These Are My People

FULL DISCLOSURE: I didn't attend the "NO KINGS" rally in my little town, this past Saturday. There's been several in my time here and I did go to one last Fall and enjoyed it enough, but not enough to make it a habit. And more disclosure: some of them happened without my knowledge. I learned of them after the fact when local yokels were mocking them on the various local news sites on Facebook. Truth be told, my jam is fucking with those reprobates. It's almost always punching down- something I'm largely against- but it often needs to be done. 

It is a big deal when a couple hundred people in a small midwestern town show up for a protest like the "NO KINGS". Though Illinois is a blue state, once you get out of the population of Chicago and the suburbs, you are in the country. This is true of big cities anywhere in the United States. Except for sports teams, there is very little identification with the big city one's state might be known for. In the country, in the rural parts of the states, life is decidedly slower paced. I like that. It's one of the reasons I live here. I'm retired. I don't have to do anything I don't want to do. By the same token, I don't have to do things that I probably should be doing, like going to protests. I'm privileged to have that luxury. 

Eight MILLION people all over the country attended Saturday's rallies. Score it anyway you want, but that is a lot of people. What I gather from the coverage is that, big city or small, red state or blue, good people of America gathered together with neighbors to express their dissatisfaction with Trump and his increasingly evil ways. That warms my heart. 

We don't really have political differences in this country. To say we do is a cop-out. It's kind of a throwback to old school politics when republicans were (allegedly) "fiscal conservatives, against taxes and spending" and democrats were (allegedly) "liberals that just wanted to tax and spend other people's money". Oversimplification there, but that was the gist of it, in more ordinary times. It's more complicated now, and you-know-who made it that way. What passes for 'political differences' now, is actually differences in beliefs about right and wrong. This is damn-near Biblical folks. We are smackdab in the middle of a morality play and some of our neighbors, friends and family are having a hard time keeping up. 

The internet is at once a great divider and a uniter. Though we all have access to the same info, people tend to stay in their bubble. I am amazed at the ridiculously stupid things maga believe, but then they all tell me I watch CNN and that's why I am so stupid. I do NOT watch CNN except for clips on Bluesky. I know full well how smoking hot Caitlain Collins and Abby Phillip are and that Scott Jennings is a performative douchebag, so I don't need to watch CNN religiously. Much has been made about my unrequited crush on Stephanie Ruhle, but I don't watch MSNBC anymore either. Besides, the emphasis was on "unrequited" and that was all just me fucking around being a Ferrerman with lust in my heart. So, I get my news from trusted sources on Bluesky and elsewhere on the 'net. 

I like to think I'm smart enough to filter and weigh this info myself, and I usually am. People get quite derivative as you get older, and their face value diminishes as you quickly realize you have seen their bullshit before. I inherited this skill from my mom. You make it 93 years in life; you've seen it all over and over. I'm just thrilled that it's not just me in this battle of good versus evil in life that we find ourselves in since that fateful trip down the escalator happened to us. It is friends, family and strangers on the internet. We are all in this together. I'm in good company in my little red town. Sometimes it really is about the people you meet along the way. Even if you don't ever meet them.