#you know the one constantly pushing away said support and also refusing to communicate openly | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

doctormead · 6 years

Text

Death of a Conservative

I was born in June of 1974. Two months later, Richard Nixon resigned from the Presidency. The Cold War was in its final stages and would end before I graduated high school. But its shadow defined my upbringing.

I was raised in a Evangelical Christian, conservative, Republican home. And that is what I was raised to be: a Christian, an Evangelical, a conservative and a Republican. I was never actually told that you couldn’t be a good Christian and be a Democrat. In fact, I was explicitly told the opposite…but there was this underlying attitude in everything every adult around me said and did that said otherwise. I’m pretty sure that the adults in my life didn’t mean to come across this way, but this was the “logic train” that I absorbed over time.

Here’s where the U.S.S.R.’s cold shadow crept in. Russia was the boogieman for every churched kid in those days. We were fed horror stories about religious oppression in the Soviet Union and inspiring sagas about good Christian people who held onto their faith in spite of the danger. We were given pamphlets and Christian comic books about heroes who smuggled bibles behind the Iron Curtain. We were told over and over that the Russians wanted to do that to everyone, and that the U.S. was the bulwark that kept them from grinding all of us under the heel of state-established atheism.

And, if that wasn’t bad enough, Russia wanted to impose its economic system on us. “Socialism” and “Communism” were words to conjure demons by. We heard tale after tale of how poor the Russian people were because of prices fixed by the state. How nobody was motivated to do their best because there was no way to really advance. That the lack of competition kept everything stagnant and miserable. Then Capitalism was set up as the Aslan to Communism’s Tash. Capitalism was why things were so much better in America! Capitalism provides competition and incentive for people to get off their asses and work hard. This creates better, cheaper products which makes everything better for everyone!

This was the dichotomy I grew up. Russia/Communism = evil. America/Capitalism = good. Enter the liberals in general and the Democrats in particular. They weren’t “tough” on the Russians. Worse, they wanted to erode good Christian institutions like prayer in schools which would put us on the “slippery slope” (yes, that logical fallacy got a lot of play in school time lectures and political discussions around me ) toward outlawing Christianity outright. This made them foolish dupes at best and collaborators at worst. And, since no good Christian would stand by while the Evil U.S.S.R. and their liberal sympathizers in the U.S. pushed us down the road toward atheistic totalitarianism, you couldn’t REALLY be a good Christian and be a democrat. Simplistic, I know, but I was a kid and, for an embarrassingly long time, even into my adult years, I held on to that simplicity even if it was only in the back of my mind. To paraphrase John Fischer, this was something that I wasn’t so much taught as something that I “caught”.

But, as I got older, cracks started to appear in the facade of “Righteous Capitalist America”. The benefits of the sweeping, upper level tax cuts and the repealing of economy-shackling regulations that were supposed to “trickle down” to everyone never seemed to reach us. Looking back, we were doing pretty well, but I remember mom and dad seeming to constantly worry about finances. Costs of living kept going up while wages were stagnating for the middle and lower class. As corporations merged into virtual (and sometimes literal) monopolies, I learned that Capitalism doesn’t guarantee competition. It is “good business” to eliminate your competition from the viewpoint of a corporate overlord. Thus an in-theory “free market” can become just as locked in and stagnant as any State run economy. This made it easier for hard-working people to fall into financial trouble and cutting of social safety nets in the name of “fiscal responsibility” and “not encouraging freeloaders” made it harder and harder to climb out of that trouble. And the continual gutting of public education only exacerbated matters.

