It seriously sucks being right about things like the illegal invasion of Iraq, illegal torture, the collapsing of the economy and other examples of Social Suicide. Saying "I told you so" brings a bit of comfort but just lets the idiots who ignored you last time justify not paying any attention to you this time. For this reason I avoid it if I can but I do try to get them to notice that their previous misapprehension had proven to be mistaken and to begin to question the faulty premise that led them astray before. Of course some folks have their thinking so set in an alternate reality you just cannot penetrate it. I'm starting to understand why people become hermits. It seems like there are getting to be so many of those people around the edges of my own reality are becoming vaporous. Take torture: I have had the pleasure of having three Mexican prison guards beat me in the abdomen repeatedly with phone books wrapped in a towel for hours, bending my joints in directions they were never intended to move, beating the bottom of my feet and my ankles with a leather sack with a 1/2 pound of lead shot in it, and having two of them sitting on me holding me down with the towel wrapped around my head and half-drowning me first with a water-hose and then pissing in my face before they dumped me back in my cell. They didn't really want to know anything, they just hated Americans. All of this was repeated on a twice daily basis for about three hours at a time for, damn, I think 7 or 8 days. They finally just got bored I guess, or moved on to another prisoner. They wore these black ski masks but he fat fu*k in charge forgot to take his badge off, even if the fact that he outweighed the other guards by 100 pounds didn't give his identity away. So you can probably understand why I think torture should be illegal and even barring that it should be so morally reprehensible that we would never engage in it. But here's where my reality starts to fray-there are two people in the world I would just dearly love to be alone in a room with for three hours so I could torture them to death, give them CPR and kill them again. That little fat POS scum, and draft-dodging-selling-missiles-to-terrorists-war-profiteering Dick Cheney. Problem is he's already a Damned soulless zombie so that might take some of the fun out of it.
The other thing is the bloody Piss Onya Republican economic agenda that screws the hell out of the very same voters who keep voting for them and blaming everybody but themselves when they screw things all up. The whole Tea Party movement got off the ground when the TARP Bailouts happened and yet now their newly-elected leaders have just passed a Bailout Bonus Protection Act that absolutely will create another bubble fueled by derivatives on car loans and student debt followed by another crash and another round of bailouts whereby they steal every last scrap of wealth that remained in the lowest 98% of American households. This time when you get foreclosed on you aren't even going to be able to sleep in your car. The stock market is going to collapse the few remaining pension programs and seniors are going to see their checks reduced or eliminated entirely. Even the wealthiest of us will be affected, I was going to say hurt but that word really is kind of meaningless in this context. If you're like me if a soda machine or a pay-phone steals a quarter from me, I am annoyed but I don't lose any sleep over it. When I see a penny I'm just as likely to let it lay as I am to pick it up. But I've watched a millionaire not only chase a penny he dropped but move the coke machine it rolled under to get it back. When he found two quarters, crusted with evaporated scuzz and lint, he was ecstatic! He cleaned them up with his hanky and no-shit, bragged about finding them to his kid when he showed up. This is our problem, some members of our Society have developed a Hoarding Syndrome regarding money. They never have enough and it does actually hurt them to be forced to part with any of it. They pile it up in boxes where it serves no more good than an elderly recluse's boxes of old newspapers and paper bags. That same greed and hoarding behavior is going to lead us to financial disaster and that brings us to the last thing I will discuss here-our failed Justice system.
The other thing is the bloody Piss Onya Republican economic agenda that screws the hell out of the very same voters who keep voting for them and blaming everybody but themselves when they screw things all up. The whole Tea Party movement got off the ground when the TARP Bailouts happened and yet now their newly-elected leaders have just passed a Bailout Bonus Protection Act that absolutely will create another bubble fueled by derivatives on car loans and student debt followed by another crash and another round of bailouts whereby they steal every last scrap of wealth that remained in the lowest 98% of American households. This time when you get foreclosed on you aren't even going to be able to sleep in your car. The stock market is going to collapse the few remaining pension programs and seniors are going to see their checks reduced or eliminated entirely. Even the wealthiest of us will be affected, I was going to say hurt but that word really is kind of meaningless in this context. If you're like me if a soda machine or a pay-phone steals a quarter from me, I am annoyed but I don't lose any sleep over it. When I see a penny I'm just as likely to let it lay as I am to pick it up. But I've watched a millionaire not only chase a penny he dropped but move the coke machine it rolled under to get it back. When he found two quarters, crusted with evaporated scuzz and lint, he was ecstatic! He cleaned them up with his hanky and no-shit, bragged about finding them to his kid when he showed up. This is our problem, some members of our Society have developed a Hoarding Syndrome regarding money. They never have enough and it does actually hurt them to be forced to part with any of it. They pile it up in boxes where it serves no more good than an elderly recluse's boxes of old newspapers and paper bags. That same greed and hoarding behavior is going to lead us to financial disaster and that brings us to the last thing I will discuss here-our failed Justice system.
