Hope everyone realizes how much of our current chaos is caused by grown-ass men with daddy issues. Dudes that have all the money in the world and all the time anyone would need to work on themselves - and all they do is bitch about how everyone is out to get them.
There are no bigger red flags than constantly airing your grievances in public when you are in a position of power. It’s a flashing bat signal that an individual is wholly unfit to lead.
It’s sad, pathetic and also quite dangerous.
Men who constantly act upon their ego-driven compulsions and resentments on the world stage seldom have happy endings.
Elon Musk is just the latest in a long line of these men in recent years; from Trump to Putin we’re being held hostage in a way, by men who failed to face their own demons.
We have a culture that allows those men, who live in a constant state of self-centered fear, to continue to shape and warp their perceptions to the point that continuing to hide their own emotional weakness is preferable to protecting the lives of others.
We bear witness to madness on a daily basis.
Musk tweeted out a picture of a video game gun and a replica musket just days after the latest mass shootings rocked our nation’s soul.
In a year that has seen horror after horror from gun violence, some incidents are so beyond the pale it beggars belief.
Massacres that felt painfully amplified by the inactions of police officers who stood by ironically ‘locked and loaded’ with the very same weapons of war themselves but were still unable to act to protect a classroom under fire by yet another armed and disturbed American teenage male.
Reflect upon the callousness and lack of empathy it takes for the owner of one of the largest communication platforms to tweet out such a ghastly image at the beginning of the holiday season.
Far too many families will go through this holiday season without a child, parent or a sibling because of gun violence perpetrated by mentally disturbed young men with minds made rotten by online hate speech. Such as the damaged young man who shot up a Fourth of July celebration this past summer. Or the racist shooting in Buffalo, New York this past spring where far too many beautiful and rich lives were cut short because a young damaged white teenager was taught to hate others because of the color of their skin and then given easy access to assault weapons.
It’s telling that many of these guys wear body armor, including the killer who attacked an LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs last week.
They see themselves as warriors and they are sometimes rewarded for acting out violently. Such as the case of Kyle Rittenhouse who was every bit the mass shooter, he just targeted people that the judge in his case felt deserved to die.
The cops even handed him a bottle of water and sent him on his way - after admitting to the killings the night of his murders.
He was culturally positioned to be seen as an ally of law enforcement, a scary and sobering fact that deserves its own deep dive.
It was as simple as that and he has become a big celebrity in GOP circles, even promoting his own online shooting game while he waits to become old enough to take one of the congressional seats Republican House leadership has all but promised the doughy young psychopath.
We’re a nation that gives bullets to broken souls, barely able to navigate their own emotions and anger.
Before they even get a chance to work on themselves and hopefully begin the hard work of self discovery, gaining emotional maturity and a modicum of emotional sobriety.
They’re sucked into a culture that rewards split-second life or death results by aiming an AR15 at what they perceive as ‘the other’ or the enemy and they find themselves taking life before they learn to even grasp the reality of their own lives.
It’s an epidemic and we not only have a political party profiting off of it, we have billionaires encouraging the worst instincts of online trolls, extolling the virtues of trying to hurt another’s feelings online as a sort of cyber sport.
Weak men always reject empathy and sensitivity to others because they are so ashamed of their own feelings inside.
The ‘f*ck your feelings’ crowd and ‘liberal tears’ memes that Musk and his crypto-bros take such pleasure in purveying across our timelines and in our replies have become a cult of sorts.
It’s a deeply psychological hive-mind approach to the complex and scary world we now live in.
The eternally adolescent viewpoint of exclaiming nothing really matters.
It’s nihilism for morons in mom’s basement.
Its like a digital Burning Man where they all dance around a giant sculpture that represents mankind and they cannot wait to set it on fire and let their laughter fan the flames.
In those moments they have a fleeting glimpse of power, they feel a kinship with a billionaire who may just shine his light on them for a moment and they too will have the power they so deeply desire but know they will never really attain.
Unless they become conscious of their desire to hold Armageddon in their hands, they will find smaller, more localized ways to hold annihilation in their grasp.
In our culture at this moment that means guns.
They’re relatively cheap and plentiful and thanks to the NRA and the GOP they own, are accessible in far too many communities, no questions asked.
Entire states like Texas have basically become open carry versions of the Wild West.
Florida is next in line for this sort of ‘constitutional carry’ madness.
I don’t know if you have spent any time in the ‘Sunshine State’ recently but the last thing one walks away from a visit there with is the thought that its citizens need more guns.
As we witness the incivility, the antisemitism and racism on the rise - and seemingly on the march - I keep thinking about two images from the past year.
Especially in light of all the Republicans who will surely be posing with their young children holding an assault weapon and smiling in front of their Christmas trees for their annual holiday cards.
The mother in Uvalde, Texas, Angeli Gomez who heard about the shootings at her children’s elementary school while laboring in the fields, putting food on America’s dinner tables as a farmworker.
She left her shift, drove to the school, attempted to rush in to rescue her kids, was handcuffed, released, then hopped the fence and ran into the school and retrieved her children.
She has been the subject of multiple harassment incidents by the ignoble and execrable Uvalde Police Department.
I also recollect the heartbreaking tale of the two year-old boy found wandering in the aftermath of the mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois.
He was attending the Fourth of July parade with his parents. The boy was found by strangers, covered in blood, pointing in the direction of the parade route saying “Mommy, Daddy, Mommy, Daddy”.
His parents will never see him grow up to be a young man in the United States of America because another young man in the community ended their lives in a fit of rage and insanity, exacerbated and twisted by online awfulness and the NRA’s stranglehold on conservative American politics.
This holiday season we need to reflect and take stock of where we are as a nation and make not just an effort but an affirmation to be rid of the trolls and the organizations that will continue to do us harm.
Hate speech is not free speech and weapons of war and unlimited access to firearms are not protection.
In the end, love always wins, but sometimes we have to fight for it.
Be well.
LMAO this garbage is your best thing?
Thank you Noel, you're an exceptional human being ❣️