I slowly grew away from the Republican Party, because, well, they weren’t living up to their hype. Take the War on Drugs. You’d think we’d have learned something from Prohibition. Yeah, they “got tough” on drugs with the “three strikes you’re out” policy and militarizing the police to a fare-the-well. All they actually did was explode the prison population and didn’t really make a significant dent in drug trafficking and use. Drug use is the same between white and black people, but black people are disproportionately arrested and convicted which exacerbates the issue of poverty in that demographic as families lose providers and young people get a black mark on their records that will bar them from many opportunities for the rest of their lives. At the same time, they advocated (and followed through) with cutting assistance programs for inner cities and other impoverished areas, making drug dealing one of the few available means for having an income that is above subsistence level…and the cycle continues. (And, then in the last year, I learn that the War on Drugs was pretty much started by Nixon to target his political opponents: i.e. liberals and African Americans. And this isn’t “fake news”. One of his aides confessed to this.) Then there were the incessant wars overseas (granted with strong support from Democrats in many cases) which, in the long run, only seemed to exacerbate the problems they claimed to be solving. There was also the outright hostility to science. I admit, I was a climate change denier to begin with, but then the evidence finally piled up to a point where I couldn’t deny it any longer and remain intellectually honest with myself. Also, the stifling of research into areas that might hurt their platform (for example, preventing the CDC from even starting to research gun violence/fatalities). The party was gradually adopting a stance that facts should be discounted and ignored when they are inconvenient. Then, to put the cherry on the top of this toxic sundae, there was the courtship of racism When hordes of angry, white southerners left the Democratic party over the party changing to support the Civil Rights Movement, the Republican party tried to bring them into their fold to bolster their voter support. It was subtle. So very, very subtle at first. The used “dogwhistles” instead of obviously racist statements and/or policies to let them know they’d be welcome. And, as they took root in the “Party of Lincoln”, they started throwing their weight around becoming more and more openly racist. It finally came to a head for me half-way through Obama’s first term, when Republicans flat out refused to even try to work with the President or the people across the aisle. Their entire policy was “obstruct everything”. The Republican party no longer represented my ideals…if it ever in fact did. After that, I no longer considered myself Republican or conservative. I was an independent with increasingly “leftist” leanings.

I still considered myself an Evangelical Christian but “cracks” were starting to appear there as well. Evangelical Christianity was the vanguard of conservatism and the Republican Party. They led the charge against the “moral erosion” of our society. As I got older I and got to know more people outside of the Evangelical bubble, I became more and more uneasy. Many of the things that were being railed against by Evangelicals and the Moral Majority were…simply applying the rights of the 1st Amendment to everyone. Prayer in schools? Unless you’re going to give a service for every religion represented in that school, it’s not fair to people who aren’t Christian. And, even if you could do that, it singles out members of minority religions to be picked on (and, if you think minority religions wouldn’t be picked on in school, you haven’t been paying attention). You can make it “all right” in the rules for people to abstain from the opening prayer, but see what I write before about minorities being picked on. When I was in undergrad at Bryan College, there was a program where our students would go to the local grade school to teach bible lessons in their classes. I’m pretty sure they only got away with it for as long as they did because Dayton, TN was pretty insular. Looking back, I cringe at the idea. Yeah, kids weren’t “required” to attend the lessons, but the lessons were held in each of the homerooms. It would be painfully obvious if you left and…minorities being picked on, etcetera etcetera. Gay marriage? Folks, homosexuality isn’t forbidden in all religions (and certainly not in any atheist or agnostic creed I know). If you’re going to have a religious/legal hybrid of an institution in the first place, you have to let it be applied across all faiths or lack thereof across the board to be in sync with the idea of Religious Freedom. I kept hearing respected voices in the church rail against Islam and the stifling theocracies its followers created…but, from the way they talked about other issues, they seemed to be longing for a Christian version of Sharia law: a theocracy where the outward behavior of one sect of Christianity was enforced by the government.

Then there was Evangelical Christianity’s increasing lack of compassion for the poor in our country. Oh, Evangelicals had tons of compassion (and open wallets) for poor people as long as they were overseas, but, if you were poor in America, you were out of luck. The attitude seemed to be that it wasn’t the fault of people overseas if they were poor. After all, they didn’t have all the advantages of living in America - the land of opportunity. But poor people in the U.S.? Well, if they can’t bootstrap themselves up like the American Dream says, it’s their fault. They’re too lazy or irresponsible or “not right with God”. I overheard or participated in many discussions about kids growing up expecting to draw a check like momma or single mothers having baby after baby just so they could get a bigger welfare check. I’m sure that some people abuse the system. Some people always find a way to abuse systems, but it became increasingly hard to believe that so many did that it negated the good such safety nets do. I’ve gotten to meet and get to know some people who had come out of a background like that and they were nothing like the “entitled, lazy welfare-queen” of the stories. At the worst, the poor became scapegoats for the failure of “trickle down” economics. If those leeches weren’t being supported by the rest of us, we’d have much more money, or so went the logic. I heard several people advocate for getting rid of the welfare system entirely and “let churches and private charities take over that job”. The thing was, churches and private charities were around when these programs were set up. If they were doing such a good job of it, government wouldn’t have had to start them. Quite frankly, I didn’t see these advocates for private and church based welfare giving anywhere near enough to the local poor to make the governmental programs redundant. And the racial component of this kept getting more and more pronounced. The “welfare queens” were increasingly cast as black or Latina. Stagnant wages were the fault of all those illegal immigrants who would take pennies for hours of work. The lack of well paying jobs in your area was because they were given to less qualified minorities to meet “racial quotas”.

