It was ten degrees below zero on Monday. As I was driving my kids to school, I noticed the heater wasn’t working. Usually it takes a few minutes for the car to warm up, but not this time. It blew cold air all the way to the school.
I don’t like working on vehicles when it’s that cold outside. I don’t have a garage, so I have to stand in a snowbank and fiddle with the hard metal. Your fingers go numb and it’s impossible to feel anything, so you end up cutting yourself.
The blood freezes.
When the heat goes out on your car, it can mean that there’s something wrong with the coolant. I’m not a mechanic, but I know that if you maintain the appropriate oil and coolant levels, your car will last a long time. That’s bare minimum, and if you ask a mechanic, you’ll find out how few people manage to do even that.
I popped the hood, flipped open the coolant reservoir, and found it spoiled. It should be a kind of lime green. Instead, the liquid I looked at was black.
That’s bad.
I was driving a 2003 Subaru Forester. They’re reliable cars but they sometimes have an issue with the head gasket. That’s expensive and inconvenient to fix.
So, with this new information in mind, I looked at my car again. I noticed that the hood latch wasn’t closing properly. I haven’t been able to open the back hatch for years. I noticed the rust on the wheel wells and beneath the doors.
I remembered that the dashboard lights had burned out. The air conditioning didn’t work. The driver’s side window wouldn’t go down…
The list goes on and on and on.
These were all things that I’d learned to live with because I didn’t want to go to the trouble of getting a new vehicle. I bought this car in 2019 for $3,000. It had accumulated 226,000 miles. Had the heater continued to work, I would have happily driven it until the wheels fell off. But with the heater broken and the coolant reservoir tainted, I realized I could no longer look away.
The veneer had been cracked. I finally had to face the fact that I needed a new car. My wife and I went in that evening and picked up the cheapest one we could find. It’s not about color or make or model or year. We make our decisions based on price and price alone.
There are times when all the miseries that are a part of your daily life become more than you can stand. It’s the final straw that breaks the camel’s back. This week I saw that with my car, and this year I’ve seen it with the United States.
This country has a busted head gasket. It’s too expensive to fix. It’s time we traded our government in for a new model.
I realize that it’s easier to put your head in the sand and continue on as if nothing’s wrong. You might tell your kids to wear an extra jacket for the drive to school because the heater doesn’t work.
But that’s like putting a band aid on a wound that requires a tourniquet.
It’s time for Americans to wake up and recognize that our situation is dire. A madman is running the country. Billions of dollars are being spent on a secret police force that’s breaking into homes and using nerve agents on babies.
We can’t afford to disregard what’s happening anymore. The time to act is now. We deserve better than this.
Every single day there’s a new video of ICE agents brutalizing innocent men, women and children. It has to stop. We can’t afford to normalize the idea of masked, armed men terrorizing us with military weapons.
You’d think everything about the American psyche would reject such a thing. But too many Americans still cling to the delusion that they can be protected by their right to own firearms.
Allow me to let you in on a little secret: your firearms offer no protection at all. If ICE shows up at your door, they’ll hit you with weapons you never even knew existed. They can probably shoot tear gas through your window from a half mile away. The idea that you need a gun to “protect your house” has always been a lie. The second the military comes knocking at your door, it’s too late. You’re done.
You’re not a cowboy. You’re not John Wick. When the secret police arrive you’ll be nothing but a statistic.
It’s time for everyone to have their “come to reality” moment.
It actually makes me physically sick that so many white people, and it is the white people who are responsible for this, are so indifferent to the needless torture and loss of life we have to witness every day.
The Black community knows this is happening.
Latinos know this is happening.
The LGBTQ+ community knows.
It’s only white people who are sitting around acting like a blown head gasket and a rusted body and no dashboard lights is “no problem at all.”
Unfortunately, white people are in control of the media, the government, the educational system, the police, and every other mechanism of response available to us.
They’re acting like it’s “no big deal,” but failing to recognize that they’re driving around in a luxury vehicle paid for by taxpayer dollars. It’s only we the working class that’s forced to travel to school and work every day in a junker that might explode into a fireball at any minute.
“You’re being an alarmist,” they say. Then they share some memes that call the president a “crybaby” or something equally useless.
The veneer has cracked friends. What we’re looking at isn’t working. It’s unsustainable. We either have to stop it, or they’ll come for you too. White people have to recognize that on the day that the secret police come banging at their door, it will mean all their potential allies are already dead.
We need to stop ICE now. The same politicians that refuse to listen to the cries of innocent men, women, and children, will listen to the cries of white people and political donors.
I encourage everyone to stop for a moment and visualize what it would feel like to have a brutal, masked man covered in body armor and white supremacy tattoos gas your baby and rip your toddler away. Imagine what it would feel like if something like that happened to you.
We need the white population to recognize this isn’t a fantasy. This isn’t a distant thing. It’s happening now, and unless we stop it, it WILL happen to everyone.
Denial won’t keep your car running when it’s out of oil and the engine block is cracked. We can no longer afford to ignore what is happening.
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