Previously on...

Let’s attack smart people. Let’s attack any person of moderate to high intelligence who isn’t pursuing a solely financial “job-creating” venture. Let’s chase our intellectuals into the woods with torches and pitchforks. Let’s browbeat teachers who educate the younger so we can fail multiple generations at once. Let’s seek to crush anything whose goal is to enrich our culture, our lives, our understanding of ourselves, each other, our relation to the rock we live on, to the limitless universe only a few miles outside our upper atmosphere. Let’s shut down (and even chastise) public institutions whose only purpose is to communicate information to everyone willing to listen, regardless of creed, sexual preference, color, or tax bracket.

Let’s take populism and make it a weapon entirely devoid of its original meaning and purpose. Is that even possible? Let’s try it. Let’s convince the willfully ignorant, the prejudiced, the greedy that they know better than those who might have a glimpse of a larger world not built on pluses and minuses. Let’s encourage them to condescend, censor, disrespect, write off, ignore, spitefully encourage the destruction of, and—if we’re lucky, inflict violence upon—those who have spent their lives pursuing something other than themselves, who have used their minds for things other than tax loopholes, corporate imperialism, and the trapping of anything and everything under Heel of Foot.

Let’s wash away our culture with power hoses. Let’s replace literacy with firearm accuracy and volume. Let’s build the best, most expensive fighter jets possible while our minds, bodies, and souls continue to starve. Let’s take our currency rapidly dwindling in value and worship it above everything else, but refuse to share it with anything that might do some good. Let’s take our powerful dollars and cents and put them toward Austrian warm-blood horses while our infrastructure falls apart before our eyes, mental illness-level forms of social isolation continue to go unchecked, and racism and ethnicism thrive simply because people don’t know any other way and people are angry.

Let’s have our motto be “I can’t put a price on it, it ain’t worth shit.” Let’s narrow our focus and efforts toward about 100 faceless corporate monstrosities, and let’s smile as they vampirically take everything we have in order to make it their own. Let’s use arbitrary passages in an ancient book—arguably a “good read”—to persecute, exclude, condemn, and otherwise control vast groups of people.

Let’s tailor Jefferson’s and Jesus’ words to our selfish needs and ignorant fears. Let’s rob power from thinkers in all these ways. Let’s look upon them with malice and bear our teeth at them and shun them until it’s just the few of us, standing on a blistering barren slab of concrete in the middle of a boiling Atlantic and Pacific ocean.

And let us continue to deal with anyone who disagrees with us with extreme prejudice.

(via chriscantwell-deactivated201211)