Fourthtelling

I'm not going to apologize for that title.  The Star Wars one I used was already not great and it's pretty hard to get a pun specific enough to what I'm going to talk about as it is without having to base it on a number.  If you can come up with a better one, leave it in the comments, where I pretend to ignore it and keep my inferior title, but secretly foster a deep feeling of shame.


Anyway! Last year, when I started and subsequently abandoned this blog, one of my first posts was about the Fourth of July, taking a look at legitimate reasons to be proud to be an American in the midst of a year overflowing with reasons to be ashamed.  This time around, such pride is easier to explain: despite nearly all of the major issues troubling America last year remaining, the Supreme Court definitively (please? please guys?) defending Obamacare, the national legalization of gay marriage, and the sudden momentum against preserving relics of racism and hatred on capitol grounds have all occurred within about a week of one another.  People look at these amazing events, and they're proud to be Americans.  Which they should be!

But people should also remember that the Confederate flags are only coming down after a horrifying mass murder, that thousands who would otherwise be eligible for Medicaid will die thanks to capricious governors and the last time the Supreme Court "saved" Obamacare, and that the legalization of gay marriage has brought about the onslaught of blatantly discriminatory "religious freedom" laws passed in statehouses throughout the country.

A bit of a downer, I know, but I like the Fourth of July to be a day of reflection, not just of the good we've accomplished but also the good we have yet to do.  Some people try to dismiss this attitude by appealing to the past: "we have to fix _____! Is this really what our founding fathers would have wanted?" But I don't find this super helpful.  America is incredibly young compared to other nations, but things have still dramatically changed in the centuries since our founding.  Enough so that a conversation with the founding fathers about modern issues would probably go like this:

Time Scientist: Hello, George Washington! Thomas Jefferson! Benjamin Franklin! You're probably wondering what you're doing here, in Times Square, when you were just in a statehouse in Philadelphia! Well, you see--
Washington: What's with all of these black people?
Jefferson: Yeah, they're wearing normal clothes and just walking around.
Time Scientist: Oh, uh, slavery is gone.  They're free now.
Franklin: Well, about time too!
Jefferson: WHAT!? I mean, I abhor slavery and consider it a blight on the face of this Earth, but I'm deeply uncomfortable with this development! What will my slaves think of this? Does this mean my black mistress gets a say in how our children are reared, instead of them being my property?
Washington: I care less about this than Jefferson, but am also uncomfortable.
Time Scientist: Oh jeez.  I just wanted to ask you guys about political donor limitations, but now I'm thinking the age gap is pretty significant.
Franklin: Say, why are so many people walking around without pants?
Time Scientist: Those are leggings.  They are pants now.
Franklin: Well, I like the future.

So instead of looking backward, I say we look forward, at what we still have to do to stay proud of our country.  While obviously grossly simplifying these things for the sake of brevity and   So, first and foremost:

Remember the "BT" in "LGBT"

These two letters are going to be the next stage of the current civil rights movement, and it's one that I'm annoyed we still have to fight, because these things take a while to wrap up (technically, I don't think we've even finished one yet) and that probably means I'll be dead by the time robot civil rights becomes a thing.  Also, I'm annoyed we have to fight it because bisexuals and transexuals shouldn't be so marginalized in the first place, especially not by the two letters that usually follow them.  The fact that people still think of bisexuals as just being straight or gay and indecisive about it, and ignoring or deriding them accordingly, is ridiculous.  And the amount of physical and sexual violence trans people endure along with being constantly ostracized is so outrageous it's still stunning to me that it's been ignored by so many for so long.  There's stuff to be happy about here, too--people got mad at Steven Moffat when he was insensitive about bisexuals, and Caitlyn Jenner came out and received praise from a bunch of people, so that's a start.  Now come steps 2 through eighty million.

Create new training procedures and standards for police officers, take away their military surplus gear, take away most of their regular gear, fire literally all of them, incarcerate the ones that did really awful things, make everyone reapply for their jobs, only accept the people that pass the new standards, and only assign people to areas in which they live.  Also make guns way harder to get and hard to keep and limit modifications way more.  Also completely overhaul the judicial system and the prison system.

C'mon, Obama! You have almost a year and a half left! This isn't that tall of an order!

Alleviate income inequality by actually regulating the banks, and slightly alleviate racism by actually regulating the banks

The first part of this seems obvious, but the second part is about the less obvious racism still tacitly supported by so many of us Yankees that sneer at "Southern Pride."  Despite such discrimination being illegal, banks still refuse to loan money to people of color at disproportionate rates, which reinforces the systemic economic inequality imposed on nonwhites.  Unfortunately, this one is even more unlikely to happen than the previous entry, which I deliberately wrote to show how complicated and unlikely to happen it was, because this one involves taking on money.  And as much as it sucks people with money always win right up to the moment when starving people rip their heads off.  Speaking of people with money...

Get Donald Trump talking about the problems of people of races other than latinos and hispanics

Okay, just hear me out on this one.  Despite literally accusing the majority of illegal immigrants from Latin and South America of being rapists, aspiring Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is in second place in the polls at time of writing.  This should literally be impossible.  The only thing I can figure is that the incredibly crazy primary voters normally split among the other forty guys are rallying behind their wafer-haired savior.  Trump explaining his enlightened views on the problems of black people, asian people, Native-Americans, and maybe the Irish and Polish if he wants to go old-school, would be sure to draw in the uncommitted crazy people and solidify his nomination, and thus crushing defeat at the hands of whoever team blue picks.  Or it could just hasten his inevitable downfall, but I really want him to still be a big deal when Colbert starts up again, and even if this way failed, it would at least be entertaining.

Thus concludes my poorly written (both figuratively and, in the case of my laptop screen deciding to finally detach itself from any remaining supporting joints, literally) manifesto.  Hopefully I'll get better at more serious writing by this time next year, but for now, back to video games and fart jokes.  Happy Fourth of July!