My Rage Runneth Over

I have been bubbling with rage for weeks.  I don’t recognize my country, anymore, and so many of the people I love have slid behind this ideological veil that I could never have imagined them to.

From my own experiences with mass hysteria, it’s not hard for me to understand how some have embraced the dark side, or “drunk the Kool-Aid,” as people seem fond of saying, though I think it’s crude.  To embrace Trump as good for anything but himself is to ignore ones own common sense.

This was my experience with the flavor of Christianity to which I subscribed as a young person.  I not only believed that I would go to hell for not believing things that are completely illogical in the world that I could see, hear, smell, taste, and feel with my own senses, but I believed that my loved ones would also burn for not subscribing to my particular flavor of Christianity.

I was convinced that the Bible was literal, and I believed that something was wrong with me because I couldn’t make my brain believe in things like a virgin birth or a  man walking on water or a literal resurrection of a dead and rotting corpse.

I will never stop resenting the  influence that kind of peer pressure had on me.  I married a man who was controlling because he pressured me into sex before we were married.  I stayed married to him for eight years, and when I divorced him, we had our first real conversation about sex and other things that didn’t work in our relationship.  I told him that I’d really wanted to wait until marriage.  He said he knew.  I said, “Then why did you keep trying?”
He chuckled and shook his head, then looked up at me under his bushy brows and said, “The challenge.”

But my train of thought is derailing.  I’m here to talk about the current state of my world, and I suspect the worlds of many of you.

I see that same willingness to believe the absurd in current poltics.  That anyone could believe that Donald Trump, an admitted sexual assaulter, an adulterer, a coercer, a racist, and a petty, childish, name-caller could be a representative of Jesus Christ blows my mind to the point of questioning my own sanity.

But it’s not just Trump and the circus that is our current Federal Government.  It’s this idea that seems to have come to exist that sexual trespass isn’t all that bad and that (mostly) women just need to shut up about it.

Yesterday, a FB post went viral about a school district in Sacramento, one in which I have substituted as a teacher.  It was a story about an 11-year-old trans boy who was sexually assaulted at school by one of his peers.  The child was forced to put his hands on the penis of the aggressor, a boy.  The child went home an absolute wreck, and when it was brought to the attention of administration, the child’s mother was told, “Well, we’ll move your child to a new class.  We don’t want to ruin the aggressor’s life over this.”

How many times have we heard this same sentiment in recent news?  Brock Turner given six months in jail for rape, because the judge didn’t want to see his athletic career ruined.  David Richards, a former Tennessee pastor convicted of repeatedly raping his adopted daughter was given 12 whole years because he’s such a good Christian.

And this week, social media has been blowing up with tributes to Kobe Bryant.  Others are taking his death as an opportunity to remind us that he is an accused rapist.  I follow a number of Black activists because, as a teacher, I like to know what various cultural groups are discussing.  I have seen a number of attacks on white women for bringing up that rape allegation.  “He was never convicted,” they remind us, as if this contradicts his own admission that his victim had not given consent, though he claims he honestly believed it was a mutual experience.  Worse than reminding us that he was never convicted, they insist that the victim went looking for it.  “They found the semen of multiple men in her panties.”

SO WE CAN’T CALL A RAPIST A RAPIST BECAUSE IT WAS NEVER MADE OFFICIAL BY A JURY, BUT WE CAN CALL A VICTIM A LYING WHORE WITH NO  EVIDENCE OTHER THAN SPURIOUS RUMORS????

Where is this Great America in which we were all raised to believe we lived?  You know?  That melting pot, inviting all cultures, and guaranteeing freedom and liberty to all (as long as they are white, male, at least pretend to be-Christian, CIS, Straight, and wealthy).

I wonder what kind of sentence Brock would have gotten for raping an unconscious male.  What kind of sentence would that pastor have gotten if his adopted child was a boy?

I’m tired.  And sick of this shit.