America has done some horrible things in its tender existence.  Some pretty horrible things.  We all but annihilated the native population.  We enslaved entire cultures.  We’ve suppressed, imprisoned and murdered minorities, aka, non-white males, for our entire existence.  We’ve purposely imposed our will upon sovereign states, deposed legally elected rulers and manufactured coupes by the sackful.  We’ve poisoned, impoverished and neglected our own citizens with less empathy or concern than a poultry farmer tosses dead and dying chicks into whatever it is they throw them into.  We’ve started wars to prevent wars.  We even found justification for incalculable mass murder on a so-sickening-it’s-almost-hilarious-to-think-about scale.  And yet through all this and more, we have managed to maintain, promise and earn the status of the world’s beacon of light, a bastion of freedom, hope and intellectual will on a level never before seen in world history.  Or we did, that is, until we began concentrating children and babies into isolated prison camps.

Say that out loud and let it linger a minute.  Let the metallic bitter taste of that bloody image resonate off your tongue.  Wince at the discomfort and stifle the gag and retch that follows its aftertaste.  Ponder that.  America is willfully, en masse, tearing away children from their families and imprisoning them on American soil.  RIGHT.  FUCKING.  NOW.  In real time, folks.  This shit is going down in your backyard while you plan your summer vacation.  While you fuss over the coffee you just spilt on your shirt on the way to work.  While you kiss your snuggled little ones hurriedly so you can return to your spouse and try to work up to some real lovin’, Marvin Gaye style.  

While you are doing this, a child is screaming out loud to an indifferent, even perversely pleased American guard, “¿Donde esta mi madre?!!”  While you are doing this, a father is pawing hysterically at a wire wall, frantically trying to save his children from the clutches of tyrannical despotic praetorian paid for by your American dollars.  While you are doing this, 35% of your friends are slapping each other on the back, laughing themselves silly and praying to God for Trump to up the ante, because this tame shit just ain’t fucked up enough.  This is America, under the reign of an unfettered, unaffected, unintelligent criminally sick fuck masquerading as our nation’s president, buoyed by the will of the minority, by the will of the cowardly, by the will of the lost, indifferent and delusional.

There isn’t much further we can deteriorate as a country.  The next stop will be state sanctioned murder in an open forum.  No joke.  Mass hangings, mass shootings, mass graves.  This is not hyperbole.  Can you in any way believe that the America you knew could ever have done ANY of the things so far committed under this malignant regime, much less operate MASS CHILD CONCENTRATION CAMPS, on our own fucking soil no less?!  And if you can’t fathom that, then try stomaching the fact that other Americans, your brother, your uncle, your best friend, are pleased as fucking punch to see children literally torn from their mother’s arms and imprisoned.  Right.  Fucking.  Now.

One of the most perplexing and maddening effects from this sickness is coming from those that try to excuse or justify it.  “They shouldn’t be here in the first place.”  “They’re here illegally, so they get what they deserve!”  “Why can’t they follow the rules like everyone else is supposed to?”  I can’t believe that these arguments are put forth by people claiming NOT to be part of this Conservative fascist reign.  And that angers me to almost cartoon caricature levels.  You know.   With the ear steam and the tea-pot kettle scream and the temperature eyeball gauge with a needle jumping from from cold to hot to boiling to broken spring?  Yeah, that one.

The simplest answer is this:  How has America managed to NOT imprison forcefully separated children from their “illegal” families while still doling out justice for all these centuries, in the pasts?  We’ve managed to deport, en masse and with great prejudice, WITHOUT having to incarcerate babies in the before times.  What gives now?  Did migrant children suddenly attain superpowers or develop the ability to summon hellspawn, so they require such drastic measures?  Do they shit shiny platinum nuggets, or better yet, plutonium nuggets and we need them for harvest to help balance the Trump deficit?  Do they emit some Love Potion #9 pheromone that influences those in their vicinity against their will to squander them away like a fox burying the remains of a rabbit in the snow to savor later on?  What the fuck?!

