Hispanic Fanatic

The jargon changes every few years. Over the decades, it’s gone from “bleeding-heart” to “politically correct” to “social justice warrior” to “woke.”

We have no shortage of derogatory terms for people who exhibit compassion toward others.

In contrast, we don’t alter our terminology to describe hardcore right-wingers. The word “sociopath” works just fine.

Of course, there are numerous reasons why conservatives mock those who express concern for others. There is sadism, self-loathing, selfishness, and a few other motivations that don’t begin with the letter S.

But one of the oddest is the bizarre fear of conservatives that any attempt to display basic decency will inevitably lead to widescale cultural weakness and, therefore, societal collapse. Republicans are constantly shrieking that Americans are lazy snowflakes dependent on government handouts, so we need to whip ‘em to keep them tough. In the GOP worldview, businesses that grant paternity leave are turning American men into effeminate wimps and emasculating the entire country in the process.

I’m pretty sure, however, that being too meek is not one of the American populace’s big problems. Look at our political discourse, social interaction, and rate of gun violence.

Does anyone seriously believe that the main issue with Americans is that we are too nice? Really?

But if you insist that keeping one’s nose to grindstone, feet to the fire, and balls to the wall is the only way to ensure Americans behave, you might be interested in a few statistics that show how well that hard-driving philosophy actually works.

For example, red states are less likely to offer government support to their citizens. This keeps their citizens honest and creates a thriving population of happy, prosperous… oh wait.

Red states are pretty much a hellhole when compared to blue states, evidenced by the fact that liberal areas outperform conservative areas in just about every economic or sociological category. 

Even the Republican argument that a red-state existence is better because of the lower cost of living is not entirely accurate. Yes, it is cheaper to live in Mississippi than in Minnesota. But wages are usually lower as well, so it’s at best a tie, or even a slight advantagefor blue states. 

OK, so rugged individualism isn’t such a winner in those cases. 

But surely our approach to healthcare is tops in the world. After all, we don’t have socialized medicine and all the government dependency it fosters, so our citizens must be the healthiest on the planet.

Yeah, you saw that setup coming, didn’t you?

As everyone knows, the United States spends far more on healthcare and gets worse results than every industrialized nation in the world (and several non-industrialized ones), simply because we refuse to accept universal healthcare.

Studies show that just during the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of Americans died because we don’t have a system like Japan, Australia, or Finland.

But don’t worry, because “nationwide, many hospitals have grown wealthy, spending lavishly on advertising, team sponsorships, and even spas, while patients are squeezed by skyrocketing medical prices and rising deductibles.”

Still, at least all those sick, destitute people aren’t dependent on big government.

And speaking of poverty, America stands alone when it comes to our high rate of homelessness. Other industrialized countries have homeless citizens, of course. But those nations, big governments all, don’t just have a lot fewer homeless people. They actually try to solve the problem.

In America, we believe that giving people housing will make them soft, even though research has shown that providing free or inexpensive housing with no strings attached is an effective way to reduce homelessness.

No, we won’t be having any of that commie crap here. We would rather have a half-million Americans live on the street, even while there are “hundreds of thousands of vacant properties owned by city and state governments” that just sit there empty.

But at least we’re tough.

In fact, we’re so tough that we are committing suicide in record numbers. Yes, while the rate of suicide has declined in every industrialized nation, America is the “one high-income country [that] is a particular exception to the downward trend.”

And that’s part of a larger development brought on by “years of widening economic inequality, compounded by the pandemic and political storm and stress.” And this development is that “life expectancies have been falling” for Americans, which is odd for a nation that takes such great pride in being exceptional.

Yes, we can’t even keep our own residents alive, but we’re number one!

Our declining life expectancy has opened “a window on a set of pathologies unique to America among developed countries.”

And a root cause of this pathology is the belief that trying to help one another is wrong. In truth, however, this demented credo is only making us weaker.

OK, I totally meant to write about the fact that CNN asked a racist insurrectionist to hold a campaign rally on their network, and then pathetically justified it by saying progressives, and pretty much every decent American, were crybabies who needed to get out of their silos. But it’s just too sad to pile on a network that scraped the lowest point in its history.

So instead I was going to write about how conservative white guys freak out when they feel one second of discomfort and use that icky sensation to justify murdering people who annoy them, and how they panic when facing a sliver of the constant threats that ethnic minorities, women, and gay people endure every day. But then 50,000 commentators made that exact point.

