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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThey Are Giving You Death and Calling It Liberty
They Are Giving You Death and Calling It Liberty
The reckless Republicans opening America up to a deadly pandemic want us to risk sacrificing our lives for their power
By Jamil Smith
[ ... ]The Republican rush to reopen is projecting a simulacrum of the American normal that existed before the pandemic. The genuine article needed improvement, seeing as the pandemic has revealed the fragility of our systems in health care, education, tech, criminal justice, and throughout our federal government supply infrastructure, just to name a few. And rather than noting how it has sought to unbalance and defund many of the very systems that have proven deficient during this crisis, the GOP has kept behaving as if the coronavirus calamities are part of some divine plan. As such, before they ever reopened a single state, Republicans were demanding that we willingly embrace a lesser life before we bow out early.
Many cultish movements have deadly culminations, so it only seems natural that some of Trumps most avid fans might be willing not merely to use the fiction of what they understand as freedom, risking their health for Dear Leader. But whether or not that is true, Republicans offer this fraudulent version of liberty because their true goal, plutocracy, is the diametrical opposite of freedom. It is a life lived to spite other lives, and often take advantage of them. They have profited from the vulnerable, whose literal freedoms are limited in various ways that, at times, overlap: communities of color, incarcerated populations, service workers, the homeless, disabled people, and others for whom liberals regularly advocate.
The right has built a thin veneer that looks like independence and freedom, but the pandemic has stripped away that myth in a matter of weeks. We can love our country enough to want to build it stronger than it was before, not paint some shoddy lacquer over top of it and call it brand new again. Why should we lay our lives down for a system this fragile and rotten, and for people this desperate?
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They Are Giving You Death and Calling It Liberty (Original Post)
Hermit-The-Prog
May 2020
OP
handmade34
(22,755 posts)1. "Live Free and Die" n/t
CaptYossarian
(6,448 posts)2. The terms liberty and freedom were hijacked after 9/11.
We had Freedom Fries. The fried potato pieces created by a chef named French, who now has to change his last name to match the stupidity of members of the "Grand" Old Party.
Then the teabillies who wanted gubbamint to keep their hands offa their Medicare and rejected the idea that 114 American lives per day would be saved with the ACA--would use those terms on comically misspelled protest signs.
Now we come to one of our darkest times in our history, and the misunderstood concepts are flying around once more.
Our Founding Fathers are probably thinking they should have just let George II keep the place as it was.
Hermit-The-Prog
(33,021 posts)3. Mad King George III is having his revenge on us.
(George II died 1760, according to wikipedia)
CaptYossarian
(6,448 posts)4. I was off by one George.
Thanks.
Hermit-The-Prog
(33,021 posts)5. At least we don't have to sort the Henries! :D
CaptYossarian
(6,448 posts)6. I'll leave that to Peter Noone.