Speaking truth to idiocy
Once a week, 30 to 50 local citizens get together and meet up on Main Street in the village in Orsini Park across from the Main Street Café and Farmhouse Tap and Tavern. For one hour, they quietly chat and hold up signs that are in protest of the current regime ruling the United States.
This has been going on since April and will continue on for the foreseeable future, or until ICE shows up and arrests everyone for having the audacity to exercise their right to free speech as guaranteed in the soon to be shredded U.S. Constitution.
During the protests, about 90 percent or more of the cars, trucks, Amazon vans, motorcycles, UPS trucks, and Fedex trucks that pass by, honk, give a thumbs up and generally show support for the mostly white-haired, white, retired protesters.
After all, this is a village of 1,500 upper-middle-class folks with a generally left-leaning political bent, at least based on past election results. Overall, it’s a friendly gathering except for a very small, but very angry minority of mostly white, mostly male, mostly pickup-truck drivers, mostly heading up the hill who scream, swear, flip the bird, rev their engines, peel out, drive dangerously and, in general, attempt to shout down and intimidate the protesters.
And herein lies the basic problem in our country.
The men in those trucks (and one young guy in a red corvette who almost wiped himself out veering out of control onto Maple Avenue) are venting their anger on people they don’t know, for reasons they can’t articulate because they’re angry, upset, and miserable due to their lives being less than what they hoped for and felt they deserved.
And in one way, they’re absolutely correct. Their lives do suck. They’re driving old, rusty trucks because they haven’t got the money for new ones. They can’t afford decent medical or dental care because their crappy jobs don’t offer decent benefits. They’re statistically living paycheck to paycheck and have nothing in savings if they get sick or lose their crappy job.
They can’t provide for their families and they feel like failures and the billionaires behind Fox News, NewsMax, OAN and other right wing “news” (propaganda) operations have given them permission to rage at the people least responsible for their problems: anyone of color, women, liberals, Democrats, elites, educated people, non-Christians, LGBTQ+ folks, and of course, the most evil group of all, illegal immigrants.
The irony is that our pickup-truck driving, coal-rolling (detuning your diesel to spew out clouds of noxious smoke as a means of owning the libs), finger-flipping, epithet (naughty word)-spewing cult members really have exactly one group to blame for every single problem in their miserable lives: Billionaires.
Americans do not have universal healthcare because it would mean certain HMO billionaires would lose money. Housing is unaffordable because millions of single-family homes and rental apartments have been bought up by billionaires and rented out at well over market rents.
Our food costs are manipulated by huge grocery-store chains and our food quality is compromised by Big Ag and their factory farms and mega-meat processing plants that fail safety inspections year after year but, luckily for them, those rules have been rolled back or cancelled by the regime.
Our drug costs are the highest of any nation on Earth because Big Pharma has bribed, lobbied, and coerced the lawmakers into giving them free reign to set their own drug prices.
Public education has been under siege by the billionaires for the past 50 to 75 years operating through the GOP because an ignorant population is more easily manipulated and controlled and college has been deliberately priced out of reach to the point where only 30 percent of Americans possess a college degree (in Canada it’s upwards of 50 percent and Canada has universal healthcare).
So our undereducated, underfunded, unhealthy, angry, pickup owner has every right to be mad because he is, indeed, a victim of a rigged system that benefits a tiny minority of super wealthy psychopaths. But because those megalomaniacal nuts also control the media, the government, the healthcare industry, the food industry, and education, they’ll never know it.
Have you noticed that, while the price of everything continues to rise at crazy rates, the price of giant TVs, laptops, cell phones, and tablets has dropped like crazy? You might not be able to afford anything healthy for dinner, but you can eat your hyper-salty, hyper-sugary, hyper-processed, nutrition-free sheeple chow while watching millionaire sycophants like Fox and Friends on your 75-inch flat screen.
They have kept the prices on these devices low because they are conduits into our homes and our consciousness for their products, their lies, and their constant 24/7 sales messages. And social media is a data-mining operation that basically gives them total access to your life, location, and thoughts, which they use to sell you even harder.
But our truck driver isn’t aware of any of this, or, more likely, is willfully ignorant because to admit that his problems are caused by a specific group of old white men and young tech bros would be to admit that he has fallen for some of the biggest lies in history. And that just ain’t gonna play in their world.
The worst thing for the rusty-pickup crowd is to admit they fell for lies and repeated hate and built their life around empty promises because someone made them feel good for a few seconds because he gave them permission to blame their problems on innocent people, many who can’t really defend themselves.
But I digress rather bigly. I don’t have any quick fixes for a lot of these problems that don’t involve loading the billionaires, the Congress and the White House occupants onto a Space-X rocket and firing it directly into the sun.
So, once a week I join my neighbors and hold my sign and let the world know that I know who the real bad guys are. And I also copy down license-plate numbers because I won’t be bullied, threatened, harassed, or shouted down by people too ignorant to know they’re being used by the real bad guys.
Editor’s note: Michael Seinberg says he has been protesting the oligarchs for quite a while and he’s also an experienced cyclist and motorcyclist who learned to memorize plate numbers of naughty drivers in under 5 seconds as a means of survival.