There is a rotating finger of blame for what happened yesterday in Santa Barbara. That finger points at several moments in time when we had a chance to be decent human beings but just couldn't be bothered. It begins with a dying political party trying to pad its voter base by appealing to the worst bottom feeders imaginable: the racists, the bigots, the misogynists, the religious fanatics, the angry little fucks who point the finger at everyone but themselves for their pathetic loser lives.
And for what? For money to get re-elected to their multimillion dollar jobs serving the "people," except those people were greedy, women-hating racists like the Koch Brothers, like Rupert Murdoch, like Rush Limbaugh, like the hatemongers and bottom feeders on Fox News. Women to them are robotic idiots who blather on about what the men want them to blather on about.
The women on these shows help the Rush Limbaughs of the world insult the Sandra Flukes of the world by denouncing her testimony on birth control in front of an all-white, all-male panel of rich Republican douchebags. They let their male colleagues refer to her as a slut without speaking up. By their silence, or worse, by their parroting of misogynist talking points, they perpetuate their own insignificance as human beings.
A big finger of blame belongs to the lobbyists for organizations like the NRA who let a misogynist child molesting douchebag like Ted Nugent speak for them just because there's a few mouth-breathing knuckle draggers in some swamp who might buy a few more guns, a few more bullets if you just scare their pea brains into thinking that scary black guy in the White House is coming for them.
Another finger of blame belongs to the politicians who courted the right wing lunatic fringe of religious fanaticism because they needed their votes, and then to keep them happy, passed laws regulating women's bodies as if they were cheap goods harmful to the American public. They looked the other way when these same American versions of the worst of the Taliban women haters used the bible as an excuse to beat their wives, rape their daughters, and deny them a decent education.
No man would put up with that. No man would allow anyone to make him less a man by making parts of his body subject to regulation by special interest groups. No man would allow a group of religious nuts to tell him what he can and can't read.
Another finger of blame belongs to the movie, television and gaming industry that uses women to sell everything from cars to donuts. Video games and movies use women as props to be abused and fucked. The heros are always the beaten and bullet-ridden he-man who flings his bloody and bruised body on the first female he stumbles across because there's nothing like a good fuck to heal what ails him. Of course, there's never a scene where she says no, where she recoils in disgust at this dirty, bloody, stinking excuse for a man throwing himself on her. She is an insignificant prop put in the scene only to perpetuate the savage male's ego and superior brawn.
There is more, so much more. There is a Supreme Court that defines corporations as people and bestows even more rights and privileges upon rich white men. There are the corporations who will make money off anything, no matter how distasteful, how despicable. All that matters is the bottom line, the profit margin, the shareholders whining they need to make even more money so squeeze the workers even more, especially the women.
What kind of fucked country denies women the right to earn a decent living by punishing them with lower wages than a man, keeping them locked into low-paying jobs and treating them like garbage when they dare to ask for an increase in the minimum wage. The minimum wage! How disgusting is that? How denigrating to women, and how wrong of this country, how hypocritical of this country to not speak up against it.
There's an old saying that you become that which you oppose and I see no real difference between how women in this country are treated and how they are treated in backward countries trapped in religion and misogynist ideology where women are pretty much disposable bic lighters who can be abused, abandoned and easily replaced.
I don't feel equal. I feel as if I live in a country where women are taught how to avoid being raped but men are not taught how not to be rapists. I live in a country where women's bodies belong to everyone but the women. I live in a country that won't speak up and call someone a racist, a misogynist, a bigot because they don't consider it their place or their job to do so.
To those people, I ask then who? Who speaks up and says this is wrong? Who speaks up and says this is enough? Who goes to the voting booth and votes out every single one of these misogynist freaks who care only about money and power even if their own wives, their own daughters, their own sisters end up paying the price?
I ask you, what have we become and how did your silence, you apathy, your own bigotry, racism, and your own rejection of everyone different from you contribute to this shit pile of humanity we call America?
Most importantly, I ask, what are you gong to do to make sure your own daughters don't have to grow up this way, because it's not just your world. It's a world that will have a future and it's your children who will suffer if you don't get off your apathetic ass and do something
