Wake Up and Open Your Eyes

by Clay McLeod Chapman

When Thanksgiving discourse shifted to immigration, who’s creeping into the country, didn’t his parents notice Kelsey sitting across the table? Who just passed the mashed potatoes? Didn’t they realize their granddaughter is half Haitian?

Their chyron flashes BREAKING NEWS, but isn’t news always breaking nowadays? Isn’t the news all broken by now? Smashed to bits?

No war at all. Just aimless anger. Anger at what they’re doing in the public schools. Anger at the libraries. Anger at vaccination mandates. Anger at—at— Jesus, anger at just about everything.

Anderson Cooper made him feel stupid. Fax didn’t make him feel stupid. Fax just made him feel.

There are no demons. No devils. This is just you. You. Humanity at its worst. The hate in all of your hearts. The bitterness just finally boiled over and look what spilled out. You did this to yourselves.

“You stupid little miserable fuck. You’re just like your dad, know that? Your whole fucking family is what’s wrong with this country. You’re the ones pissing it all away. You and your guns, you pro-life, book-banning, trans-hating, body-shaming fucking twats! YOU!”

You’re the worst kind of liberal. A self-loathing liberal. Who else would have the voice of Anderson Fucking Cooper chastising them in their head? Your liberal values were a façade. A flimsy barrier between you and your own baseness. You are no better. You are worse. Know why? Because you believed you were better. You believed you were somehow superior to your brother, to your parents, to half of the country. You never believed the shit you preached. You don’t believe in anything. You have nothing, no values, no belief system beyond your own selfishness. You don’t believe in God or the Devil or any higher power, and you look down on those who do. You laugh at them. Mock them. In your snooty-pants superiority complex, you never had anything to call your own. No belief beyond what’s right there in front of you. You have always been selfish. Empty. Craven.