I always hesitate to write these things. You know that’s what these people intend in the first place. After all, why does someone take a picture and release it onto the interwebs? So, we feed the beast but likely not in a way that they fully intended.

 

It’s the same reason why they put bumper stickers on their big ass truck or fly the flags at the house. It’s the same reason why they wear their t-shirts and hats to the gym or into the grocery store. It’s a not so subtle fish symbol like the early day Christians used to identify each other. For the rest of us, it is the announcement that I am indeed an asshole and there is nothing you can do about it.

I could focus on poor Logan and the life he has in front of him. I could focus on the hatred that is obviously there. I could focus on the nearly pathological need for attention. I could certainly link it to gun culture and the tragic events that occurred in Buffalo. All of these things are things they want.

My overwhelming feeling when seeing that isn’t anger or fear. Those are the emotions they want, but aren’t the ones they get. The overwhelming emotion is one of pity. At the end of the day they are closer to being a victim than they are to being a bully. They likely went out and stockpiled weapons when Joe Biden became president. They stockpiled weapons because they heard that Biden was going to take their guns. Somewhere the gun manufacturers are having a huge laugh and sharing a round of drinks at happy hour.

See, Jimmy Carter was going to take their guns. That didn’t happen. Bill Clinton was going to take their guns. That didn’t happen. Barack Obama was definitely going to take their guns. That didn’t happen. Even three year olds and most dogs could pick up on the pattern. Somehow the MAGA crowd is incapable of deductive reasoning or maybe even object permanence.

Poor Logan doesn’t stand a chance. He is being indoctrinated and not so much into a life of hatred, bigotry, and violence. Yes, he is being indoctrinated into those things too. More importantly, he is being indoctrinated into a life of abject stupidity. Abject stupidity allows you to be led by the nose to hate, to discriminate, and to respond in violence. Abject stupidity allows you to buy crap you don’t need in order to protect your family from things that will never happen. Abject stupidity allows you to photograph your own ignorance and broadcast it on the internet for everyone to see. The self-own is the cruelest own of all.

Abject stupidity pushes you to do things to own the liberals, leftists, and progressives when you could be a lot happier just living your life. These photos never inspire the fear they think it does. It may inspire outrage, but that outrage fades pretty quickly. More than anything it inspires pity. Anger and stupidity don’t mix well and they are a horrible way to live. Yes, the self-own is the cruelest own of all.

These screeds usually come out in the morning, but I couldn’t do it this morning. I was administering a STAAR test. For those out of state, that is the acronym for our state testing. We take five of those tests throughout high school and students are expected to pass them all in order to graduate.

Except they don’t have to pass them all. Special education students can be excused from taking them after making several attempts. Other students can have an alternative packet they fill out in order to get the same credit. Still others can simply graduate with a different diploma as long as they pass three of them. Are you sufficiently confused?

The students are smart enough to see through our bluff. They have friends that have managed to walk without passing it. These tests are normally done in the spring, but retesters have to take it in December as well. I always administer the English test. Students are given five hours (or more) to answer around 50 multiple choice questions asking them to comprehend reading passages, edit reading passages, and revise reading passages. Then, they have to write either an expository or persuasive essay.

The students taking these tests again run the gamut. Some of them are great kids that just don’t have the skills necessary to make it. Unlike all of the other STAAR tests, the English tests are skills based. You can’t study for them. You either know how to read and correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation or you don’t. You either know how to write or you don’t.

The rest fall under two categories. Either they know they don’t have to pass and don’t care or they cannot keep themselves awake through the five hours. At some point you start to wonder what exactly we’re measuring. You have the poor girl  =asking questions every few minutes and I can’t answer any of them. You have the little turd who announces loudly that he is done with the test after 13 minutes.

Then you have the three or four boys that somehow take apart their chair and throw the pieces at each other. They wait to do this when I am waking up the same three or four girls for the 20th time. Citizens of the state are paying billions of dollars to large corporations so they can write these tests and we can torture these children. Ultimately that is all we are accomplishing.

That’s the whole point. When you fail the test in the spring, you take it again in the summer and then again in December if you don’t pass. Then you go back to the top of the slide and do it again in the spring if you don’t pass it that time. Some students take the same test up to seven times before they are seniors in high school. No wonder they sleep. No wonder they act like 12 year olds. No wonder they just fill it out in 15 minutes. They know the process will start over no matter what. Asking a child to take a test seven or eight times is child abuse. It’s sadism wrapped up in fake accountability.

Yesterday, Kirstjen Nielson, White House aide who was elevated to Secretary of Homeland Security last year after John Kelly was moved to chief of staff, gave up whatever was left of her reputation yesterday by standing at the briefing room podium lying to the American people in a continuous stream.  Most infuriating is her repeating ad nauseam that the brand new, cruel policy of separating children from parents who are fleeing violence and corruption in their home countries is not a policy, but a non-existent law passed by Democrats.  This outrageous lie, whipped up by in-house white supremacist Stephen Miller and repeated continuously by Jeff Sessions and Trump himself, is shameful.  To utter it from a White House podium is inexcusable.

Let’s be clear here – Nielson is lying when she says that she is “enforcing the laws passed by Congress”.  Technically, she is correct, but her agency CREATED this problem, and then enforcing a law that doesn’t need to be used.  Here’s how she is doing that: Refugees are coming to ports of entry to ask for asylum.  They are being turned away at those ports of entry because ICE has slowed entry to a trickle.  After days of waiting on bridges and in lines, they are crossing illegally in desperation, then turning themselves in to Border Patrol agents.  THAT’S when the “zero tolerance” policy is at its most cruel; these refugees are then arrested, thus “enforcing the laws passed by Congress”, their children are taken by force because children can’t be jailed with their parents.  This problem is wholly created by Trump and sycophants, then lied about from the podium of the White House briefing room.  It’s immoral and criminal.

The UN Human Rights Office has condemned this new practice as unconscionable and declared it “state sponsored child abuse”.  Republicans have finally awoken from their gerrymandered-in coma and are now speaking out against this new policy.  However, at the eye of this storm is Kirstjen Nielson, who is blatantly lying for Donald Trump trying to get back in his good graces after privately opposing this new policy.  This is what I don’t get about people like Nielson who sell their souls to a cretin like Trump.  What do they gain from that?  Why are they clinging to likely the most immoral president in US history?  How do people like Nielson sleep at night?  How can they do this day after day?  What are they planning on doing AFTER destroying their own reputations and then being cast aside?

Whatever rationalization Nielson adopted to justify this, it’s our duty, as Americans, to hound her out of office.  Maybe we can’t get rid of Trump (yet), but we can certainly deprive him of the tools he uses to prosecute his idiotic policies and repeat his lies and enable his immoral conduct.