My related topic was that “all strands of the Right—leading Republicans, the media machine, the reactionary intellectual sphere, the conservative base, the donor class—are openly and aggressively embracing rightwing vigilante violence,” and that the GOP “encourages white militants to use whatever force they please to ‘fight back’ against anything and anyone associated with ‘the Left’ by protecting and glorifying those who have engaged in vigilante violence” in what can only be called the Rittenhouse effect. But that’s pretty much what a lot of people said, so I left it at that.

As such, I moved on to the fact that “masked members of a white supremacist group” marched toward the U.S. Capitol, even while conservatives got all sad that Biden correctly pointed out that white supremacy is the biggest threat this nation faces. But then I found out that members of Congress have staff members who are members of a group that “expresses Holocaust denialism, white supremacy, white nationalism, pretty strong anti-women bigotry [and] a return to 12-century Catholicism.” And I thought, “Who wants to return to the 12^th century? I thought they were obsessed with the 1950s and maybe the Civil War, but this shit goes back even further.”

In any case, that got me thinking about the statistic that “20% of those who sympathize with Christian nationalism agreed they were ‘willing to fight’ to take the nation back to what they incorrectly believe it always was.” And I wondered how that lined up with the stat that “the importance of religion in the lives of Americans is on the decline,” and that we “are becoming increasingly likely to become religiously unaffiliated” or straight-up atheists.

But just then, I found out that Rudy Giuliani has been accused of rape and may have been selling presidential pardons for $2 million a pop, splitting the profits with that other bigoted ex-politician who was just found liable for sexual assault, and I wondered about those conservatives who insist their movement isn’t misogynistic. And related to that, I wondered why they even bother to say they are against corruption, as they support selling pardons, bribing Supreme Court justices, and engaging in comically overt criminal behavior.

However, I realized that Republicans aren’t so good at uncovering crimes. I mean, the people who could never “lock her up” are unable to even keep track of their own informants. How embarrassing.

So I looked to the border, where conservatives insisted that 489 billion immigrants were massing to surge into the country, and I discovered that the “number of migrants at the southern border has dropped 50% since the end of the pandemic restriction known as Title 42 on May 11.” Talk about a letdown.

Perhaps I should have addressed how Republicans are hypocrites, fine with destroying the economy, and how they appear even gleeful about the idea. 

But it’s more important to note how billionaires are secretly using their vast wealth to set up an oligarchy. The problem with that, however, is that it’s too unbelievable—even if it’s the absolute truth.

At last, I settled on the perfect topic, and it is this:

Scientists have analyzed the odds of a massive asteroid (i.e., the size of the rock that wiped out the dinosaurs) hitting the Earth and killing us all. 

The lead scientist, Oscar Fuentes-Muñoz of the University of Colorado, says that such an event is highly unlikely to happen within the next 1,000 years.

So that’s good news, right?

Ha, we’re not falling for that.

Nice try, Fuentes-Muñoz. But we all know that you’re in the pocket of Big Asteroid, and you’re just covering up the plot by deep-space debris to steal our freedoms.

How’s that for a post?

In a few weeks, the US government will end COVID-19 emergency declarations, meaning that the pandemic will officially be over.

Hey, that wasn’t so bad, was it?

You know, aside from the years of death and madness and depression and trauma and societal unraveling, it wasn’t that big of a deal, right?

Ahem.

In any case, the pandemic provoked behavioral changes that we could not have imagined in 2019, like carrying a mask everywhere or washing your hands incessantly or sticking those weird clamp things on your fingers to check your oxygen levels.

Those were called pulse oximeters, by the way, and they were “a crucial tool for tracking the health of COVID-19 patients.”

Yes, pulse oximeters helped gauge the severity of the illness. They were a sterling example of medical knowledge, technological innovation, and white supremacy.

OK, that last one is an unpleasant addendum. But unfortunately, it is true.

You see, pulse oximeters were often “inaccurate when measuring oxygen levels in people with dark skin tones.”

This is because medical products are often developed using data from “trials that involve primarily white individuals.” As a result, pulse oximeters were designed to work well on white people. For the rest of us, however, not so much.

Experts say “it’s not possible to know how much pulse oximeters have contributed to the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on people of color.” But considering Latinos and blacks “experienced higher rates of hospitalization and death from COVID-19 compared to white people,” it was likely a factor.

Of course, the assumption that white is the most common skin color, or even the only skin color, has a long history in America.

Until the 1960s, Crayola crayons had a pinkish hue that was labeled, “flesh.” 

