This morning I received a comment on my post “A Few Haiku & Senryu (63)” with regards to this piece:

(#378)

our humanity
bleeds out in Gaza and Ukraine
just another day

The comment read (and I’m paraphrasing here since I immediately deleted it), “Thank YOU, Mr. President, for bombing Iran,” and setting it on fire, adding that he hopes to see Iran flattened to the same degree as Gaza. He ended his mini-maga-rant thusly: “Burn, baby, burn!”

I have my comments set to Moderation specifically to weed out trash comments from deluded right-wing maga cultist trolls such as this person, so fortunately I was able to delete the comment before it ever saw the light of day on my blog.

In my four years of blogging, I’ve seen only a handful of extremist maga cult blogs (four or five, tops), and I’m grateful for that. This WordPress community has been, in my experience, a safe haven for compassion and sanity, where folks care about one another and strive to exhibit the best of what it means to be human. But there’s always that one guy, right? There’s always that rotten apple in the barrel, that putrid potato in the cellar, that colony of mold on the loaf of bread, that illiterate third-grade bully who terrorizes the smaller kids but who’d shit his pants at the thought of harassing someone his own size.

Before deleting this person’s comment, I took a quick peek at his blog, and yeah, it was just as nasty as I imagined it would be, replete with hateful, obscene “own the libs” memes and maga propaganda. A few years ago, I ditched my Facebook and Twitter accounts for this very reason—those social media platforms have been overrun with right-wing extremists, and their owners—two of the most abhorrently evil men on the planet (Zuckerberg and Musk)–not only turn a blind eye to this maga cesspool of hatred on their sites, they also participate in it, encourage it, and rake in billions from it. And, because of this, right-wing extremism continues to thrive and spread like the cancer it is, affecting not only those still on their platforms but also those who have chosen not to associate with these anti-democracy, anti-America thugs.

I lost faith in humanity long ago. Growing up in a severely dysfunctional family in a state (Utah) dominated by a religious cult (mormonism) to which I did not belong will do that to a person. Yet…there’s a part of me that hurts when I see other people hurting, a part of me that cries out and yearns to help, to make things better, to assuage the tears and fears of my fellows here on this planet. My motto has always been “We’re All In This Together, We All Matter, We All Have Value…” But I find my compassion and resolve tested constantly nowadays by my fellow citizens here and abroad who obviously never read the memo about how to be a decent human being. And this leaves me wondering…am I wrong here? Am I an idiot for believing there is goodness in all of us? I mean, seriously? I’ve been mistaken plenty of times before when it comes to trusting people, to giving people the benefit of the doubt, and I’ve paid a heavy price more than once for my errors in judgment.

Perhaps the biggest question of all is, are these people–like the one who commented on my blog–too degenerate to be redeemed? Most religious folks will tell you there’s hope for everyone, or at least for most of us. But one needn’t be religious to hold out hope for humanity. At the same time, one must be realistic in one’s assessment of humanity, and that means recognizing that some folks are past the point of no return.

We have a “leader” who personifies the most heinous traits of the dark side of humanity, someone who has a blighted soul and no heart whatsoever, who is hellbent on destruction for the sake of destruction with no accountability at all. And this fascist felon/rapist/traitor monster has a following of at least 77 million like-minded trigger-happy cultists who will do his bidding without question, conscience or remorse. This person has now initiated an illegal, unconstitutional war with an adversary that posed no direct threat to our country, based on lies of weapons of mass destruction (jeez, where have we heard this before?), with absolutely no game plan, no permission from Congress and no consideration for how his blatantly criminal and inhumane actions will affect the world. And his legion of followers salivate at the thought.

I suppose I was right about one thing: we truly are all in this together, unfortunately.

Burn, baby, burn…