And, finally, there was the demonization of the “other”. People who didn’t agree with us weren’t just mistaken. They became “The Enemy”, and somehow Jesus’ admonition to “love your enemy” didn’t apply to them. They weren’t to be listened to. They weren’t even to be tolerated. They were to be shouted down and attacked. Grace? Who has time for grace?! There’s a war on, so get down to the battlefield and hold the line at all costs!

Now, I hear you Evangelicals out there objecting to this. “We’re not all like that!” you say. I know, but THIS is the public face of Evangelicalism. “That’s not fair!” you say. “The liberal media just focuses on that minority!” Folks, I know that argument. I’ve MADE that argument for years to my friends outside the Evangelical bubble. Over and over again and, after a while, it began to ring increasingly hollow. I could SEE what was going on inside Evangelical churches. I could hear what my fellow Evangelical Christians were saying and “liberal slant” couldn’t excuse all of that. And, quite frankly, this last election year was the nail in the coffin for me because Evangelical Christianity (mainly WHITE Evangelical Christianity) as a whole showed its true colors for all the world to see. Evangelicals were a major help in putting a mysogynistic, bigoted, entitled bully in the White House. Numbers vary, but the figures I find most likely are 58% for Evangelicals as a whole and 80% for white Evangelicals. Let me say that again. Of the people who identified as Evangelical who turned out for the 2016 Presidential Election, over half of them voted for Trump and a particular subset had over three quarters vote for the Orange Anti-Beatitude. Even if a large population of the Evangelical community stayed home, that’s a pretty damning percentage and no amount of yelling that liberal media is doing a smear job can overcome it. And Trump *still* has strong Evangelical support! I could forgive what happened on election night if it wasn’t for the fact that the majority of white Evangelical Christians still seem to support him in spite of everything he’s done and all the lies he’s been caught out in. Top Evangelical voices like James Dobson, Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham still staunchly support him in spite of the fact that he is the opposite of what they’ve been saying a Christian leader should be for years and years. And, you know what? I don’t care why they’re doing so. Because I’m out.

I am a Christian, and it is because of that that I can no longer consider myself an Evangelical. There are no doubt pockets in the Evangelical movement that haven’t been corrupted, but, when the rot is THIS far spread, I don’t see how I can do otherwise. If Jesus and the current Evangelical movement are in conflict, then I must go with Jesus. A huge chunk of Evangelicalism has sold its birthright of grace for a mess of political pottage. And, let me give you a word of warning, Evangelicals. I came to Christ in the age of Billy Graham, a man of grace. If my introduction to Christianity was Franklin Graham and his ilk, I’d have run far, far away. There is far too little of Christ in the lives of these Christians. Think about that. If I was growing up and seeking truth in this day and age, I strongly suspect that I would reject Christianity due to the hateful behavior of His servants. Think about all the young people who ARE looking for truth in this day and age…and how you’re driving them away.

#politics #progressivism

1 note · View note

dadvans · 7 years

Text

TOP FIVE THINGS MASTERPOST (1/3)

so for the remaining Top Five ask meme posts, i’ve decided to consolidate into a series of three huge posts instead of destroying people’s dashes with replies. for a series of fun, ridiculous headcanons, follow the readmore!

Playboy Nikiforov will cheat on Yuuri with the entire Russian Hockey team, and Yuuri will come crying to him and eat katsudon piroshky in his bed and Yurio will be allowed to brush the bangs out of his eyes as they lay facing each other, knees knocking together. “You can stay as long as you want,” Yurio would say. (Except Victor is incredibly devoted to Yuuri, and the Russian hockey team only has eyes for Yuuri anyway.)

Victor dies from a Terrible Disease. In his last conscious moments, he grabs Yurio by the hand. “Take care of Yuuri,” he says. “He’s always loved you.” “I will,” Yurio responds, unplugging the life support.