And as we all know, band-aids don’t come in dark brown, which has “long been a point of contention among people of color who have questioned why white skin is the default shade for a range of flesh-toned products, including nude bras and other garments.”

Why, indeed?

But you will be happy to know that the baseline for the human experience is not just white people, but white men specifically.

We’re not just talking about the fact that white men hold over 60% of all elected offices, despite being just 30% of the population.

Or the fact that most films and TV shows focus on a white male protagonist. 

Or that white men are apparently the only group whose opinions matter, and that the rest of us are pretty much at their mercy.

No, I’m talking about air conditioning.

Yes, you heard me correctly.

Back in the 1960s, when air conditioning became common in office buildings, engineers needed a standard to ensure the temperature would be comfortable.

And of course, they based this standard on the preferences of white men in wool suits — the Don Drapers of the era. 

These temperatures “favor the thermal preferences of men,” and are the baseline to this day, which is why women in office settings often feel like they’re freezing.

It’s because they are.

But don’t worry. Those white guys in suits are perfectly comfortable.

It seems that “everything in our society is centered around preserving white male power regardless of white male skill or talent.” And this is not just annoying. It’s also detrimental to our nation.

You see, the “rewarding of white male mediocrity not only limits the drive and imagination of white men; it also requires forced limitations on the success of women and people of color in order to deliver on the promised white male supremacy.”

When everyone just assumes that a certain group should be in charge (i.e., white guys), members of that group don’t have to excel to succeed, while members of other groups struggle, and the culture as a whole stagnates.

In this way, “white male mediocrity harms us all.”

Unfortunately, this situation is unlikely to change any time soon.

But hey, at least the pandemic is over.

It’s bizarre how often Americans are forced to prove themselves.

You must have a full-time job to prove that you are worthy of health care.

You must take on crippling debt to prove that you deserve a college education.

If you’re a woman, you must prove that you understand your own body.

If you’re an immigrant, you must prove that you love this country better than people who are born here.

If you’re homeless, you must prove that you are drug-free to get housing (even if the exact opposite approach works better).

It goes on and on. But you’ll be glad to know that there are exceptions to all this proving. 

For example, if you’re a lunatic millionaire racist who led the country into unprecedented disaster, you deserve another chance.

Also, if you’re a toddler in Missouri, you can openly carry a gun in the street. We trust you.

Yes, Americans seem like a skeptical bunch, always demanding proof. But they are actually quite discerning about what requires evidence.

For example, most Americans emphatically believe there is a man in the sky who controls the universe, despite the fact that he has never revealed himself.

They are mixed, however, on the whole concept of climate change, despite vast amounts of solid data obtained over decades 

They may or may not believe that vaccines cause autism, or that covid exists, or that JFK is actually alive and working to overthrow a vast conspiracy run by lizard people. Really, millions of Americans believe that last one.

And still the contradictions mount.

Consider that many people think Biden stole the election (despite the absence of evidence), but these same individuals refuse to believe that giving people money or free food helps alleviate poverty (despite an abundance of evidence).

Of course, it doesn’t help that we are deeply suspicious of how poor people spend their cash, even while bursting with admiration for wealthy jerks who blow obscene amounts of money on egotistic endeavors and grotesque trivialities. There is quick judgment for what a poor person puts in her grocery cart, but foot-kissing praise for billionaires who spend the equivalent of Denmark’s GDP on themselves.

Other beliefs similarly defy reason.

For example, a high percentage of Americans believe that racism is dead, except if it’s directed at white people. But they also believe in blatant racist stereotypes so strongly that it affects public policy.

Yes, American life is a strange combination of superstition, illogical thinking, and skewed beliefs that are mixed with vociferous demands for objective proof that is usually ignored.

For many of us, there will never be enough evidence to change our minds. 

And that’s a fact.

We are currently enduring the 5,826^th video of police officers overreacting just the tiniest bit by killing someone during a traffic stop.

That someone is usually a black man. The officers exhibiting psychopathic levels of violence are often white, but not always.

The locations and details differ, but the result is the same. 

Conservatives imply the victim had it coming, which is odd coming from people supposedly terrified of a tyrannical government. Why are they so willing to accept the government murdering its citizens without trial, or even formal charges?

Right-wingers also insist everything will be fine if ethnic minorities just comply with the police, even if the cops give contradictory or physically impossible orders, and the unarmed person complies, only to be tased, pepper sprayed, and punched repeatedly.

