I’ve never seen this level of rhetoric in my own country, and its frightening.

So I’m older, .. and I remember the 1970’s, 80’s, etc .. and I remember when it all changed. It was right before Obama took office, when the TEA Party took off, that’s the first time I remember people referring to rural people as “them”.

Up until that point, rural and working people were part of “us”. I mean when people watched the news, watched television, went about their day, they all assumed that everyone was in it together, and that everyone was basically on the same page as far as the basics went … sure there were political disagreements over policy, etc, but at the end of the day when the political fighting was done everyone was basically under one flag.

That changed when the TEA Party took off. Suddenly, and I was amazed when this happened, .. people started referring to people I actually knew as “them” on television, as if there was a team “us”, .. and this other team of people that was doing all this shit over there, .. “them”. There started to be newspaper articles about “them”, and what “they” were doing, etc. All of a sudden, “we” were calling “them” astroturf, referring to them as uneducated, saying they were xenophobic, and all of these things, .. I remember being shocked by this at the time, because I had never heard people on the actual news talking about people I knew in those terms before.

This all escalated through the Obama years with all of the divisiveness that brought, … half of the country deciding for the other half what the health care system was going to be from now on, etc, .. all of the winner take all politics, but more than that the level of hostility between people in politics ramped up to levels I had never seen. Personally I started saying things like “It can’t get any worse …”, but every election since .. it has gotten worse.

Then things really started to change when Trump was elected, … it’s like people just went mental. Now the rural and working people, they weren’t just uneducated, xenophobic, or whatever .. they were racists, homophobes, bigots, and haters … and it is like every single urban news organization, comedian, .. everyone, went insane. I have never experienced so much bias in the news in my entire life, it is crazy the crap that has gone on in the past few years. Then again, I thought to myself, even with all the shit that happened in 2020, .. “it can’t get any worse”

Then here we are. These rural people, working people … they aren’t just bigots and haters anymore … now their seditious, they are violent, they are domestic terrorists. Now they are literally putting up steel walls around Congress to protect against “them”.

It is time for reasonable people to start talking about all of this shit … and start encouraging people to STOP all of this insane rhetoric.