How did we get here? And why is it so dark? And why does everything look so strange?

It’s not just that charming lady (I’m stretching a point, okay?) Tanya Cohen willfully claiming that having your speech restricted is true freedom of speech. Oh, no. I wish it were. That would be easy. We have places for people who confuse the meaning of words to that extent and who seem unable to reason their way enough to cross the street. Or, okay, not places, but at least medicines.

But the topsy-turvey nature of our present reality goes well beyond Tanya’s problems.

Take, for instance, how people say things, publically and in a way that seems to make them all proud of themselves, about how we should believe rape reports regardless of whether or not they’re true.

Or take how I’ve been accused of racism and white supremacism for pointing out present day Muslim culture is sick. (I didn’t say all Muslims subscribed to the culture, just that the culture in Muslim countries has issues that completely dwarf ours. Apparently it’s bad to be against female mutilation and stoning. Who knew?)

Or the way I was called transphobic for saying men and women are different, not just in external genitals but in internals, because the hormones shape brain development. This is something that no brain expert would dispute, and even I who am no brain expert can’t begin to dispute. But apparently saying this, saying that men and women have different equipment between the ears as well as between the legs is transphobic and homophobic to the point it caused someone to throw up on reading it.

This not only baffled me, it baffled one of the gay readers of this blog (and a friend) who pinged me to say “if men and women were alike inside, then how could anyone describe himself as a woman in a man’s body? And if men and women were exactly alike except for externals, why would anyone say they are gay – or straight for that matter? After all there are prosthesis and they’re not expensive.”

It’s a mystery, but apparently it’s a pattern of thinking, if you can call it that.

It is also racist to say our president has any issues, even though, you know, my lying eyes can’t help but seeing them and my problem with him is not the black but the red. (I have a cold war injury. I remember communism. It only hurts when I laugh. Fortunately I’m more likely to cry.)

Also I’m misogynist. Too many reasons to list, but it includes thinking women shouldn’t be given affirmative action because cream rises. And my thinking that being promiscuous is not mandatory for young females. And my thinking that having children is actually something most women aspire too. Oh, yeah, and my thinking that some women are morons. Granted, fewer women than men are morons. OTOH statistical distribution wise, there are more male geniuses. We women mostly cluster in the middle. There is also my firm belief that women often also have a dysfunctional culture in groups, and that the greatest enemy of female success are other women.

All this makes me misogynist to go with my racism and my transphobia and homophobia.

And all I can think is “Why are we here? How did we get here? Why is it so dark?”

Liberalism, the real kind, started off so well. It was all about allowing the individual to succeed and fail on his merits; allowing each person to determine what constituted his happiness; allowing people to speak freely and to practice whichever religion they liked, and to strive and earn or fail to earn, each to his capacity and inclination.

Why did we get to this place where suddenly we all have to be the same and the same we have to be is a white male (whatever the feminists say. Greatest case of raging penis envy ever. That’s why they hate women having children or wanting to be mothers) obsessed with work and casual sex and voting straight party democrat.

It’s dark in here. I think we’re up a duck’s bottom. Because up a duck’s bottom is the only way any of this would make any sense at all.

Now it’s bad to say criminals are bad. It’s bad to have a gun in self-defense. It’s bad to say communism was a bloody (literally) failure. It’s bad to believe our lying eyes and not the word of our betters.

And I want to scream. My middle fingers are screaming up.

What got us up the duck’s bottom was that some fluffy people went too far. If the individual was so important, it must be because we were all born saints. From that too comes the idea that if we’re not all succeeding it must be a systemic problem, not an individual decision.

And once Marx put the cap on that bit of madness, everything got subverted. Because if the capitalist system is the original sin that causes all human badness how can we condemn criminals? And if everyone should have equally good results, then there must be discrimination. And anyone who says that things are different, that some humans, even some classes of humans are, statistically, different from each other, anyone who says that communism and socialism are not moving us near to Earthly paradise, anyone who disagrees with any of that… well, they’re the culprit and should be destroyed.

This is enough to keep most people quiet while our current administration does things that punish our friends, empower our enemies and endanger the entire world.

After all the press reserves particular words for those who question the status quo and the received wisdom: evil, extreme, wing nut.

This is never applied to supporters of a system of governance that saw 100 million (a low estimate) into the grave. Instead it’s applied to the proponents of a system of limited government that has created the greatest prosperity and ease for the common man that this sorry globe has ever known.

And people stay quiet, in the main, because they’re afraid of being called names, of being hunted down, of having their reputation and livelihood destroyed for daring challenge the insanity.

Which is how we find ourselves living in the Red Queen’s world, where words mean what she says they mean and everything changes at random and only her majesty can dictate what is true.

As someone pointed out it’s like a child crossing a tile floor, who is beaten for stepping on a particular tile, which looks just like every other tile. And the fact he can’t tell the difference is what makes him so particularly evil. And this goes on till he admits he’s evil or he cowers on a corner of the room, with his hands over his head, sobbing.

Metaphorically speaking, there are a lot of us either admitting they’re evil to make the punishment stop, or hiding in a corner of the room, hands over head.

I could join them, I could. For a long time, I just stood in one square, paralyzed, afraid to move.

But the more this goes on, the more I become convinced that if we are LUCKY we’ll be called “the mad years” in future history books. If we’re unlucky we’ll be called the “pants on head running around making train noises years.” And if we’re really unlucky, we’ll end up not being called anything, because there will be no human civilization left on Earth to write books about us.

Which is why I refuse to just sit in a corner hands over head. It’s not because I don’t feel the madness around me. It’s not that I don’t get tired.

It’s because I want my children and my (at least my adopted) grandchildren to have a future. I want humanity to have a future.

So someone needs to point out the mad people are mad. And tell the sane ones:

Be Not Afraid! In the end, we win, they lose.

The future of humanity demands it.