And yes, conservatives are usually more upset about protests against police brutality than the existence of police brutality itself. They also freak out if a protester throws a brick through a window, but they’re noncommittal if cops kick someone to death in the street.

In any case, US cops kill an average of three people per day, and last year was “the deadliest year on record for police violence.” Experts point out that police violence is “continuing to get worse, and … it’s deeply systemic.”

American police “typically shoot, arrest and imprison more people than similarly developed nations,” making us an ugly outlier yet again when compared to other industrialized countries.

The cops kill over 100 Americans each year in which no actual crime is ever alleged. A similar number get killed during routine traffic stops, which is what happened in Memphis. Overall, about 70% of the people killed by police each year were not involved in committing a serious crime. In fact, about one-third of people killed by police were “fleeing before they were killed, generally running or driving off — cases in which experts say lethal force is unwarranted and also endangers the public.”

Now, if that is not some trigger-happy shit, I don’t know what is.

So why are the police so willing to gun down or beat up unarmed people? 

Well, like most societal ills, the roots of this issue go back decades. Cops have always held an unquestioned position of power that allowed them to rough up Irish immigrants in the 1920s or billy club Latinos in zoot suits during the 1950s. In the 1970s, Dirty Harry said it was cool to shoot hippies, and in the 1990s, millions of Americans thought Rodney King deserved his walloping.

Then we get to the September 11 attacks, which militarized the entire nation. Police departments became mini armies, and a “warriorculture emerged that often views community members as the enemy.”

This was also around the time that a handful of shoddy studies implied that “officers who show weakness are more likely to be killed.” Such pseudoscience convinced many cops to treat every patrol as a tour of duty, and “law-enforcement culture has never recovered” from this mindset.

Of course, conservatives still argue that heavily armed cops with their own tanks are necessary to prevent crime. But in truth, “police departments with more military equipment are more likely to kill civilians,” and studies show that “more militarized police departments are less likely to prevent crime or make local residents feel safer.”

In the case of Memphis, a specialized squad was “formed to address the city’s rising crime rate by targeting ‘hot spots’ of illegal activity.” But all this menacingly named unit — “supposedly created to make the city safer” — ended up doing was “instilling a newfound fear into a tight-knit grieving community.”

Yeah, that unit has now been disbanded.

Now, any discussion about police violence must include the issue of white supremacy. 

Oh sorry, I forgot that the Memphis cops were all black. Strange, isn’t it, that these black cops were all fired and charged, with no protest from right-wingers, even before the video came out? In contrast, the murder of George Floyd had to get constant airplay for days, with corresponding massive demonstrations, before one white cop was charged, all over the strenuous objections of conservatives.

But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

Regardless, the Memphis cops did not have to be white to uphold a racist structure. These officers were “drunk with power” and rewarded for maintaining the status quo. They worked within a system that “is predicated by white supremacy, and they bought into that system.”

Black Americans are three times more likely to be killed by US police than white Americans. However, if statistics don’t sway you, just focus on the fact that we will never see a video of cops pulling over an unarmed white guy and beating him to death.

The very reason that the police exist has gone from obvious to vague. After all, cops have no constitutional obligation to protect you. 

So exactly what are they doing out there? 

It’s a good question.

Yes, things have been grim in America for the past few years. To be honest, they haven’t been that great for a couple of decades now.

In fact, a serious case can be made that the nation’s high-water mark was the 1990s, when we had grunge rock, the X-files, a booming economy, and a conservative movement that was going crazy (but not yet fully psychotic). 

Also, I was still young, which is, when you think about it, really the most important thing.

But in the spirit of optimism — and before we get too far into 2023 and allow it to crush us like the other 2020s so far — I will point out several positive developments.

First, child poverty has “dramatically decreased in the U.S. over the past 25 years.” The chief reason may be the Child Tax Credit, which helped cut child poverty by roughly 30 percent. 

Of course, that tax credit has now been eliminated, so there is a chance the rate will go up again. And compared to “other developed nations, child poverty rates in America remain higher than the rest.”

But hey, let’s not kill the vibe.

Moving on, we see that the rates of cervical cancer have “dropped an astonishing 65% among women in their early 20s.” This is primarily because of vaccinations against the human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes this type of cancer. So many women have taken advantage of the HPV vaccine that herd immunity has kicked in, and “rates have dropped among unvaccinated women as well.”

It’s true that many religious zealots refuse to let their teenage daughters get vaccinated because they would literally rather have their kids get cancer than engage in premarital sex, but… ha, I see what you did there. Almost got me to go negative, didn’t you?

