I have done this one before. All that is old is new again. The overwhelming theme that has occurred this week in the argument over gun control are those three words. Because I can. I have gotten into debates with multiple folks on social media and all of them have asserted the same things. The second amendment gives me the right to do it. Of course, whether that’s true or not is up for debate. I don’t have time for that debate in these spaces right now.

Because I can. That has become to conservative mantra in the United States. It has become the mantra of the MAGA crowd. Because I can. I can cheat on my taxes. I can commit fraud on the American public. I can grab the private parts of women. I can be selfish and refuse to wear a mask. I can be selfish and refuse to get a vaccine or follow basic safety protocols. Because I can.

Because we can. Essentially, the difference between a fully functioning adult with moral autonomy and one that isn’t is the keen understanding between “can” and “should.” I’ve fought this my whole life. It’s a hard lesson to learn. That period of early adulthood is key. For the first time in your life you have autonomy from your parents. You CAN do things they would never allow you to do. Because we can. However, that is never the most important question. The most important question is whether we should.

I still remember vividly serving on the editorial board of my college newspaper. A student had been accused of sexual assault. He had not been charged. Journalistic ethics indicate you can report on it and publish his picture. So, the rest of the editorial board chose to do that. We have the right to do it. I didn’t think it was wise since we were a small campus and were the only source of news for the campus.

I lost that debate. They told me I wasn’t a journalism major and simply didn’t understand. We have the right to do it. Because we can. As it turned out, the charges were dropped. The student in question had an identical twin on campus. Both had to transfer to another university because of the fall out. The alleged victim recanted her story, so no one knows if an assault even occurred. Because we can.

All this happened because no one bothered to ask the important question: should we do this? Far too many people have made life more difficult, more painful, and more cruel because they’ve never bothered to ponder that question. Should we do this? Because I can has been the default position. Because I can has been the mantra that has driven this country into a ditch.

Naturally one could take this whole concept to its logical extreme, but any time a decision is made, the effects on those around us should be considered. Does my behavior present an inherent risk to those around me? Does my behavior make the world a better place or a worse place? Because I can is just simply not good enough. We need better. We deserve better.

Yesterday a friend of mine got caught in a huge traffic jam on a local street.  The cause of the jam? The line of cars trying to get into a Popeye’s Fried Chicken drive thru to buy their chicken sandwich.  Also yesterday, there was a fatal stabbing outside of a Popeye’s fried chicken in Maryland during an argument over…wait for it…a goddam chicken sandwich.

If you’re around a Chick-fil-A around lunchtime in Texas, you will be caught in a traffic jam with hundreds of people sitting in dozens of cars willing to wait for almost an hour to buy THEIR goddam chicken sandwich.  This willingness, though, is in large part owed to conservatives  making some kind of statement in support of Chick-fil-A for their anti-diversity politics and support of Trump.

In the meantime, we’re only a few weeks away from the madness of Black Friday (which now starts on Thanksgiving morning) as millions of Americans stupidly storm into big box stores to do battle with one another to buy a cheap made in China flat panel television which they can neither afford or fit on a wall in their home.

Insanity has now become normalized.  More Americans are engaged in Dancing with the Stars and The Voice than they are in participation in their own government.  They go nuts over shit they read on Facebook and Twitter, while ignoring the real world of what’s going on around them.  AND, our system of consumer protections has been decimated.  Lying about products, politics, people, and policy is now OK and our courts have been packed with ideologies who believe that is just fine.  The President of the United States has amplified this cancer by lying himself over 14,000 times in 3 years.  He’s tweeted over 11,000 times, most of those tweets either lies, attacks against his enemies, wild conspiracy theories, or promotion of his own businesses.  His education department is making it worse by destroying decades of progress in public education and assuring that millions of Americans swim in debt created by a system designed to entrap them for profit.

We are living in the age of lies.  The masses, whose wages have been stagnated for 0ver 30 years and whose education system is broken, now live in a distopian television fantasy world, reduced to fighting over goddam chicken sandwiches, flat panel televisions, and casting meaningless votes for people who have no business dancing on national television.

We are lost, and with few viable government protections left, Trump has accelerated the downward spiral to an outright freefall.  I don’t have a solution for it, and don’t even know where to start.

As JJ’s readers know, I was strongly opposed to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for president. I won’t rehash the reasons because I don’t have the energy now to re-litigate the fiasco of 2016.  I will say, though, that this political position cost me friendships, got me kicked out of progressive discussion groups, and pissed off long time friends and allies.  What surprised me, though, in no small measure, was the vitriol that my opinion generated.  I was called a misogynist and a lot worse. The anger just jumped out from the screen of my laptop and was acid in people’s voices.  From strangers I kind of got it; but from friends I had known for years, I was gobsmacked at the anger and hatred.

I guess I was naive, but my opinion, based completely on simple facts and strategy I believed would win the election, was dismissed because I am a white guy.  It didn’t matter that I was ultimately proved correct.  It didn’t matter than many others felt the same way.  What mattered in the eyes of many was that, because I’m a white male, I was automatically disqualified from deserving an opinion.  Those who know me well KNOW that I’m not any of the things of which I was accused and that I often write about social justice, equality, and diversity in our society.  In this particular case, though, simple genetics took away my right to free speech and free association.

Today, Frank Bruni wrote about the same subject.  He spoke about how our college campuses and other organizations have become forums for the aggrieved where opinions are automatically qualified or disqualified by the sex, race, religious affiliation or social standing of the speaker.  Now, before you start screaming at me, I (and Frank Bruni) certainly acknowledge the reality of racial and sexual privilege.  There’s no question that it exists and is pervasive in many cultures including ours.  However, that fact doesn’t automatically disqualify the opinions of those people because of those unchangeables.  As Bruni put it, often people’s response is, “Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B.”  That’s unfair, especially when you know the person speaking.

Can the “privileged” KNOW the plight of the oppressed by personal experience?  Certainly not, especially without sincere effort to learn about that plight.  However, does a person’s genetics, ethnic origin, education and place of residence permanently disqualify that person from deserving an opinion?  Of course not, and that’s the point, isn’t it?  Mutual respect of others is the key to exchanging opinions.  We are endangering that exchange by this growing gap that we profess to be closing.  Sometimes we have to take off the colored glasses that we all wear to actually communicate with one another.  And, we have to avoid personal character assassination, especially over who we support politically, and more especially of those we know well but with whom we have a disagreement.

There are people with whom I agree on 99.9% of issues.  But I no longer talk with, or associate with them because of that .1% disagreement.  That’s just stupid, and doesn’t help anyone.