I’ve tried to write a few times over the last week, but can’t seem to stay on topic. You know, the opposite of writers block. Just a mess of whatever comes out. Huddle House hash browns, scattered and smothered. Sure it’s great at 3 A.M. after you’ve been out drinking at the club, but it has to come back out sometime. Usually at 5:30, when the room starts spinning and you can’t make it to the bathroom.
With all the subjects in the news, drawing comment and outrage from all sectors, where do I begin. How can we make something as simple and universal as going to the bathroom difficult. If you Google it, between 0.2 and 0.3 per cent of Americans face this problem. Why can’t it just be as simple as: You’re rights end where mine begin. 99.7 per cent of the population are seeing laws passed to force everyone accommodate 0.3 per cent. It’s in the same category as same sex marriage. I don’t care who you love, have sex with or want to share a bitter divorce with.
The Presidential elections are starting to feel like Russian Roulette. No matter who wins in the end, everyone loses. The echoes of “Never Trump” and “Never Hillary”, come at me across all media, along with the inevitable “He/she is a liar and is only out for their own good”. Minorities are being vote harvested by promising that if I’m elected, I’ll give you more and warned that if the other gut is elected you will lose everything. The pandering is just embarrassing.
If the protesters continue gather and become violent, will they try to interfere with the freedom to vote? What will it look like on the nightly news when National Guard and Police have to stand outside polling sites, just to ensure freedom of access and protection?
Where is the tipping point of racial and religious tension, that pushes us past words and into intentional, organized, armed violence? Tolerance has a limit. When do the sheep, stop repeating what the Talking Heads say and start holding everyone accountable for their own actions and words. When do the sheep recognize that their news is crafted to be entertaining first and accurate a distant second.
The hash browns have to come out one way or another. Either way, it will look the same. Somehow it will still look like something you shouldn’t have eaten at 3 A.M. No wonder I can’t stay focused. Now, I’m afraid of what it will be like when it comes out from the other end.
The New Word Wars 
You’re right; you need focus. You might have gotten somewhere if you had noticed the difference between “Minorities are being vote harvested” and voters being harvested by race. If you ever want to have anything to say, you are going to have to learn to think for yourself.
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I used the right words. As an anti-racist, I would expect you to focus less on race and more on circumstances. To do otherwise seems to prolong and exacerbate the situation.
You may want to consider your last line again. The assumption that I don’t think for myself might be insulting.
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I am not trying to insult you. I am trying to demonstrate, with reasonable restraint, why badly developed writing is construed as a failure to think clearly or for the author to have thought for himself.
I have no doubt that you used exactly the right words to express your opinion. Further, I do not doubt that you can support your immediate proposition. Minorities are, in fact, being “vote harvested”. My criticism is rests on the reality that it is not minorities alone who are being vote harvested. Both of the Democratic/Republican Oligarchs and their surrogates and respective parties are actively using derogatory and fear mongering gender and racial stereotypes to harvest votes across the gender and racial spectrum.
Your 3rd paragraph implies that you are analyzing the entire electorate, but your failure to recognize the symmetry of gender and racially defined demagoguery significantly undermines your claims of objectivity. “The Presidential elections are starting to feel like Russian Roulette. No matter who wins in the end, everyone loses. The echoes of “Never Trump” and “Never Hillary”, come at me across all media, along with the inevitable “He/she is a liar and is only out for their own good”. Minorities are being vote harvested by promising that if I’m elected, I’ll give you more and warned that if the other gut is elected you will lose everything. The pandering is just embarrassing.”
Your second paragraph also demonstrates the imbalance of your analysis and even the failure of your questions to resolve into an explicit answers following a rational principle. “With all the subjects in the news, drawing comment and outrage from all sectors, where do I begin. How can we make something as simple and universal as going to the bathroom difficult. If you Google it, between 0.2 and 0.3 per cent of Americans face this problem. Why can’t it just be as simple as: You’re rights end where mine begin. 99.7 per cent of the population are seeing laws passed to force everyone accommodate 0.3 per cent. It’s in the same category as same sex marriage. I don’t care who you love, have sex with or want to share a bitter divorce with.” You give two examples of instances where the overwhelming majority of Americans are not directly affected by issues of consequence to a minority.
The tenor of your essay suggests that you consider these problems easily solved and that you are offering a solution, but the language in the second paragraph is nothing if not ambiguous. (1) “You’re rights end where mine begin. 99.7 per cent of the population are seeing laws passed to force everyone accommodate 0.3 per cent.” (2) ” It’s in the same category as same sex marriage. I don’t care who you love, have sex with or want to share a bitter divorce with.” Whose rights end where other’s begin – the minority or the majority. Sentences 1 and 2 suggest that you have reached contradictory conclusions. If you see distinctions between the cases covered in sentences 1 and 2, I suggest that you compare and contrast those ideas explicitly. That level of analysis alone would support a series of essays.
You introduced a topic and then tried to support whatever conclusion you’re trying to reach with two very badly developed paragraphs which, unfortunately, suggest two badly formed sets of ideas. Your essay collapsed, and you lost the opportunity to present or support whatever conclusion you were trying to share.
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There is no contradiction in the second paragraph. To be blunt, the claimed discrimination of not having full access transgender bathrooms is crap. Their right ends where my right to protect my family begins. Their right to determine that nature somehow made a mistake in the gender expression of their genetics and do something about it is their right. However, sex is determined by the outward expression of physical development. My indifference to same sex marriage is the same. It does not cross a line and effect me or anyone else. If you are offended by it, avoid those couples. In short, you do you.
The comments on the Presidential race were equally complete, as far as they went. The focus appears to be on the minorities, not racial segregation. The simplest distinction is defined by those who have assimilated into the mainstream culture and those who have not.
In general you missed the point of the post. I haven’t been able to think specifically about any one subject. I haven’t even really tried. Most of the news is so moronic and repetitive, I started to keep the weather channel on instead of the news. Again, I don’t want or need a critique of my writing style, so you can quit trying to dig the corn out of the shit.
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You expressed yourself and your ideas in prose. A critique of your writing flows inevitably from a critique of your ideas. If you can’t be bothered to think clearly enough about your ideas to write clearly about your ideas, I suppose it is inevitable that you complain when people notice that your ideas are not clearly expressed and question whether you thought clearly about them at all.
The evidence is beginning to suggest that you didn’t really mean: “Have thick skin. It’s not personal, don’t make it that way.”
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Never mind all that shit before. I went back and re-read your essays. They are really good. I can’t wait to see more. I was just being an asshole.
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