Saturday, August 17, 2024

On Mean Memes

 

I guess people think I just wake up every morning with ideas for tacky, mean anti-trump memes to post on Facebook to piss everybody off.  And, about 3 percent of the time, that is the case. But the truth is that the other 97 percent of the time I’m simply being reactive to some idiotic “snowflake” or “woke” or “Brandon” bullshit that was posted by somebody else and shows up on my newsfeed. I generally don’t go back and comment on such misguided drivel to tell the author (or, most often, the “sharer” – because they are not clever enough to come up with such idiocy on their own) that they’re wrong, or stupid, because doing that seems tantamount to walking into somebody’s house and turning off the Faux Nuze broadcast they’re soaking in to explain the error of their ways. It’s just rude. I mean, it’s THEIR house. They’ve got a right to do any damn thing they want up in there. Ammirite?

Yet, when ol’ Unkel Ricky (that’s me, referring to myself in third-person, like George Costanza, or Trump) comes up with some global response to the trumpery (real word – look it up) he had just previously witnessed and is so bold to display it on the interwebs, man, they’ve got no problem with kicking down the front door and just dumping that truckload of Jehovah’s Witness pamphlets right on his living room floor.

Then, when I respond there, in the comfort and security of my own abode … watch out! I’ve been chastised, insulted, preached to, belittled and threatened more times than I could count, if I was keeping count. And if I’d had my ass kicked as many times as it has been implied that I was going to get my ass kicked, I’d surely quality for some of that socialist “disability” money by now and be able to quit my 80 hour a week job to devote more time to such endeavors.

What’s the point? I’m old; white; male; not poor; a little bit redneck. I’ve had my fun, for almost 70 years. I’m well beyond getting any formal education I don’t already have – which isn’t much. In a vacuum, the US Government being taken over by some weird Frankenstein Oligarch-Theocracy (Theoligarchy?) hybrid monster, created from the festering hatred in the fears & prejudices of the masses wouldn’t really have that much effect on me, directly. I got no dog in this fight. I could blend in just fine. If I could keep my mouth shut.

Then comes this damn nagging image of my granddaughters trying to survive as Handmaids.

They’re not built for that.

So, since very few people are capable of reading anything more involved than a bumper sticker, it’s back to the memes.  I doubt that they’ll change anybody’s mind. But, as the saying goes, at least I will have said my piece. And maybe one or two youngsters who are too involved with their lives to consider things political will understand what the old man is saying in his own, abrasive way, and be motivated, to some degree, to fight for their own freedoms.

Or…I can just keep pissing off dumb people.