Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll feels our pain in ABUSED ELECTORATE. She writes:

A friend of mine who had been a battered wife told me a very sad story about how domestic abuse works. She discussed with me an experiment that her therapist had told her about. I have only this conversation from 30 years ago and my memory of it. I don’t know the experiment or whether it was ever replicated, but I think it is interesting on its merits.

She said that experiments have been done on dogs – no word on whether or not Fauci was involved – in which half of the floor of a dog cage is electrified and the dog is mildly but unpleasantly shocked. Not enjoying the experience, the dog will move to the other half of the cage. When that half is electrified, the dog will move back. If the whole floor is electrified, the demoralized dog will just lie down and take it. She made me cry when she said that EVEN IF THE DOOR IS OPENED, the dog will not leave.

Her therapist believed that it was a partial answer – along with terror, poverty, and often, several children – to the question abused women get asked, “Why didn’t you just leave?”

The other thing I learned from the few women in that circumstance I have known is that it often starts gradually with harsh words, words to erode the victim’s will and self-esteem, and proceeds to slapping and shoving before the more disgusting brutal acts.

And I see some parallels to the shocking situation the conservative electorate – and especially the working class – finds itself in. No metaphor is perfect, but bear with me.

So, first, the abused electorate tries a Democrat, the first Black American to be President. We forget at our peril the great sense of optimism that Americans of all colors had for that historical moment. Not me, because I saw through that narcissistic, race-obsessed fraud from the git-go. But every single magazine, every news outlet went nuts over the awesome opportunity that that moment portended. Why, Obama even went before a mega-church audience and swore that “marriage” was between one man and one woman. (Wink-wink; nudge-nudge. Twenty minutes after the election, he “evolved.”) Racial divisions would be healed once and for all. A middle-class, two-parent home would be modeled!

Since no Black candidate could ever be elected nationwide with JUST Black voters, Black people would see at last that white people had good intentions, open minds, and were eager to vote for a qualified man, not a color.

So people were stunned when just days before the election, Obama announced aloud to poor Joe the Plumber his intentions to dismantle American exceptionalism brick by brick. “Wait, what? A ‘fundamental’ transformation, you say? You might have mentioned this earlier so we might know exactly what you intended to transform and what you intended to keep!”

For eight years, we saw even the mildest criticism of anything Obama said or did framed as prima facie evidence of RAAACISM. He was virtually “uncriticizable.” We saw The Lightbringer Himself viewing every conflict through a racial prism — from a young thug ending up on the losing end of a fight, to a cop wanting to make sure the person breaking into a house was actually the OWNER! The only possible conclusion being that white people were always in the wrong and hopeless racists, if not outright white supremacists. We heard Obama describe his own grandmother as a “typical” white person. Even electing him to a second endless term was not enough to expiate our original sin of being born with white skin.

And so the tired old dogs of the electorate moved to the other half of our “pen” – and elected Trump in 2016. I was certainly as happy as weeping billionaire Oprah was when Obama was elected. Apart from being FOR everything Hillary was against, and AGAINST everything she was FOR, I also did not care to be called ugly preposterous names like racist deplorable. Nor being accused post-election of voting against Hillary because I am a brain-dead, subservient woman whose husband TOLD me how to vote.

But, alas, we never got a chance to see what Trump could really do. Those same newspapers, magazines and news outlets that worshiped Obama waged a ceaseless war against President Trump and his constituents beginning a year before the vote and intensifying on election night. We were treated to a slander-fest up and down the networks, but especially on cable where the MSNBC lesbian goofball shrieked that it wasn’t just a bad dream, we were now in Hell and Donald J. Trump was our President! Sounds fair.

Thousands of hysterical loons donned poorly designed knit facsimiles of lady bits and marched to declare permanent war and to whine that they now felt “unsafe.” And THOSE were “the good old days” by comparison to what came later with Impeachment Theater, tech censorship, shadow banning, the Russia Hoax, blah blah blah. It’s depressing even to list all the travesties. When Basement Biden “won” in 2020, a certain percentage of us just gave up. As several people before me have opined, if there WAS no election fraud, it is actually even MORE depressing.

This feeling of hopelessness and despair continued with the results of the 2022 midterms where, in my state, by a miracle of Biblical proportions, the machines that printed the ballots “failed” in overwhelmingly Republican strongholds! Lordy, what WERE the chances?

Every day brings a new travesty, a new slap in the face to decency and Our Precious DemocracyTM. Every day brings a new law for “reproductive health” that involves not a single thing that would promote “reproduction.” If the baby somehow survives gestation, it can now look forward to being groomed by the first week of kindergarten. Every day there is a new criminal unleashed without bail or with minimal jail time to run riot on society at large. It’s very hard – like the discouraged dogs in the experiment – not just to lie down and get used to the shocks. “Hit me with your best shot – fire away.”

AND YET, WE MUST NOT. WE MUST NOT GIVE UP. We must channel Valley Forge and Churchill and fight the evil ones on land and on sea – or at least in the Courts, in the classrooms, on Facebook and Twitter and in our houses of worship, some of which have signed up with the “Go Along To Get Along” School of Theology. (Comedian Eddie Izzard had a hilarious bit about a Church of England clergyman addressing his flock, “Today’s sermon is taken from a magazine I found in a hedge.”) Indeed.

Channel instead Welsh poet Dylan Thomas: “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.” He was referring to individual death. How much more important, then, is the death of the Republic?

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