BY NATHAN J. BUSH
The birth of a hoax. The birth of a virus. The birth of a menace. 2020 was the realization that the American dream is drowning in the afterbirth of our nation. It was no surprise when 2020 became the first year in many where school pals unexpectedly cutting their peer’s lives short was not likely to happen. Students who were bullied to the edge of nonexistence taking as many of their cohort with them before their violent exit into whatever journey lies before them and their shocked, unwilling crew in tow ran out of luck in 2020. As an American tradition, those kiddos would have to rely on politicians, militant bystanders with concussed staring eyes and the bloodlust of law enforcement to finish the job for them and flood their field of vision with unchecked cruelty and death. If 2020 has taught us anything, it has taught us that the real virus did not travel from a market overseas but manufactured through years of indifference and lack of any empathetic decency, truly the virus to match our unique ambitions of manifest destiny. Truly frightening, is that the cure to draw out this poison before our children’s minds are completely void of empathy is quite simple, education.
A forged twenty-dollar bill opened up what a novel virus began to reveal in an already festering wound that has been bleeding our unhinged population out slowly and steadily. It was once again brought to the national spotlight that our true heroes protect and serve by gently nuzzling a man’s neck for nine minutes until he wails for his mother on a Minneapolis street. Our true guardians overcome such weaknesses as a regard for human life. Again, no surprise there. Our nation was born an addict of slavery and imperialism with little thought for communal well-being. Trump 2020 Fuck Your Feelings. We are sick. A diseased heart and liver swollen with cirrhosis. A skeletal structure giving spiritual arthritis a roadmap to burrow its way along an already diseased structure barely able to stand.
Indifference is our preexisting condition and the world’s insurance market place has gone bankrupt. We did not claim the patent on indifference but rather marketed the hell out of it. The Religious Right, peddling their blind and deaf tonic to all four corners of rural America until those same parishioners turn blind and deaf to themselves without even realizing it. There is no other world beyond their front door and goddamn it, that is the way they want it. That is the way they need it. After all, the parasites they keep shoveling into local and national offices made the rural Americans of this country dependent on the fear and hate transferred during the delicate exchange of fluids while feeding. These decayed souls have preordered their open spots under their financed tombstones praising their redlining parasites all along the way.
The rambling beasts that occupy the chambers of the house and senate have it made. False evangelical cowards spewing scatological interpretations from a pulpit bought and paid for by the American people, “In Trump We Lust”.
We cannot even blame the introduction of a novel walking and talking swine virus occupying the most expensive rental house on Pennsylvania Avenue in 2016…but it’s a good place to start. Our ex bat-shit-crazy commander in chief had, and in fact still has, not only our lower class populations, but our esteemed representatives who have let the Trump virus course through the Republican party over the past four years. Their rotten slimy hooves powerless to scrape their distorted scale riddled torsos off the senate floor force-feeding their constituents that any inconvenience to their comfort is a threat to their freedoms:
This is not new. This is not unique to 2020, rather 2020 shoved our petri dish under the microscope only to be viewed by asymmetrical insane eyes kneeling in a pool of blood being denied the courtesy of peer review before publication. If only these sycophants had somewhere to rest their weary heads at night. Maybe, a 14 time relapsed crack addict could invent some special sort of cranial support of their very own, or better yet, a pillow for each individual person so they could proudly lay claim to “My pillow…” without sharing, because inclusion and empathy are now our enemies.
2020 has been contact traced to the undeniable conclusion that we, the American people, are the true virus. Communicable association infects us all. We are the menace. We dance with elected parasites waltzing towards a putrid feast fit for a tiger and a king served up by a murderous insane spouse. A feeding frenzy on the young and old in marble buildings, palaces of democracy decayed by the religiously insincere, devouring us with legislation one amendment at a time. Full Windsor knotted warriors for the Christ that kicks ass, takes names and cashes checks. Evangelical goosesteps marching their way straight to the White House to lay hands on and cast votes for their righteous divinely chosen leaders. Offering up their young as sacrifices at the alters of indifference, self-righteous ignorance, and an unwillingness to face the music and admit the American Dream is a lie. Whatever truth behind the premise burned up with a fever that never broke.
As a people, underpaid and overworked ideological machine gun teachers are the only weapon we have worth a damn in our arsenal to fight the sick and willfully ignorant. Holding the line for the American youth and doing their best with a constantly shifting landscape through 2020 into 2021. Soldiers of thinking, combatants of love throwing themselves on a live hand grenade for stranger’s kids. Or, more accurately, taking a bullet when “normal” decides to rear its head and come up for air giving the kiddos their much needed dose of unchecked cruelty and death.