“Yurio, the way you landed that quintuple axel jump after only two weeks of practicing, despite it being physically improbable makes me super hot,” Yuuri says, pushing him against the rough edge of the lockers. “Please, take me now, take me now and wrap your well-toned and physically superior legs around me.”

Victor Nikiforov decides to make a deal with an angel to see a reality where he’s never been born, where Yurio and Katsudon got together instead, and he sees how happy Katsudon is to be constantly challenged and sexually satisfied by Yurio he completely fades from existence.

Yuuri showing up at his hotel room at three in the morning. His eyes are red. His smile is shy, but real. “Yuri,” he says, and the way that Yuuri says his name, his real name, is so open and meaningful. “You’ve always been—I’ve always—“ Yuuri in his mind has said, but never finished. Yuri’s never let it get past that. It hurts too much.

Victor gets up before sunrise, even on days off, and is constantly trying to get Yuuri to adjust. Yuuri hasn’t slept in to a number in double digits since leaving Hasetsu. He misses sleep so much.

Victor doesn’t like chocolate. What kind of serial killer is he that he doesn’t like chocolate? What kind of animal murderer? There has to be something wrong with him. You don’t just not like chocolate, Victor.

Victor hums along with songs he doesn’t even know, often trying to find the harmony (Yuuri assumes. Victor is also pretty tone deaf). Yuuri will try to change the song or station, but Victor just changes with it until Yuuri forces them to sit in silence.

The fifth time that Victor goes out and buys new dishes instead of washing the ones in the sink. The third time that Victor uses the pile of dirty laundry as an excuse to go buy more designer underwear than actually do a load.

The time that Victor gets drunk and refuses to go anywhere without wearing his skates, including bed

Yuuri’s best position is reverse cowgirl, where Victor gets a face full of ass, gets to hold his cheeks while Yuuri grinds down on his dick with these tantalizing, syrup slow roll of the hips. Sometimes Yuuri will look at him over his shoulder, biting the side of his hand as he slides down slick and needy right to the base of him, as if he can barely help himself, and the look on his face is where Victor both begins and ends.

Sometimes Yuuri can’t even look at Victor, especially when Victor is going down on him. He’s got one hand in Victor’s hair, pulling tight, and the other over his own face. His mouth says, “oh,” says, “oh, oh, oh, Victor, oh,” like the noise is pulled out of him and wrapped taut around Victor’s wrist.

When Yuuri loses his shame. “Please,” he asks Victor, “please, please, oh, deeper, please.”

Yuuri lets Victor tie him up sometimes and blind fold him to just lose all sensation. He lives for Victor’s touches, and lack thereof. But also the way that Victor teases him slowly like that lets all of Yuuri’s anxiety leak out of him in the best way. “I love the noises you make like this,” Victor admits, when he drags a hand down Yuuri’s torso after an hour, touching wherever Yuuri expects it least. The noises Yuuri makes when he least expects Victor’s hands on him are the best surprises Victor likes inflicting on him.

He loves public sex, especially after a few drinks. He wants Victor to fuck him in an alley, wants the grime of a dumpster on his shirt front and cheek and fists, wants to get his knees muddy in a public park as he crawls over Victor behind some well manicured bushes.

Here's one for you dad - top 5 favorite AUs? (this feels so general, and honestly in my years of fic it would be too hard for me to rec just five specific AUs, so i’m going to go with general AU tropes)

superheroes / identity porn

afterlife-based AUs (heaven, hell, reaper, etc.)

inception AUs — particularly for the world building, and atmosphere. i always love an author’s personal take on dream-building, dream-sharing, and the community that exists within this universe.

fake marriage/fake dating. oh my god. i’m always a slut for any variation of this stupid fucking trope. the miscommunication!! the tension!! it’s always too much! (m and i literally went and saw “southside with you,” a movie about barack and michelle obama’s first date, and halfway through it she turned to me and was like “I HOPE THEY GET TOGETHER” and if that isn’t the most accurate description of how these stupid fics make me feel, idk)

anything original. i think of the way etothepii and kixboxer write AUs set in very specific worlds that still reflect a similar storyline to the canon material, and translate it. anything that does that to me is a+++. i could literally read the same story 100 times if it’s written well.

