A million silent threats lurk in the shadows of our country.
By: J. West
Tags: America, Trump, Politics, Opinion, Sociology

At some point, in the very near future, someone will come out of their hole and show us the true power of a single human being. This is how life works. It has happened before and it will happen again.

A million silent threats lurk in the shadows of our country. They have been empowered by our own leaders, past and present. To blame this entirely on Donald Trump is to lose sight of the big picture.

Trump is an opportunist and a bullshitter. We were ripe for the picking. He would have been stupid not to capitalize on a golden opportunity. Greed is his love language.

If I can get them to worship my television show and flock to my buildings to throw money and p*ssy at me, I can probably take them for everything they’ve got.

Trump is not unique and he is far from the most intelligent con artist to ever stroll casually into public office. He’s ruthless, determined and refuses to take “no” for an answer. He’s every old school businessman that has ever existed in this country. He is the epitome of the long-standing American value of callous capitalism.

The motto is: take whatever you can and leave the pieces shattered on the floor.

We should not be angry with Trump alone. Yes, he made choices that led our fellow Americans to become encapsulated by fear and hatred. In the business world, I imagine that his organizations are among the most toxic work environments in existence, like the White House.

You can tell a lot about someone’s organizations based purely on their personality. He turned the entire country into a toxic workplace. The toxicity spread to everyone.

Love him or hate him, I don’t care. I’m not one of those people who can’t interact with those who have opposing views. Some things, however, I just cannot support and he embodies just about all of those things. He is toxic and everything he touches burns to the ground.

Donald Trump did not create the system, he exploited. He did what soulless capitalists do; he attempted to rape it of every last shred of value it possessed.

He didn’t fail because it wasn’t an effective plan — he failed because he is Donald Trump and that is what he does. Don’t think, just because he made money and is famous, that he is a success. All of his endeavors fail. That’s why he ran for president. He systematically failed his way up the ladder of success.

And that should give the rest of us hope. If he can stumble up the ladder of success fueled by nothing but his deep seated feelings of inadequacy and uneducated, transparent bullshit anyone can.

That is the dream of capitalism. Not all capitalists are soulless and I personally love capitalism when done without callousness. Unfortunately, the old school way of thinking does not believe that it is possible.

Because you can only train a dog by beating it, right? We don’t think this way anymore.

So where do we go from here? We try to heal and hope that enough people with positive voices rise up and make their messages known to the masses.

We can look forward optimistically and pray that this time of turmoil will soon be behind us but that would be foolish. Trump helped many of us come to realizations about our country that we may have preferred to stay ignorant to. We should not ignore this and we should demand a higher level of integrity from our representatives.

There are atrocities happening in our world everyday that I wish I could have stayed ignorant to. I used to think that, at the very least, America wasn’t nearly as bad as North Korea.

Now, I understand why countries like North Korea exist; I just never believed that it would look like paradise compared to America.

The seeds of anger have been sown and those seeds create monsters that can do unspeakable things. We’ve seen them pop up before — serial killers, political assassins, mass shooters, etc. Those were child’s play compared to what will be done by angry, delusional psychopaths in the age of technology.

For decades we were told to fear nuclear war or obliteration by North Korea, Iraq, Russia or whoever the villain du jour happens to be.

This fear has never made any sense to me. Why have Americans been led to believe that everyone is nuke happy? Japan may have a motive for wanting to nuke us but since the Japan that we nuked never existed again after we nuked them, it doesn’t seem to be an issue.

Might it have something to do with the fact that we have to live with it — though not directly? To this day, kids are horrified when they learn about our country unleashing that brand of brutality upon another. I can understand the moral dilemma this may create in us. Hopefully, they learned about slavery and Jim Crow first because, after that, what could shock you?

Supposedly, we learned our lesson and moved on with integrity and grace. That was the sentiment I took away from my schooling.

That’s how we handled racism, isn’t it? We wouldn’t just sweep history under the rug and pretend it never happened. We wouldn’t walk around pretending that the evening news visions of “predators” we grew up watching doesn’t weigh heavily on our fears.

As soon as we realized that it was wrong to dehumanize anyone who didn’t share our skin color, we immediately stopped, right?

That’s the narrative that works for some people. It is the very real side effect of existing in a shame based society. The false narrative being spoon fed to you by your parents, pastors, teachers or whoever states:

If you acknowledge that racism still exists and that it would be assinine to believe that a few decades and some bullshit sentiment simply erased it, it means that you are a horrible, wretched person.

Looking at it can cause us to internalize that as shame. It hits us at the core of what we believe about ourselves as human beings.

How can we be members of such a barbaric species? Am I capable of genocide and dehumanizing my fellow man just because it’s in my DNA?

The good and bad news is that, yes, you are. You are individually capable of being just as evil as any other human being that has ever existed in this universe. You could be as ruthless as Hitler or as spiritual and socially conscious as Jesus.

Your environmental programming plays a part but, at the end of the day, that Free Will the Christians are always going on about… actually does exist!

Personally, I have a hard time accepting the immense capabilities of a single human being, let alone a group. It is what would keep me up at night if I still allowed anxiety to keep me up at night.

But let’s go back to the high school football style rivalry we have with North Korea for a minute…

Why were we able to sell this bullshit to Americans? We have been “at war” in some capacity with so many other entities throughout my life that I can’t even remember who the enemy is anymore. It’s almost like we need an enemy in order to avoid focusing on things that we are better off not knowing.

