That's what I was trying to get across.
I think of it like this. How long has it been since we've had change in this country? I mean real change. We fight in the dirt over gun laws, sinking lower and lower, and our politicians cheer and throw money at us while we do it, egging us on, manipulating us. They play both sides, pitting us against each other over the same fucking issues again and again and again. Giving a little progress to one side, then a little to the other. Keeping us in the same muddy hole we've been in since the inception of competition politics and the meaningless struggle between right and left. They tell their supporters they fight for the morally superior cause, and our inner desire for justice spurs us to action, driving us to opposite ends of the spectrum out of righteous obligation.
How dare they ask an individual to give up their means of protection when a few people taking advantage of the right to bear arms? It's the mental health system that's failed us! It's the prison system!
How dare they believe their infinitesimal chance of using that gun for protection carries more weight than the lives of children in schools! How dare they believe an amendment, titled so that it may be changed, carries more weight than the lives lost in that nightclub?
They're both right and there's a compromise to be found there. But the tug of war is not waged at the middle, it's at the end that we stand never bugging from our position, heels entrenched, with the politicians continuing to give credence to our belief and denying a compromise could ever be possible.
Yes, we should have much more strict limits on the ability to purchase a gun. Strict as in IQ test, mental health check, background check.
Yes, we should be thinking about our mental health system, yes we should be reforming our prison system.
Our prison system takes young men selling weed, tosses them into hell, transforms them into hardened criminals, then spits them back onto society. Our prison system is supposed to be helping people get better, and yet we all laugh when someone makes a joke about dropping the soap. That shit is real! You wanna talk about rape culture, talk about our prison system! The punishment for crime is time, no judge has ever sentenced a man or woman to sexual abuse, and we all laugh and act like it's no big deal. How about we talk about it? That's a real fucking problem. I've never once seen a politician talk about prison reform. They only make the shallow arguments about gun control. You either allow all guns or ban all guns, there's no middle ground.
The drug laws in our country have torn apart African American families, they've persecuted fucking kids on the street and farmers just wanting to grow a plant, and in their place we came to know the cartel, we came to know the opioid addiction. You call weed the gateway drug? What about the bloody, gaping wound at the center of our country ripped open by the drug war? And they keep us back, both sides, for years and years, with the same illogical, unsupported anti weed rhetoric, deflecting the issue away in favor of the tobacco and alcohol lobbyists money. They never talked about it, they just deflected, keeping us fighting over the same shit over and over.
It's a game. We're being manipulated constantly. Pitted against eachother, distracted, given the silent treatment. And I look online and what do I see? I see the acne ridden teens on The_Donald calling for the exile of all Muslim people from the US. And I see the SJW dickheads claiming all terrorist acts stem from the corruption of US intervention and that we should have sympathy for Al Qaeda and Hamas. And when I call it out I'm brushed off by both sides, both seeing me as opposition. I see everyone ignore the fact that the DNC actually rigged their primary, that the reason Trump got elected was because they wanted him to be the Republican candidate and used their media arms to make it so. The DNC really fucked up, they fucked up bad, and they showed the full extent of their corruption, and everyone turns away because they point and say "Look Russia!" Ya Russia probably fucked with our election, I'm sure they fucked with the 2012 election and the 2008 election. We know their government is attempting to manipulate us, guess what, they didn't miraculously stop fucking with us when the Cold War ended! Surprise surprise. Ya we should be outraged, yes something should be done, but we should question the ability for Russia to influence an election so easily.
Why were the two candidates the two most hated in the history of our country, by their own party and the other? Why were leaks of private emails able to bring down the most notable female politician in history? Because the context and content of the emails was shocking. So why do we ignore that? The Republicans are corrupt as fuck, call them out yes, but why are we ignoring the other side?
I felt the Bern, Bernie Sanders was the first politician in my lifetime that I felt actually had a genuine love for the American people and a genuine desire to make our lives better. I didn't agree with a lot of his policy, I though a lot of it was rooted in the uncompromising nature of the right left conflict, but I really didn't give a fuck. I knew many people who despised Obama from start to finish who expressed excitement for Sanders, not for love of policy but out of respect. If I had a chance to elect a man to office who may alleviate some of the tension between the two parties with genuine attempts at positive change, and the corrupt DNC screwed him over by attempting to coronate the queen of corruption. It makes me sick just thinking about it. And nobody wants to talk about it. We forgot in just a few weeks what the DNC had done. And here we are, and this thread really ignited my rage on this topic so I'm sorry if I'm expressing this in a hot and incoherent manner.