Nope, we’re going to continue on the good-news train.

Here’s something: inflation is slowing down, and the federal budget deficit has fallen significantly, going from $2.6 trillion to $1.4 trillion.

These are very positive economic developments, and everyone can cheer them. Well, except for Republicans, who are determined to drive America into default and wreck the economy out of some bizarre desire to punish Biden or parade their ignorance or just burn everything down. Who can tell anymore?

No, we are staying positive. 

So ignore all that GOP nonsense and move on to this intriguing fact: The racial gap in death rates of covid has disappeared.

We all know that the pandemic hit ethnic minorities far harder than white people, but “in a country with deep racial inequities, where covid was initially another tragic example, the virus is no longer disproportionately harming Black and Hispanic Americans.” This improvement is due to “passionate advocacy and hard work by many community health officials.”

That’s uplifting, right?

Don’t be a buzzkill by pointing out that “this accomplishment continues to receive relatively little attention,” probably because “the remaining pool of unvaccinated Americans is disproportionately Republican, and Republicans are disproportionately white.”

You see, white Republicans don’t want to admit that vaccines work, and that the pandemic was real. And the mainstream media does whatever white Republicans say, which is another example of the lobsided balance of power in this country and how we all bend over backward to appease ignorance.

It doesn’t even matter that Latinos “suffered more COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people than most other racial and ethnic groups for most of the pandemic” and that “the Latino community’s rising prosperity may be in jeopardy” because of the devastation that the virus wrought. 

But no, let’s talk about how white Republicans can’t have their feelings hurt and…

Stop. Stay calm. Ok, moving on.

Another upbeat development is that there has been mild progress on climate change, as “renewable power soars, vulnerable ecosystems gain rights, and climate protocols start to pay dividends.”

That’s almost enough to make you forget that “the oil giant Exxon privately ‘predicted global warming correctly and skillfully’ only to then spend decades publicly rubbishing such science in order to protect its core business.”

It turns out that “the only thing Exxon did better than predicting the future was lying about it.” If you need a refresher on how evil corporations can be, and how climate denialism indicates sheer idiocy, this is “your umpteenth reminder that we’ve known about the coming (now here) disaster for decades.”

Well, my quest for positive news is getting shaky now. Perhaps I can combine my last two items — the pandemic and climate change — into one hopeful story.

Yes, here it is: As global temperatures rise, it becomes “more likely that viruses and bacteria locked up in glaciers and permafrost could reawaken and infect local wildlife.” This means that the next killer pandemic may not come “from bats or birds but from matter in melting ice.”

So if the heat doesn’t kill us, the viruses will.

Damn. There goes all my optimism.

Ok, what was I saying about the 1990s? Yeah, I guess those were the motherfucking days.

At least we’ll always have Soundgarden.

If you’re Gen X, like me, you remember the 1980s phenomenon of action movies that were all based on the exact same plot. The premise was this: 

American prisoners of war are still trapped in Vietnam, and a ruthless bad-ass is going to get them out.

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Here’s how sensitive those liberal snowflakes are. Some guy in California got offended over a definition in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary. How absurd. They’re just words, you wimpy, tree-hugging…

Oh wait. It wasn’t a liberal. It was a right-wing white man. And he wasn’t so much “offended” as “screaming death threats.” Yes, the guy was furious over Merriam-Webster’s entry on gender, and in his transphobic zeal, he sent multiple intimidating messages to the publisher and said the dictionary’s creators “should be hunted down and shot.”

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There are numerous disadvantages to arguing with crazy people.

It’s futile. It raises your blood pressure. And because this is America, there’s a good chance that the crazy person will shoot you.

But a frequently overlooked hazard of debating a lunatic is that, if you argue long enough, you’ll start to wonder if you’re the crazy one. Because the more the maniac digs in, the more you will call upon your rational brain and your desire to be open-minded, with the result that you’ll eventually ask yourself, “Is this guy right, and could the moon be a secret Martian base?”

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For decades, conservatism was essentially a commitment to traditional values and ideas, combined with a hesitation to rapid change. Basically, stodgy old men kept society from evolving too quickly.

The benefit of this philosophy has always been lost on me. After all, what’s so noble about futilely resisting innovation while upholding harmful traditions? However, it was at least a coherent and principled approach. 

Modern conservatism, however, consists of Republicans claiming “an exemption from any generally applicable rule they do not wish to follow, while imposing their own religious and ideological views on those who do not share them.”

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