Dear MAGA people: all those people you hate are canaries in the coal mine

Dear MAGA people:

I recently saw one of your kind on Twitter lamenting that trump isn't "hurting the right people."

And therein lies your problem.

You know all those people you hate?

Americans who happen to be poor, female, LGBTQ+, Black, brown, non-Christian?

Friends, they are the canaries in the coal mine.

Think about it!

What you want trump and the republicans to do to the poor, to women, to LGBTQ+, to people of color, and to people of other religions and faiths than yours shows trump and the republicans what you'll tolerate them doing to you.

You enjoy locking brown babies in cages? Then don't be shocked when the fascist autocrats you love so much put your babies in cages. If they can do it to innocent people coming here legally to seek asylum, then they can trump up whatever reasons they want to do it to you once you let them know you're cool with it.

You want to ban Muslims? Then don't be shocked when you're banned because your religion is the wrong flavor of the month.

You want to fire or torture LGBTQ+? Then don't be shocked when you're fired or tortured just because, by tolerating the firing and torture of others, the fascist autocrats you love come after you to fire and torture you.

You want to force young or poor women to give birth against their will--you want to treat women's bodies as property of the government? Then don't be shocked when the government treats your body as its own property--and we've all seen how willing trump and the republicans are to squander what they haven't earned. Today, it's your tax money as they give your refund to the billionaires you hate, like George Soros and Jeff Bezos; tomorrow, it could be a pint of your blood or your bone marrow or live organ donation of your kidney or part of your liver or your lung.

Hell, maybe one of the Kochs or Adelsons or Mercers might need your heart transplanted into one of them. So what if you're still using it? Once your boofing beer boi Kavanaugh overturns McFall v. Shimp on his way to overturning Roe v. Wade, your body becomes property of the state--the government decides who lives and who dies. And I guarantee that your life matters a whole lot less to the republicans and the rich donor class than one of their own does.

Are you getting it yet?

You know all those people you get off on seeing as less than human? Well, your oligarch overlords see you as being just as inferior--if not more so.

And that's what we as liberals are fighting so hard against!

We refuse to be their canaries in the coal mine, exploited and poisoned by them for fun and profit.

And we would rather not pull out the pitchforks and torches for another Robespierre-style Revolution where all the idle rich oligarchs' heads end up in straw baskets, as Randi Rhodes puts it.

But you know what?

I've been seeing a lot of guillotine memes on social media lately, which tells me that a lot of Americans are fed the hell up with giving their hard-earned money--the money they need to survive and take care of their families--to billionaires to squirrel away and hoard.

No wonder ordinary Americans are pissed off at Ivanka's "let them eat champagne popsicles" attitude and Wilber Ross's "let them take out loans when they have zero income for collateral" attitude.

The idle rich thus prove every day that they're completely out of touch with what it takes for your family to make ends meet on a daily basis. They can't even remotely understand what it means to live paycheck to paycheck.

And trump himself thinks you need an ID to buy cereal and that your local grocer will "work with you" if you can't pay for food because he shut the government down for over a month.

Friends, these people do not have your back.

They don't even have a clue!

But we do!

We want all Americans to have affordable health care, decent public schools, decent housing, decent jobs for decent pay, unpoisoned air, water, food...in short, we want everyone treated humanely.

And, frankly, you should, too.

A government like trump's that goes out of its way to hurt any of us is already hurting the wrong people.

Like I said, we don't want another French Revolution with oligarch blood running in the streets--even if trump and the GOP seem tone-deaf enough not to realize they're pushing hard for one.

We'd rather have another FDR-style president who's smart enough to realize that the rich can only survive if they give back some of their wealth now, semi-voluntarily, without forcing us to come take it all back since they've been stealing it from us in the first place for the past 30ish years.

No, dear ones--just because billionaires bought up enough politicians to make them change the laws for the past 30 years so that your money became their money, it does not mean, "Oh, those billionaires earned it."

They didn't earn that money. YOU did. Only the republicans--who taught you to hate those less powerful and more vulnerable than you--pissed on your head and told you it was raining.

That's right, friends--stealing is not earning, and, in the America I grew up in, thieves and cheaters don't get to keep their ill-gotten gains.

And you know what? Even if they did earn it rather than steal it, they need to fork it over as long as there's one child starving or one child in need of medicine his or her family can't afford or one child stuck in a shitty public school in a community with shitty infrastructure because republicans over the past 30 years forgot their oaths of office or the Preamble to the Constitution.

Personally, I want to make sure this shit never happens again.

Does that mean 100% civil asset forfeiture? And life in prison? Possibly--probably for the worst offenders. And all their confiscated ill-gotten gains get returned to Us the People, from whom those resources were stolen in the first place.

That just sounds like justice to me.

Mostly, my personal vision is for every last one of them--every traitor and traitor-enabler--to be defanged permanently.

This has to happen. They must--individually and collectively--be denuded of all power so that they can't run off and take root elsewhere to fight against our democracy again.

That sure sounds like dying broke in prison to me, but, hey, I don't care as much how as long as it happens.

So, what do you think?

Are you content to enjoy watching the canaries in the coal mine die, knowing that your turn is next? Does their suffering and pain feed you so much that you don't really care what happens to your family as long as another family suffers first?

Is it just about the money--as in, "I don't care how many babies trump and the republicans cage or how many Saudi journalists they carve up and kill as long as they leave my tax refund alone"?

Or is it about the principle of American fairness, compassion, empathy, and democracy?

Are you ready to join with the people you hate in order to fight the oligarchs who hate you?

I hope you see your way clear to fight against the oligarchs and for America. I truly do. And if you do, you'll find that your fellow Americans who are already on this side of the fight are very friendly and forgiving.

Why not take that leap of faith and find out?

As trump would say, what do you have to lose?

- Dot Calm's shadow