Let’s ignore that so many, if not the majority of these “illegals”, are asylum seekers, running for their lives from tortuous governments, murdering drug lords, desperate poverty and sickness.  Let’s ignore that America has stood for that welcomed freedom since it’s inception as an idea and throughout its existence.  Let’s ignore that statistically illegal immigration has been at its lowest, dropping yearly, with reverse immigration on the rise during the Obama years.  Ignore the dark secret that America actually can’t function without these “illegals” as the cash crop cow that it is and has been.  Let’s ignore the principles of a free democracy that once led the world in example by being the most inclusionary country on the face of the earth, a “Melting Pot” as it were.  Let’s ignore how ALL of us got the fuck here in the first place.  Let’s ignore the fact that America herself has in some fashion CREATED the situations driving immigrants to seek a better life; unless you choose to ignore the history of Central America and the banana republic (not the Mall one), a failed drug war that pushed controlling cartel power in Colombia to a stones throw across the Rio Grande; unless you choose to ignore droves of murdered families from 17 years of an illegal war and the trigger happy predator drones in the hands of non-military judges.  Unless you’re a goddam, purposely ignorant fucktard that can only accept made up bedtime stories over statistical data and fact.

So what’s different now?  That’s right kids.  Trump.  A TV game show host.  An impotent and spoiled “business”man, bankrupt of soul, morals and intellect, as he has bankrupted himself and most every person or company to have ever worked up the gumption to trust this shit-stain.  Worst of all, his rise has unleashed a dark and hidden beast, larger and more fierce than any of us had every believed possible…ourselves.

Of course by “ourselves” I mean the 35% of sick individuals that mistake Trump’s clinical malignant narcissism for impassioned bravado.  I mean the deluded “Christians” that defile, in very explicit and literal terms, EVERYTHING Christ ever stood for.  I mean the sanctimonious masses devoid of morals, empathy and reason that for some fucking reason put this sick fuck in command, despite the fact that he holds them in contempt.  Even a professional cynic such as myself never realized the depths to which such pure, unadulterated hate and ignorance has held sway in my country.  Every day I feel like Tom Hanks in “A League of Their Own”, trying to wrap his mind around the reality of a woman crying in baseball.  Maybe Hanks should try rationalizing how a fully functioning adult that touts Christian piety as subtly as a Kentucky Derby bonnet can gleefully justify rounding up Mexican children like marbles in a really fucked up game of Hungry Hungry Hippo.

I posted my favorite poem above, ironically by a poet whom I could not stand in my younger years:  e.e. cummings.  I have loved the imagery of this poem, it’s crooked cadence and clipped staccato of word flow, a cummings standard.  More than any vice or fault of mankind, I have hated hypocrisy the worst.  Preaching the opposite of what you emulate and expecting others to bend to your will without compromise on your end is anathema to my existence.  

Yet these characteristics are rampant among American Christians.  I know.  I was a devout one for years.  But like Ghandi, I grew to hate my brethren and their inability fully grasp the tenants of their faith, myself still admiring and adhering to Christ, the figure, as a moral sensei.  Of course, I view Spider-Man in almost the same way.  The two are faulted men, fallible in their humanness but aware of it.  Christians, as a whole, are not.  They are petty, devious, uncompromising and exclusionary.  Christ taught none of these things.  He was none of these things.  Today’s Christians are no less evolved than cummings’ Cambridge Ladies, from whom he drew the inspiration.  

I am a confused man these days.  More-so than usual.  Much more-so.  My country is cheering a madman on his throne of the bones of the tired, poor and huddled masses, not even waiting for some token of purple and gold beads to willingly flash their tits to court favor from a perverse simpleton.  I am angered, I am saddened, I am befuddled, I am exhausted.  I feel like someone on a rope in a losing game of tug-of-war, clutching and pulling for all he’s worth and gaining only rope burns and an impending sense of doom for his troubles.  The worst part is, I look across that muddy pit and see only a mange-addled rodent tugging on the other side, pulling me in and I’m horrified and confused.  The math doesn’t work.  But here it is.  A shit-stained mangey squirrel is besting me tet-a-tet and apparently there’s not a goddam thing I can do about it.  The moon, though, still rattles above.  She’s seen this shit before.  And unlike me, she can bide her time.