The world we want to live in

     This is going to be an anxiety-fueled post, but it is inspired by something that happened in the real world not long ago.  Longtime followers and family members may remember my neighbor who plays aggressively right-wing sermons through his phone and that they disturbed me for years for how loud they were at home.  He has turned down at home, but he has his phone "tuned to that station" all the time.  Recently, I ran into him in line at the grocery store and he was playing it as he checked out his groceries and the cashier said nothing.

 

    This disturbed me because it reminded me of videos of aggressive Christian Nationalists playing worship songs to a captive audience in an attempt to convert them, and if the election is lost, they will have the right to do that everywhere, only it won't be nice like "Amazing Grace," it'll be demands like "God hates sin, drive out the sinners amongst you and beat the sin out of them" and "Fags go to Hell, they are not human, it is okay to kill them."  These are not the messages I was taught even at my worst (though slightly implied at my worst, but you'd have to ask them, not me, my anxiety keeps me from being unbiased) but which the internet trolls which back Trump revel in.  They are the ones who inspired Carrie's Mom, carry out shootings in gay bars and maintain the Westboro Baptist Church.  They have nothing to do with me and want to seize the name of "Christian" and say it only applies to them and those who agree with them.

 

    I don't know if you can imagine such a thing, but it's like if people said the only true "atheists" wanted Christianity destroyed, the only true "Buddhists" wanted Judaism driven from America or the only true "agnostics" wanted America to call them the state religion.  These are dangerous crackpots that I feel shackled to by the media and by my friends at times because they invoke the name of my God.  As such, it creates apocalyptic fear in me that they are the beasts we've been forewarned about who will start the end of civilization.  Things are so bad and chaotic, it feels the Second Coming should just happen any day now.  But maybe that's a holdover from a particularly aggressive person in my second Church whose apocalyptic obsession and hatred of Obama was confused with devotion.  It's hard to say, 14 years ago self thought differently than present-day self, he didn't see the depths a large number of right-wing people were willing to sink to yet. 

 

    The point is what world do we want to live in, our current one with the potential to get better, or theirs, trapped by their declarations and never able to improve again, only get more paranoid as the "undesirables" are eliminated, creating the need for new enemies to eliminate in the genocide economy.  There will be degrees of loyalty and those who don't pass an increasingly difficult test will be eliminated.  You will enjoy your Christofascist paradise for only as long as it takes to eliminate the LGBTQ+ population, the Latin American population and their allies.  Choose wisely.