Soapbox

This is Your Nation on Crack

They call themselves by many different names- pundit, anchor, blogger, spokesperson, surrogate, consultant. But their proper label, the name that truly describes their profession and the role they play in America is “Pusher.”

Yes, they are pushers, and they have a product to move, folks. The product they’re trying to get you to buy is anger- specifically, anger born from fear.

They are the merchants of partisanism, jingoism and racism- from the subtle music of racially coded dog whistles to the freight train thunder of hoods and crosses. They’ve also got homophobia, Islamophobia,  xenophobia, changeophobia, paranoia, ethnocentrism, self-righteous delusion, persecution and blaming the victim. Lots of exciting, brightly colored product with such entertaining labels but all containing the same base ingredients; the dynamite of fear and hate.
You name it, they have  little bag of it in their pocket, and when they see that you’re curious they’re always ready to dip their fingers in, touch them to your lips, give you just a little taste.
             You like that, huh?

They hang out on the virtual street corners of cable TV  and the playgrounds of online chatrooms and message boards, ready to prey on the ignorant and confused,  the worried, frightened and the disenchanted.
They sidle up to you in late-night email forwards and through talk radio while you’re stuck and frustrated in traffic, always ready to capitalize on your weakness, hunger, dysfunctional need.
They come on like your best friend, the only one who really understands what you’ve been through. They clap you on the back and say,
Man, have I got some great product for you!
Check it out: Biden is a communist, man! For real! A Nazi communist!
And he’s using drag queens in the Department of Education to try to brainwash our kids
so they all grow up to be gay atheists!
           You like that, huh? Yeah! That’s an even better high than that birther
dust I hooked you up with a while ago, am I right? Hey, only my best
product for you, my friend!

Like so many of the pushers who haunt the streets of our cities, most don’t sell this poison because they believe it themselves. It’s all about profit, folks. A gentleman has to make a buck, and dirty money spends just the same as clean.

And they sure don’t give a crap about the squalid emotional state of fear, division and self-loathing that having this kind of hate addiction brings. It’s not their fault if your emotional crack habit causes you to work against your own best interest and tears apart your community, bankrupts your neighbors, sells out your children’s future.
This is just the politics of capitalism, man, and Jesus loves the free market. It says so right there in the bible, right after the part where he said “Thou shalt not raise a rich man’s taxes.”

And once they have you hooked on that feeling that someone else, someone different than you is responsible for all the messed-up shit in your life: your dead-end job, the mountain of bills, your rude pissed-off kids, the freakin price of gas- everything wrong in this country is the fault of those others,  those weirdos… you realize that anger  actually feels much safer than fear, gives a much smoother high without the gut-churning afterburn of withdrawl that daily anxiety leaves.
And when you find that grabbing your pitchfork and storming the castle is a much bigger rush than sitting down and hammering out grudging, common ground…
…they’ve got you! You’ll come back again and again, pass it on to  your friends.

But pretty soon just the occasional  “socialist liberals are giving free stuff to lazy people” epithet isn’t enough to keep you going any more.
You need that outrage to get you through your daily grind, to take your mind off all your misery-  which you’re actually making worse by buying their product, but you can’t see that, because they whisper in your ear that it’s the kindergarten teachers teaching kids how to be gay that’s the reason why you can barely afford your rent.

Like the typical hard-core tweaker  who can’t see that the biggest problem he has is his habit, you can’t see that a few illegal immigrants washing dishes and picking crops isn’t the reason why you leave for work every day scared you’ll be laid off as soon as you walk in, but there you are at 2 AM screaming in all caps on a message board demanding that  we build an electric fence around America “with a moat!” before it’s too late.

It’s crazy, and it’s destructive, it’s eating you alive and it’s dragging the entire country down along with you. But who’s the real villain here?

When cops want to clean up the streets, they don’t waste too much time rounding up the dumb addicts. As dangerous and destructive as they are, the true evil is done by the ones who put that crack pipe in their hands and make sure they always have more even when they really want to quit.

The real criminals are the pushers; the merchants of suspicion and blame, the hate pimps who hawk their wares to the gullible and weak.  The ones who put on makeup and straighten their suits and look right into the camera with their brilliantly white smiles and tell America that we need to stop asking billion-dollar oil companies to pay taxes and start demanding that the single mom with 2 kids whose income is so low that she can hardly put food on the table- she needs to starts coughing up her fair share by God!

Just like all the other  pimps and pushers, the ones who traffic in human misery are driving luxury cars and flying first class, and living in gated communities, protected from all the division and discord they sell. They’re living quite well  from the spoils of rancor, by convincing the average man  that their lives will be better as soon as women stop getting birth control and can be executed for having an abortion.

The only way to stop them is to hit the streets ourselves, to step between them and their customers,  to stop them from corrupting any more hearts and minds than they already have.
We have to call the station and complain, demand our cable company take the station off their line-up, snopes back the e-mail chain, report the white supremacist and anti-semitic crap we see on social media. Call out the lies and offer the miserable addicts, whose habit enriches and empowers those pushers, the methadone of  truth.
Even if they won’t take it.
Also, as difficult as it is and even though it’s probably too late for many of them to ever get clean, we need to offer civility, common ground and a little compassion for people who, after all, may have been groomed since childhood to hate.

But most of all, we need to point our fingers and call the predators at the top of the food chain what they are: rage-pushers, hate-pimps.
The scum of the earth.