed to extending to gay couples various economic benefits of marriage such as insurance and pensions. They thought it was a fine and fair thing. Many people had gay friends or family members.
Well, that satisfied the lobby for about a day-and-a-half. We all know the saga of the gay marriage campaign. From two overwhelming defeats as a Proposition in ultra liberal California to the Supreme Court’s decision in the Obergefell case, gay marriage became a reality. And the marriage licenses went from “Husband” and “Wife” to “Person A” and “Person B.” (I told my Reform rabbi that if I died before Joe, and she referred to me as his “partner,” I would get out of the casket and unplug her mic. I have been a wife for 54 years. It is a huge part of who I am.)
The proponents of gay marriage were terrible “winners,” seeking out and punishing – sometimes months and years later – anyone who had had the slightest misgivings or, God forbid, had donated to defeat the Proposition. People were driven out of jobs, out of the public square. And, once again, it satisfied nobody in the LGBQTXYZ “community.”
Within minutes, we were over “gayness” and on to transgenders. Pioneer feminist and gay activists who were not impressed with transgenderism were vilified. It became mandatory to assert that gender was “assigned” and not a biological fact. Not determining and correctly using someone’s Pronouns Du Jour, even of your own children, was a criminal offense in Canada and in much of academia. Gina Carrano claimed her pronouns were “bip bop boop” and Disney unpersoned her faster than she could say “Joe Stalin”.
In the ancient ERA campaign, the late, great, Phyllis Schlafly said that it would lead to men in women’s bathrooms, and she was branded a lying, wild-eyed extremist to suggest such a crazy intrusion could EVER happen. Well, now you can’t stop it. Men who simply SAY they are transgender can parade around wagging their weenies in front of little girls in the women’s restroom and anyone who objects is a bigot. Antifa will come for you and beat you up.
So “how we got here” can be answered: incrementally at first, and then like Kim Jong Un on a luge. Every single accommodation led to the goalposts moving further Left.
Additionally, “thar’s gold in them thar hills” of Quotas, Professional Victimhood, Bullying and Cancelling. Turning a former meritocracy with equal OPPORTUNITY for all into a pot o’ spoils for ever-metastasizing subsets of victims pays huge dividends to the lazy and unqualified. Of course, even a relative meritocracy always favored the well-born and connected, but they usually had to demonstrate SOME sort of competence unless they were at least a Kennedy.
But if there are automatic set-asides without regard to merit for Blacks, Latinos, gays, illegals, Muslims, women, transgenders – everyone but Asians, Jews, and white men — think what a lucrative hustle that can be. Shoe contracts! Gillette commercials! Oscars! Book contracts! Modeling gigs! Sitcoms, oh my! When a beige Princess and a Black billionaire sit down to whine about their racist oppression, we are truly Through the Looking Glass.
Thirdly, it has happened because Republicans ceded way too much “cultural” territory to The America-Hating Enemy. It’s a dead-serious game of Tug-of-War with nobody on the other end of the rope. A large chunk of the GOP was unwilling to fight those embarrassing battles to save the unborn or insist on standards and risk being called racist. Both parties figured out how to game the system so that everybody in their Gang of 100 or Greedballs of 535 could get unspeakably rich. They could count the minimum votes needed to force their agendas on a hapless populace, and “allow” a handful from each party to pretend to be “mavericks.” Incumbents forever, primaried never.
Biden’s woke military may soon feature Navy Seals who get pool noodles because swimming is racist or Marines who prefer to fight Climate Change because it doesn’t shoot back. Our enemies will retain the traditional Marine mission to break stuff and kill people. Count on it.
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