Are you feeling all right? Not feeling too good myself.

  I really should've written this last night. I was full of piss and vinegar, fire and brimstone last night. But I was tired, had already put down 1,000 words of Actual Paying Work, and went to sleep early, and well... I guess it mellowed me out a bit. I'm still pissed off but it's back to the usual mellow boil.

 It's probably for the best, though, that I didn't write this down last night. Yes, I'm talking about the 17-year-old kid who decided to play vigilante and killed two folks in the demonstrations in Kenosha last night. More specifically, I was wound up about the wingnut reaction to the shooting.

 And I still am, because it was almost across-the-board positive. They dug it. They think it's great. They think it's justified. They think he was defending himself. They think he turned himself in. Now the story is they think he was hired by the auto dealer to protect the carlot when the auto dealer has said that was decidedly not the case.

 None of this is altogether all that shocking because conservatives have been warning of an armed revolt against anyone who doesn't think they have the morals or common sense to govern since before Trump got in office. They weren't concerned by the guy who was sending pictures of pipe bombs to media folks and Democrats. They did think it was prudent that last year's El Paso shooter did what he did because of hatred of migrants.

 Make no mistake, this isn't because of Trump. He may be acting as the catalyst, something speeding it up, but this has been Mainstream American Conservatism at least since the early Bush Jr. years. They called us the moral equivalent of fundamentalist clowns who murdered 3,000 people just trying to get paid because we wouldn't support the Iraq War. Or the president's education plan, whichever was the issue of the day. Calling your political opponents terrorists was a remarkably malleable political tactic.

  So that's where we are. This kid fired the first shot in what probably won't be a full-blown civil war, but very well might be a long, bloody clash between differing ideologies. Maybe both sides will back down if Biden wins, but I really don't see the Trump Base every doing anything but worship him. Furthermore, we've got Q promoters up for election in Congress and his brand of "fuck you, you didn't vote for me" politics is definitely a popular thing among younger Republicans.

 They want to tie the Democratic Party to AntiFa and Black Lives Matter, but that really doesn't groove like they think it should. The mainstream of the party and its left-wing can barely get along, and a whole lot of the people we're seeing in the streets don't have much use a'tall for the Democratic Party. The Right doesn't believe that and won't be persuaded otherwise, but they think Joe Biden is a red-eyed Marxist revolutionary. There's no hope for them.

 I think maybe the main issue is that not only are there enough people who're willing to brave brutal cops, an out-of-control pandemic that's killing more people every day than died on 9/11, and now gun-toting fascist lunatics who think they're the Praetorian Guard with licenses to kill and the explicit permission of law enforcement. Which they sort of have already, if you want to cut through the bullshit.

 So where will this go? That's a good question. The Right thinks it's the only one that has guns, and that is patently not true. They think AntiFa and BLM will fold at the least amount of pressure, and that is patently not true. They think the radicals they dismiss with a sneer don't have the right or the sand to defend themselves and fight for what they believe in, and that's patently not true.

 It's going to get wild, this I'm convinced of. It doesn't have to be, it's not an immutable law of physics. We're not over the brink yet, I don't think, and it's still possible to turn around before there's blood in the streets and families destroyed. I don't think we have it within ourselves - the maturity, as a culture - to do it, but it's not so far out of reach.

 None of this is "how things are supposed to be". There's no such thing as "how things are supposed to be". There just is, just life. Maybe we should actually start acting like we really believe life, all lives, matters, that all are created equal and free like we've claimed for so long.

 Because we're certainly not doing it now.