A Haunted House With A Picket Fence

“A haunted house with a picket fence.”

That line from Phoebe Bridgers “I Know The End” has stuck with me all week, because that was my childhood. I love those moments where a lyric fits so perfectly that it feels like the soundtrack to your life has been written by other broken hearted people who have been through similar shit.

I wrote yesterday once again about the abuse I suffered at the hands of an evil grandmother. The house where it happened was at 4718 Kimball SE Kentwood, MI. I google searched it just now and see the fucking picket fence is still there. I don't know how that's possible, since we moved out of the house 36 years ago, but I'll be damned if that house isn't still trying to pretend it has its shit together.

A house haunted on the inside where unspeakable shit went down, trying its best to look pretty on the outside so that we could still attend the neighborhood block parties and be late for church every Sunday.

Before Instagram existed, that house tried to make us look different than the dysfunctional train wreck that we actually were. Back then, you only let friends see a fake picture of how perfect your life was once a year when you sent out the family Christmas card.

Now we’re inundated with duck lips and cat filters and fake people dressed up to create an image that is probably nothing like how they feel about themselves on the inside. Our self-worth comes from social media likes instead of just from being a genuinely good human being.

I used to only do facebook, but it’s way too alt-right. I’ll Instagram some, but it’s not my thing either. I’ve loved Twitter, but it’s hard to limit myself to 280 characters. I write until I get my shit out and twitter has been a great outlet for that. But, I miss this blog terribly.

Writing over the last year has taken me to darker places. What used to help, instead forced me to take an honest look at how close our country is to falling off a cliff. We’re in danger of losing our democracy, because of a massive group of people who are unable to think for themselves. We’ve endured a Covid genocide, because the GOP would not stop lying about covid and instead of standing up to their evil leaders, maga retweeted their bullshit. The propaganda of the GOP death cult is a legit beast.

I grew up in what I now consider a cult…Young Life. Their propaganda reminds me of maga. YL manipulates and preys on impressionable kids to force feed them Jesus, getting kids to “accept Christ” through peer pressure. They make kids climb a mountain and wear them out the day they deliver the talk that is supposed to make them feel like a complete piece of shit sinner. And then, they make the kids wallow in that for 24 hours before introducing Jesus, who is there to save them from themselves.

It’s so fucked up. But, when you grow up with it, you assume it’s right. You assume these are good people. You assume that “non-Christians” are bad. You embrace homophobia, because that’s the way your parents talked about “the gays”.

And hopefully at some point, you grow the fuck up and break out of that narrow-minded bullshit. I had my “run from Jesus” moment at church in 2007. I remember praying “fuck this. come get me if you’re real” as I walked out of service for the last time.

I think God did come and get me. And opened my eyes to the reality that it’s really hard to find Him at church. The moments that mean the most to me are when I have conversations with other people who grew up in their own haunted house/picket fence situation. We share our real shit and get a little bit of healing.

Contrast that with the judgment I felt at church and the pressure that existed there to present a fake version of myself rather than being honest about my struggles. I found more real moments having story time at the corner bar than I ever did at Bible study.

And one thing that the pandemic has taught me, is that the church is full of people who wouldn’t know Jesus if he slapped them in the face with the new testament. Everything Jesus preached was laying down your life for your brothers. So, that chance came and maga “Christians” did the exact opposite, sacrificing your life for their “normal” during the covid crisis.

It’s absolutely fucking stunning to me that anyone can claim to be followers of both Jesus and Donald Trump. The two are mutually exclusive with polar opposite ideologies. So to see people I used to do life with, church goers, who pledge allegiance to a career conman…it makes me realize that church was a lot darker place than I even realized.

A bunch of narcissists leading and sheep following. It was a hustle. Conmen stealing from the simple minded. Evil men hiding out in a place where it was assumed they were good. And the sheep ate that shit up, because they have zero ability to think for themselves.

Which is exactly the mental state of maga fake Christians. That herd mentality. Don’t question authority. Just regurgitate a set of buzzwords which your charlatan leaders supply that have no actual meaning outside of the cult. The truth was supposed to set you free. But, your fake leaders set you free of your tithes and took you further away from God.

Because see, that's the thing...the greatest threat to any conman preacher is the truth. Same is true of the GOP and Fox. So they sell their followers on an alternate reality where the people telling the truth are the bad guys. During a pandemic, they actually got their base to hate the scientists trying to save lives. And they do the same thing every day by calling truth tellers "fake news".

It's fucking sick.

But, fox news has used that tv preacher business model for decades, helping to turn the GOP into a fascist cult. Think about this. 10 years ago, every single republican hated donald trump. then he started using fox news catch phrases and suddenly, despite everyone knowing him to be completely evil, he became the face of the "conservative, christian" party.

that could only happen in a cult. using the cult's trigger words to manipulate the followers into believing you're someone you're not. put an "R" at the end of a conman's name and he flips from anti-christ to jesus christ junior. that could not have happened without years of fox "news" reporting bullshit and calling it absolute truth. it took relentless propaganda to get us to this point.