OH SHIT NUMBER SIX AND ABO!!! PLANET MEN HAVE BABIES!!! GOD I’M A SLUT FOR THIS U G H OH OH OH AND SINGLE DADS. SINGLE DAD MEET CUTES. END ME.

yurio gets drunk after he doesn’t even place at the the nebelhorn trophy. yuuri gets silver to victor’s gold, which is at least understandable, but it was JJ who beat out yurio for bronze, and so he gets drunk, because he’s trying to be less openly angry these days, but he isn’t very good at it. yuuri holds his hair back in the bathroom and keeps him from hitting his head on the toilet and rubs soothing circles into his back, and tells him stories about being drunk in college and drunk as a young adult that yurio won’t remember in the morning. yurio lets him, leans into the comfortable curve of yuuri between dry heaves, muscles aching. yuuri won’t let him sleep alone, and yurio is furious about it, the rebellious part of him wanting to DIE rather than be coddled by some second-rate skater who just so happened to beat him to the podium. “i hate you,” yurio tells him, as yuuri holds him upright, chest against his back. it’s his body that gives him away, curling into every touch, every way yuuri tries to soothe him and keep him from puking on himself in his sleep. “you’re too good for me. i don’t deserve you. just let me die.”

the yuri’s angels instagram compiles a series of picture yuri plisetsky wearing the same scarf over the course of a month, similar to one of those OK! Magazine “WOW I REALLY LOVE MY ________” features they use for celebrities. it’s the 200USD roberto cavalli scarf yuuri got him for his sixteenth birthday. he’s always got his nose buried in it, or is sleeping with it as a pillow at the rink.

yuuri gets silver at pyeongchang, but he deserves the gold that yurio wins. yurio tells him this, ashamed to wear the gold afterwards. “you,” he says, “you did—you were—“ and that’s probably as much of a confession as he’ll ever give anyone for a very long time.

yuuri retires after he collapses pre-worlds with a busted achilles. yurio cries at the hospital and brings him non-hospital food and tells him he guesses yuuri must be happy, because he doesn’t have to maintain a weight anymore, he can eat anything he wants. he must have been dying to get out of competition at this point, yurio says, because he’s getting old and he hasn’t beaten yurio once this year, and— yurio tries too hard coming to terms with his retirement in the quiet, sterile hospital room, incapable of looking yuuri in the eye once. yuuri thanks him for the secret bag of takeout, says he can’t wait to see yurio take worlds again. yurio tells him it won’t be the same if he’s not there, and rushes out of the room as fast as possible.

mari gives birth to a baby with a thick thatch of dark hair and big, sleepy eyes. victor is technically the father through artificial insemination, but the katsuki genes came out more dominant. they’re all crowded at mari’s bedside, who is doped up on the good drugs with yuuri’s arms around her and victor snotting into his shirt sleeve. “she’s beautiful, she’s perfect,” victor cries, won’t stop crying. yurio has her in his arms across the room from them, breath coming too quick holding something so delicate. “yeah,” he says, “she looks just like yuuri.”

he makes yuuri dress as victor, just because yuuri in victor’s warm up tracksuit is the sexiest thing he’s ever seen. he even lets yuuri wear his medals and relishes the cool weight of them in between his shoulder blades as yuuri fucks him into the floor.

okay, just kidding, the hottest thing in the world to victor is yuuri katsuki in a suit, and buying a new suit and having him pretend to be an anonymous salaryman on the subway is victor’s most erotic fantasies numbered one through nineteen. so while they don’t celebrate halloween in japan, really, victor coerces him one year when they’re back in kyushu to maybe get a new suit and maybe, sort of, kind of pretend to not know who victor is and act like he’s coming home after a week at the office, so victor can blow him in the subway bathroom. his knees smell like piss after, and yuuri’s new suit gets stained with spunk on the jacket, but it’s definitely worth it.

sexy pikachu.

hot cop. (i bet anything that Victor makes Yuuri pretend to pull him over, and then the real cops show up, ala Happy Endings, with Yuuri running away in short-shorts and a flashlight that was definitely lubed up to stick in his or Victor’s ass).

he makes yuuri dress like titus in this scene from unbreakable kimmy schmidt. “seduce me with all you have when i come home,” he says, handing yuuri a bucket of corn to shuck.

#yuri on ice #headcanons #yuuri katsuki #victor nikiforov #yuri plisetsky #victuuri #five things #replies

168 notes · View notes