It’s Independence Day, not that I really care.  I’m pretty goddamned put out with America right now.  The land itself is beautiful and precious, but the people who live here: holy fuck. Maybe my perceptions are clouded because of the state I live in, because I know other parts of the country are FAR more progressive, accepting, and tolerant of non-normative people such as myself. Still, I look at the nation collectively, and I despair that we’ll ever be able to overcome the rampant individualism and anti-intellectualism that seems to have infected the populous. People so stupid they’re willing to kill to defend that stupidity, either actively with guns or passively with politics.

There are no fireworks to go see, not that we would anyway if there were any, but we’re also not doing something else we usually do on this day: watching “Independence Day”. Ever since my awakening, I see everything with new eyes and hear with new ears, and when we watched it last year, I was aghast: it’s nothing more than pure “America is awesome and (illegal) aliens are BAD” propaganda. I suppose it’s probably the same way a lot of people felt when they rewatched John Hughes movies in their 40s and went “ew”. So disgusting. I was brought up being taught that the Soviet Union was a terrible country that abused their citizens and told them lies using propaganda to make them hate us, when we were doing the exact same thing with shit like “The Day After”.

Yesterday kind of sucked a little bit. I woke up with a song in my head, and it was there all motherfucking day. It was a song I really like, but after 12 hours of that shit, I was ready to pull out my hair. It made me remember when I had U2’s “Bullet the Blue Sky” in my head on endless repeat for over a fucking YEAR. This only happens when I’m on antipsychotics long-term, so I’m glad I’m stepping my dose down again on Monday. I know I’ll get an uptick in voice activity and possibly anxiety/paranoia, but it also usually comes with a revelation or major insight of some sort, and then things level out again. Putting psychotic people on those drugs without addressing their underlying issues just makes things worse, because the subconscious continues to bubble and roil beneath the cork the drugs put in the psyche: all they do is prevent the person from showing their turmoil to the outside world, which is all anyone in our society cares about. Our society despises the mentally ill because they are walking reminders of the causes of those illnesses: trauma, abuse, neglect, stress, and bullying, things certain elements of our culture seem to thrive on because *they themselves* were the victims of those things, either directly or indirectly. Our culture is trapped at the endpoint of multiple generations of trauma that no one wants to look at or talk about, in no small part because so many of those awful traits can be directly linked to Christianity, which tells people that disrespecting your parents and elders is unforgivable, no matter what they’ve done. This blind loyalty to oppressive forces is the direct cause of our world’s turmoil.

What disgusts me the most right now is the hypocrisy and the hubris. I can’t stand people who not only don’t do as they say, but who also act as if they know everything, including God’s will. How dare any human being stand in judgment of any other human being and tell them that their vision of God/dess is any less valid than anyone else’s? Every single adherent to a dogmatic faith, regardless of what it is, is doing it wrong. Dogma comes from people, not God. God/dess has many faces and takes many forms, in order so that they may reveal themselves to each and every person in the world, and unless I’m missing my mark, it makes them sad to watch us go through this. It’s necessary, though, in the same way that it’s necessary for parents to allow their children to learn certain lessons by getting hurt, because there’s no other way to really learn that lesson. Everyone has to learn that fire burns somehow.

I know the United States will make it through this apparent Second Revolution. We’ll have to, as a matter of survival. Unless we learn to cooperate with the rest of the globe, we really are doomed though, and that’s going to require heavy examination of all of the elements that make up a society and culture on the part of every country on the planet, especially ours. We’ve been the bullies of the world since the end of World War II, under the auspices of “peacekeeping” that really meant maintaining control over sovereign nations, as well as our own people, to further the government’s now-obvious Christofascist interests. Like an abusive parent, we are quick to strike and slow to apologize, if ever. This is an age of awakening and enlightenment, however, and more and more people are holding up their hands and saying “no” to a world of hatred and oppression as they have the veils lifted from their eyes and ears. We are definitely paying attention to “the man behind the curtain”, and the more of us that do, the less power they have.

There are more of us than there are of them.