Lately, not wearing a mask during the Covid-19 pandemic has become some kind of macho thing with our Fearless Leader and his base. Apparently they don't know the masks protect others from the possibility you might have the virus. So . . . what's wrong with these people, besides their inability to admit they made a mistake when they voted for the Twitter maniac? Basically, it's a fear of change. Some conservative said, “If God had meant us to fly, he would've given us wings”. When the automobile was invented, they hated it because it scared the horses. Really far right conservatives refuse to admit man landed on the moon, and of course there are the Adam Jones types who deny the New Town massacre of 26 little kids and their teachers ever happened either.
Besides a fear of change, there are several words conservatives are unfamiliar with or that they associate with “Snowflakes”. The first of these would be “empathy”. Those Central Americans on the Mexican border are all criminals and rapists. Not by a long shot. Their coffee crops and the influx of Los Angeles gangs have made their homes uninhabitable. Then there's the Statue of Liberty. How do you read Emma Lazarus's poem at the base and still believe the above? Worse yet, some of them are Christians. Their own Bible says, “Whatsoever you do unto the least of our brothers, so you do unto me”. “It is easier for a camel to pass through a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven.” Yet they appear to worship the rich and insist that the rich provide jobs when statistics say small business employs most of laborers.
The second important word they don't seem to know is “Introspection”. Catholics would call it examination of conscience.
A progressive might look at the refugees on the border and say, “There but for the grace of God go I,” or “I'm willing to let those people in because somebody has to pick the strawberries, pick up the garbage and work at meat packing plants. I'm certainly not going to do it.” How about a harder dilemma? Do we really need all that carbon based fuel? It's only going to last for another hundred years anyway. How about we put a tax on it or pass Cap and Trade? No dice with a conservative law maker. They only see the heavy bucks coming from the Charles Kochs of this world. A progressive might say, “What about your grandchildren? Don't you care what their world will be like? Have you seen Australia?” The Aussies have a leader just like the Twitter Fiend. That's too far from the end of their noses for them to worry about it. They might say, “We'll invent cold fusion by then.” But it may be too late if the scales have been tipped.
The last word is “nuance”. Everything is black and white with conservatives. Let's look at abortion. Nobody really likes abortion, but what would you do if you were raped or were forced to have sex by your father and got pregnant? What if the fetus doesn't have a brain? Conservatives say it's still a human being. If you don't have the baby, it's murder. But that's where they stop. If the unwed mother has the baby and can't afford to raise it, tough bounce, work for Mac and Don's. Evolution is another example. We're supposed to believe we were meant to know, honor and serve an invisible man. That's a slave's existence. Charles Darwin came up with an alternative to Adam and Eve. A single celled animal divided itself and became two. But mitosis was no fun and eventually we got sex after much trial and error and survival of the fittest. How about reverse engineering self awareness? Well, we were hunter gatherers in Africa, and in order to bring down a mighty animal like an elephant or a wooly mammoth, we had to communicate and share. So . . . if you can talk to your fellow hunter, you can talk to yourself and Bingo! We've got self awareness. Let's look at women taking a larger role in society, shall we? A really block-headed type would say women should stay home and take care of the family. But even the lowest of the low would have to admit women have greater dexterity. And where there's dexterity, we get increased intelligence. You could say they were always smarter than men. I mean, tool making lead to a giant leap for mankind, right? Those guys were wasting women by turning them into gatherers. What happened? They gained greater verbal proficiency by talking to each other as they picked berries and nuts. And did you know that the first God was the Great Mother? Archeologists have found these little pregnant figurines that Stone Agers appeared to worship. It makes sense, actually. Women give birth.
Yes, the root word in progressive is progress. When you look at matters in black and white, you're limiting yourself. We will overcome Covid-19 when scientists develop a vaccine, not when some bozo recreates the great economy he got from Obama in the first place. Open your eyes. Some anti-vaxers are saying they won't take the vaccine if we do find a cure. Nothing but bone from the neck up.