When the Noise Drowns Out the Neighbors

Humans have been trying to figure out how to fly probably since the earliest ones first invented spare time. It was two Americans who finally got that done, and any little kids who might have been around to watch the Wright Flyer take off could have still been alive to watch Apollo 11 touch down. From inventing sustained flight to walking on the moon in 66 years. That’s impressive.

And it’s just one line on the functionally endless list of American inventions and innovations all across the board: technology, medicine, industry, entertainment, transportation, defense, sports, etc., etc., etc. And Elvis. America has given a hell of a lot more to this world than we’ve taken from it.

I’ve got a much larger circle of friends than you’d probably guess scattered all around the country, and I’ll put the depth and diversity of that circle up against anyone’s. Because while I absolutely am a flag wavin’ gun slingin’ washed in the blood military raised Bama boy—and deeply proud of it—I was also an actor for 45 years, which, as you may have heard, is an almost exclusively liberal profession.

I do not change or hide anything about myself according to which crowd I’m running with at any given time; you know exactly who and what I am whether you find me in the theater or on the gun range. Yet somewhere around a third of my friends, and I bet probably closer to half of my good friends, are liberals.

Because that’s what most of the people I met through my first 35+ years of doing theater and movies and commercials and such are: solid, old guard liberals, honorable people who just see the world through a different lens than the one I have. We disagree on some pretty key issues, but there’s never been even a trace of animosity behind that.

And I’ve always considered that a blessing; when something happening out there spikes my blood pressure, it’s nice to have people I already trust and respect who can give me a perspective I’d never be able to see on my own. Some of their perspectives can seem a little out there to me, but that’s not my decision to make; I appreciate their point of view, and as long as they keep it honest, they know they can count on me to back ’em up.

I only have that because I started forming those relationships in 1979. That couldn’t happen today. I have nothing but respect for actual liberals, but the bent left wing extremists? The ones who believe they have the right to ignore any laws they don’t like and destroy any private or public property they don’t approve of? The ones who believe you’re either in rigid lockstep agreement with them or you’re a misogynistic Nazi homophobe? Yeah, I don’t like those people at all.

But it works the same way on the left that it does on the right; it’s the extremists who make all the noise and get all the attention. If I was 18 today, just now getting out of school and into the real world, watching all the chaos out there, how would I know that’s not what liberals are? I wouldn’t. So I wouldn’t have any liberal friends, I wouldn’t care about their perspectives, and I’d damn sure never stick up for them.

So there y’go. If you’ve been wondering what Make America Great Again means to me, it means that. Going back to when we put a lot of focus, and a lot of pride, into getting stuff done, and nobody got stuff done like us.

Back before antisocial media, when we were more civil to one another, because if you wanted to make a big show of cussin’ a man in front of everyone, you couldn’t type it from 12 zip codes away; you had to say it to his face. Back before occasionally not getting your way counted as “oppression.”

I never would have guessed anyone could twist “Make America Great Again” into a negative, but less than 24 hours after Trump rolled that out as his campaign slogan, I saw the first post claiming that it was “white supremacist code for a promise to bring slavery back.” That’s one hell of a ridiculously over-the-top accusation, which didn’t stop it from spreading around without much of anyone challenging it.

So I took up that slack; whenever I’d see it posted by someone I know, I’d leave a comment: What’s your evidence that Make America Great Again was intended to be white supremacist code for reinstituting slavery? Or white supremacist code for ANYTHING, for that matter? And what’s your evidence that enough Republicans/conservatives WANT to bring slavery back that it’d make sense to run a presidential campaign on it?

I never got an answer. And this wasn’t random Facebook rabble I was asking; these were people I’d considered friends who wouldn’t tell me why they believed Trump planned to clap our black brethren into chains, and why they apparently believed I’d vote for that. That hit deep; it was the first indication I got that my circle of liberal friends had been infected by at least five loose, far-left radicals.

And that’s what set the tone for me. Less than a full week into the 2016 campaign, the left extremists already had Make America Great Again acronymed down to MAGA and were using it as a synonym for nazi, which they define as literally, and I do mean literally, anyone who disagrees with them on literally, and I do mean literally, anything (prove me wrong).

And they get that garbage piped in directly from their party leaders, their news media, and their talk shows. I think it’s perfect, and hilarious, justice that their blind obsessive hatred of Donald Trump is more responsible for him being President Trump than anything Trump himself has ever said or done.

There is one thing I’d really like to know, though. When Trump fired up his first campaign, he’d been a very high-profile pop culture icon for over 30 years. He had his books, his TV show, he was making cameo appearances on sitcoms, and he was a popular guest on talk shows. A lot of people didn’t like him, and they said a lot of nasty things about him. But it was always some variation of how he’s just a spoiled rich kid.

You don’t think it’s even a little curious that through all that time and all that exposure, we never heard a peep about him being a fascist nazi supremacist until he had the audacity to run against Hillary Clinton, who has a long, proven history of going scorched earth on anyone who displeases her?

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Bama has been a rodeo cowboy, a professional stuntman, and, for 39 years and counting, a bouncer at various biker bars and redneck rat cage juke joints through the Deep South. He makes cool stuff as Crimson Tied Paragear, using knots his Army Ranger Scoutmaster taught him at Boy Scout summer camp deep in the Okinawan boonies back in 1972.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.