Gaslighting and the price good people pay for confronting the latest American tragedy

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being at least mildly jealous of the people who refuse to give modern-day politics, and the sorry state of our fading nation the worry they so haughtily demand.

I bump into these folks on occasion when I’m out on one of my purposeful journeys toward anywhere in the vicinity of sane. I’ll see them during my rare visits to Facebook, and I swear to you, if the America-attacking Trump threatened imminent nuclear Armageddon, they’d be posting pictures of their trip to some Disney theme park with the snappy status update, “Life’s too short to sweat the small stuff …”

These people seem completely disconnected from reality. Worse yet, they smile a lot more than I do, which stings all the more, because I know for a fact if they forced themselves to pay attention to all the doom, gloom and trouble coming their way, they’d wipe those cheesy smirks off their sunny faces but quick.

Which is why most of them choose a steady date with the blissfully ignorant, I reckon ...

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Don’t get me wrong here, I don’t see myself as a completely helpless case. I am still fully capable of enjoying a good book, the exciting back-and-forth of a football game, or the warm slap of a bone-dry martini. And there is nothing like a hike through the wilderness, where the journey, not the destination, is the reward.

Trouble is when I return to the trailhead and wipe the sweat from my brow, all the trouble that I couldn’t see through the trees is biding its endless time in the cool, dark shadows waiting for me and my inevitable return.

Why just on Thursday alone, we learned the America-attacker, and his revolting boss, Elon Musk, were pressuring their bought-and-paid-for pasty clowns in the House of Representatives to shut down our government. These two America-hating crooks have already pocketed billions shaking us down, but they won’t quit until their bottomless pockets are filled to overflowing with our damn money.

The Republicans, of course, are just A-OK with the whole thing, which is akin to allowing the crooks to close the bank they just robbed. Millions will suffer through the holidays if they get their way, and because you are one of those people who have the audacity to pay attention, you know by know that pain is entirely their jagged point.

They specialize in hurt.

Also on Thursday, Georgia’s appeal court which is made up of three Republican-appointed judges threw Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis off the rock-solid case she was making on behalf of Georgia’s voters charging the America-attacker of illegally conspiring to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state. I mean, we literally heard the orange bastard trying to shakedown election officials on the phone, and we know for a fact he publicly threatened poll workers there. Oh, and then there was that dirty slate of fake electors the entire nation saw.

But Willis is the problem here, you see.

These morally corrupt judges want us to somehow believe Willis’s relationship with a member of her prosecutorial team on the case, in which there was ZERO conflict of interest given they are on the same side of the fight, was somehow deemed to be more grievous than a full-blown attack on the bedrock of our Democracy by the odious Trump.

All this is gaslighting at its smoldering-hot extreme.

To think the party that recklessly backs the women-attacking felon, and porn star-banging thug could take issue with anything to do with “inappropriate relations” is even richer than Musk himself …

By any normal standards the whole thing is absolutely insane, and quite simply the public lynching of a Black woman (who, by the way, was overwhelmingly reelected in November) with the audacity to try to stand up for what is good and right in this country. And if you are straining your neck to see it any other way, you need to check all that white privilege at the door.

In the end, it was just another Thursday in America, and I will guarantee you that fully 80 percent of the people in this nation have no damn idea the above two things even happened because of a combination of self-care, ignorance, and external design.

This is in large part thanks to the America-attacker’s Conservative Supreme Court. Their gruesome Citizens United ruling in 2010 allowed the rich to illegitimately purchase an outsized portion in both our lives, and our politics that they have never legitimately earned.

Because of that, the political world nags at us to constantly do more … to give more … to care more. Worse, it seems the more we pay and the more we give, the more we are taxed for it. The constant churn wears on us. It takes advantages it has no right to.

We the worriers, er, warriors, are bloody tired of it all.

I bet I have asked myself a thousand times since the terrible blast on November 8, 2016, what the going rate is for a good night’s sleep these days. And if you are reading this piece, I bet you, too, just yawned in solidarity.

Too many people are checking out, when they should be checking in, because while they sleep the busy little corporate bees are giving our government and our country quite a going over.

Here’s where I type that I am sympathetic to the tens of millions of people in America whose lives never improve much, if at all, no matter who inhabits our political infrastructure in Washington, D.C. It’s hard to care about the promise of a reservation at the table next year, when your stomach has been grumbling all your life.

This time will be different, they are told, but hard experiences have taught them they are only hearing more of the same. You’ll never get a better example of this than last month’s election when a first-class, lifetime public servant who has relentlessly defended America and her people was defeated by a low-class, belligerent delinquent who attacks them both.

There is no way for the sane of mind to process this clearly.

We are constantly being asked to make sense of the shock and hell, and to do just a little bit more to finally kick it where it belongs.

I can see how it would be miles easier to just say the hell with all of it, and throw up some tone-deaf post on Facebook: “Life’s easier when you simply decide to stop giving a shit …”

Except I just can’t do that, and either can you.

Martini, anyone?

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D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.