We’ve been at war with other countries and foreign entities. We have the wars on drugs and terror. I might be forgetting a few. What is left? The war on ignorance?

That’s my vote for our next war.

Why would our government and media — both made up of people just like us — be so full of toxicity and hatred?

Perhaps we will finally be forced to face the real enemy we need to defeat:

Ourselves and what we have created.

Instead of the imaginary tyrant across the ocean, now we have to worry about a disgruntled and highly trained veteran, who was preyed upon by fear mongers, deciding to die for an imaginary cause. Actually, we have to worry about potentially thousands that are out there.

Do you know what happens when you get thousands of disgruntled, angry egomaniacs together under the guise of saving democracy?

America… that’s what you get.

What do you think was the driving force behind the creation of America? Nobody breeds hateful, entitled, elitist terrorists quite like we do.

In a way, the Trumpeteers are correct, they are on the side of the forefathers — the white, affluent, Christian men who thought they were the only creatures in existence that had any rights. They didn’t believe that any other creature on earth was human — women, children, the poor, minorities, etc.

And I know they honestly didn’t think any of us were human because, if they had, they would have been more specific in order to protect themselves.

The rest of America is trying to prove their humanity. This is not a battle between the haves and have nots — it’s a battle between the ares and are nots. Don’t get it twisted.

I see people angrily commenting back and forth from the opposite end of the political spectrum and they sound identical. Trump supporters are accusing non supporters of being cultists and pedophiles who want to steal our democracy. Trump antagonists are calling Trump supporters cultists and pedophiles who want to steal our democracy.

Huh?

Let’s talk about human trafficking for a minute…

Like the completely misunderstood word socialism, most of the people crying for the children do not understand the meaning of human trafficking.

It’s simple. Human beings, like drugs, are bought and sold in this world. They are cultivated, pruned, dressed up, trained and sold just like drugs. Since we made drugs illegal, nobody trafficks them anymore so we’re all good, right?

Why would you think that making human trafficking illegal made it stop? And, riddle me this… is it even illegal?

Feel free to consult Google, Bing or Q-Anon for the answer.

For you to think that the streets of suburbia are hunting grounds for children to traffick, would be like saying that Pablo Escobar stole the seeds you planted in your grandmother’s woods in high school.

What are we fighting over? We are fighting over a bullshit battlecry that came out like clockwork each time Trump lost ground with suburban white women. What do suburban white women love? Saving children and looking altruistic while ignoring their own children.

Which children do you want to save?

The children in your home, begging for your attention while you’re wasting your life and attention on outrage porn being spoon fed to you on social media. Those children?

The children who have had their lives disrupted by a global pandemic and can’t depend on the adults around them to act like adults rather than spoiled, entitled children themselves. Those children?

The children who are suffering from lack of social and emotional stimulation who are getting it from the same sources that are ruining your mental health because you’re busy ruining your mental health with social media? Those children?

How about the children in your community who were born to those parents you thought shouldn’t have spread their legs if they didn’t want a kid? Do you want to save those children?

Maybe you want to save the children who live in poverty and destitution everyday all over the world — including here in America. Do you want to save those children?

Guess what? There is no huge conspiracy about international child sex trafficking rings because it’s never been a secret that human trafficking of all varieties is still in existence in our world today. Do you think that someone needs to risk getting caught on 75 surveillance cameras to steal your blue-eyed Kaitlyn when there are places in this world whose main export is human beings?

There are warehouses and factories whose primary purpose in this world is to crank out human beings for use by the wealthy of the world. Yes, there are babies in this world who are born for the sole purpose of being a sex slave.

Some of them are born just to be tortured and murdered by a psychopath who is streaming the torture and murder on his vlog.

Does this disturb you? I certainly hope so.

How delusional do you have to be to think that the American brand of bullshit we’ve been fed even resembles the truth of how the world works?

The world is a twisted and messed up place, full of twisted and messed up people. Human beings have always been the most dangerous creatures known to us — and the most valuable. Our labor, our bodies, our offspring and our minds have been enslaved for so long that we don’t even realize that we are still enslaved.

Human beings are dangerous. If you had a feral lion problem in your neighborhood, that would be terrible. If it was only one lion, it would be dangerous. If it was an entire pride, you and your neighbors would be screwed.

A single lion can only stalk and kill so much prey before it’s caught. Even an entire pride of lions would eventually be easy to get rid of and might only eat a few pets and people before they were apprehended.

There is no limit to the kind of destruction that can be done by a single human being. We are only limited by our own imagination and we are born to manipulate people into following us because there is safety in numbers.

At some point, in the very near future, someone will come out of their hole and show us the true power of a single human being. This is how life works. It has happened before and it will happen again.

Throughout history, humanity has had to experience collective pain in order to experience collective growth. We must be close to leveling up again because things are getting painful — just like a video game. It always gets really hard right before you level up.

The battle of good and evil happens inside every one of us every single day and we don’t always know which is which. We need to be open to the idea that we may be wrong.

We are not who we are because of our biology; we are who we are because of our experience. We come off the assembly line a blank slate and the world sets out to mold us into what it needs us to be.

Sometimes, it turns us into Ghandi and other times it turns us into Donald Trump.

We are not limited by our experience. We have a choice. We always have.