Churches have done the exact same thing for generations. I remember taking my kids to vacation bible school a year or two after leaving church. And it was the most uncomfortable experience. I sat in the sanctuary one day and had to suffer through watching all the kids recite words or songs in unison. They absolutely blasted the kids with fake Jesus propaganda. It was sick. They start that shit at an early age, so that by the time you’re an adult who should be able to think for yourself, you’ve been conditioned not to.

Which is also what Fox News and the GOP have done to their base. There is zero self-awareness amongst those who are regular fox news viewers. They are Pavlov’s dog and have a visceral response when fox or republican politicians use buzzwords like socialism.

Okay. Yeah. I could write for days on this stuff, but let’s reign it in to why I pulled up my keyboard at 4am.

Jesus was a brown skinned socialist. I mean come on. Read the fucking Bible. Donald Trump is the 7 deadly sins personified. And Jesus, in word and deed, is a helluva lot more like Bernie Sanders than he is Donald Trump.

Maga are the people who would have crucified Christ. The group that personified “it is not good to have zeal without knowledge, nor to be hasty and miss the way.” Look at that. I remembered a bible verse. But, it fits, right?

The savior who was there to save these people got murdered in cold blood by an angry mob that was too dumb and too indoctrinated by the joel osteens of the day to notice when actual Jesus appeared in their lives. The mob mentality, a group completely dependent on what their leaders tell them is true.

Problem is, sometimes the mob follows the wrong leaders. And no actual Christian leader would have anything to do with Donald Trump. Jesus lit up the fake religious. He talked shit on the super rich. He healed the sick. He fed the hungry. He modeled not being racist. He was a champion of the down and outers.

And maga Christians are the exact fucking opposite. They worship a false god in trump. Trump, when asked, couldn’t cite a single bible verse. He tear gassed nuns and other peaceful protesters to have a picture of himself taken while holding up someone else’s bible. He showed up at the national prayer breakfast with the headline of himself getting acquitted after his first impeachment as if people were there to pray to him and not God. He’s called himself the chosen one.

To support Donald Trump is to hate Jesus Christ.

Maga Jesus says, “For I was hungry and you gave me the choice to work unsafely during a deadly pandemic or stay home and starve to death. For I was thirsty and you passed racist voter suppression bills that made it illegal to give me water while standing in a 10 hour voting line.”

But, republican fake Christians cannot and will not think for themselves, so they’ll scream “socialism” at anyone trying to follow Jesus’ lead. For profit healthcare? Are you fucking kidding me? Jesus would have never said, “I’ll heal you, but I’m going to need you to meet your deductible first.” For profit prisons. Black lives not mattering. Kids in cages. JC was for none of the above.

But, everything is fucking backwards with this evil iteration of the Republican party that claims to be christian. These allegedly pro-life people defended and retweeted Trump’s lies as he ran his anti-science, for profit, no lives matter pandemic response.

600,000 Americans are dead.

But, what would Jesus do, right? Fuck over the poor to make the rich richer? Are you fucking kidding me with this garbage? GOP Jesus is the Prince of Darkness himself. And yet, people I actually know support this bullshit. still.

The fuck is wrong with you people that you couldn’t take note of the hundreds of thousands of bodies piling up and dare to question the leaders that you blindly followed. Blood is on your hands maga. You are complicit and an accessory to genocide, because you didn’t stand up for science and the truth, but mindlessly retweeted white coat doctor pro-covid infomericals and plandemic videos that ensured our death toll would be the world’s worst.

What kind of fucking lemming thinks we live in the greatest country in the history of the world and yet is supportive of the regime who killed 5x more Americans than we should have lost, because of the GOP’s non-stop Covid lies.

My grandma got away with her bullshit, because it was a family secret that was kept hidden. But, the GOP’s genocide happened in plain sight. And you fucking cheered them on while they killed us in mass.

Absolutely everything about the GOP is hate and lies. Trump lied 30,000 times while in office. Every truth was “fake news”. Every scandal was a hoax. Including Covid. Some fucking hoax. PTSD for life for thousands of front liners. Hundreds of thousands dead. American dreams turned to nightmares. Homes lost. Faith in humanity forever fucked. All because of maga’s impossible selfishness.

How in the bloody fuck do you call that “making America great”?

When your leaders, or in my case family members, are evil, you call them out on their shit. You scream it from the rooftops. What you don’t do is stay silent, continue to support them and show social media fake snapshots of everything being fine.

We are not fucking fine. The White House was haunted for the last four years by an absolutely abysmal excuse for a human being.

And that couldn’t have happened without evangelicals supporting the evil that is Donald Trump. Trump is a 6x bankrupt, 5x draft dodging, 20x accused sexual predator, who paid porn stars hush money, sold us out to Putin, presided over a covid genocide, unjustly villainized black lives peaceful protesters, lies like most people breath and yet maga evangelicals are like, “Jesus is that you?”

To confuse Trump with JC is to be out of your god damned mind. And to still support him as his Covid lies killed 600,000 and his election fraud lies nearly killed our democracy is to be every bit as fake as that picket fence that stood in front of my broken home.

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