Fire Iron

The treatment may be worse than the cure

This morning, Lori told me something from her days working with the Humane Society.Years ago, some veterinarians used a practice called fire branding to treat lameness in a horse. Also known as Pin Firing or thermocautery, a hot iron was used to puncture the horse’s skin around the tendons that were causing the lameness. The belief was that it turned a relatively minor inflammation into a major inflammation, and the horse’s immune system would go full out to address the inflammation. Some horse folks still swear by it , but most others oppose it, saying it causes unnecessary pain and is unscientific in its approach.

I believe that the United States is in the process of being fire branded. We have had a fire heated iron shoved into our national wounds, and the poison is spewing out of that wound, demonstrating just what serious issues we had prior to the fire branding.

Eight years ago, we watched as a man rose to political power in spite of the fact that he had proven himself to be despicable beyond measure of any public figure we have ever know. He clearly demonstrated his misogyny, his rampant racism, Islamophobia, his hatred toward those with differing abilities, immigrants, veterans during his first campaign, and still he was elected, making him feel empowered to continue to unleash his hatred.

Four years of that and apparently a sufficient number of people could not take any more, and we got out and voted together and sent him packing.

For four years.

Now we have a Fire Iron which is hotter and being inserted into the heart of our country.

Maybe this is precisely the painful therapy we need at this time to purge ourselves of the venom and poison that has been festering under our dermal layer since 1619.

The poison of racism was invented by early slave trading colonists. Racism is a construct that was used to justify the enslavement of a people who were cruelly exploited to work for free, oftentimes in chains, to build cities, national shrines, plantation houses, factories - the very infrastructure of the new country that was being formed.

They were reviled. They were punished with whips, hot irons, beatings and raping, oftentimes for the mere fun of it.

How sick is that? Yet it was that construct of race that started this infectious and diseased country. It was the manner in which people were manipulated into hating “the other” that opened the Pandora’s Box of generalized hatred against one group after another.

When the hatred and hatefulness appeared to shift to the Chinese, Mexican, Irish, Italian or whomever, it was not a real shift of the hatred, it was a metastasizing of the toxicity, spreading throughout the body of the United States.

These illnesses have been left unaddressed, unattended and untreated for 400 years, and now we can see, as the pus of hatred oozes out from every rock in the country, that it may be terminal.

This may be the end of us.

Never can a country call itself a “Christian Nation,” a “godly nation,” or a”great nation” with this oozing hatred touching everything in its path.

It is so difficult to believe that there are still so many people who will cheer for him, praise him and vote for him.

That is the depth of the underlying disease of the United States of America.

So perhaps this is precisely what this country needs right now, this Fire Iron to expose it all and demonstrate the need for our immune system to address the situation and begin a process that will aid in curing the disease.

I personally fear that it is chronic, if not terminal, this hatred of others. I have seen it all of my life, and I do not believe that any of it has just developed. I believe that Trump has brought it to the forefront, giving permission and even encouragement to hate others.

What makes matters worse, he just decides whom to tell his base to hate, and they listen. He knows nothing about the immigrants that he is having sent to concentration camps (yes, that is what prisons are when there is no due process). Pick them up and ship them off somewhere, just like the Nazis did to the Jews.

So let’s hate anyone who does not agree with him.

I come from a rather embarrassing area of the country. I grew up in Rome, Georgia, home to the infamous Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the Chief Haters in the era of Trumpism. I have, unfortunately, had the opportunity to interact with some of her base / his base. People whom I have known my entire life who worship the Orange Jesus of their hearts. “Good, church going people”, who spout scriptures out of one side of their mouths, and hatred out of the other.

Their poison sends chills up my spine and squeezes the blood out of my heart.

I politely referred to one of them as a moron for demonstrating the above, and she responded with the vilest support for the man who is “cleansing” America of “those people who get better treatment than Americans.”

I thought it nice only to call her a moron.

But see? The poison runs everywhere and it infects all of us.

So maybe, just maybe, if he can continue to apply the Fire Iron to the soul of America, we can all be cleansed of the hatred and division that we feel.

Maybe, just maybe, we can flush out the hatred and the racism and start over.

I do not believe a word of that. I do believe that we are indeed seeing the true colors of people we may have thought of as “good people” whose true core values are peeking through, ripping aside the veil that has hidden their innermost selves for so many years.

So what, then? How do we use the Fire Iron to suss it all out? Then what do we do about it?

We have few tools with which to square off against such hatred of others. We have to be able to think, and speak, and defend, and never give up. If this is, as President Biden said, “a battle for the soul of the nation,” then we need to arm ourselves with the power to stand up for and alongside those who are being marginalized by our government.

This is not alright. This is not just a swing of the political pendulum. This is a dire threat to all of us.

DOGE continues to go after our private, personal data in order to arm Trump with the ammunition of knowing who his dissenters are. This places us all in a clear and present danger and we must not think we can just sit this one out.

We need to continue to heat the Fire Iron with our passion and apply it where needed.

We MUST overcome, or there will be no difference between the United States of America in 2025 and Germany in 1933, the first year of Adolph Hitler’s reign as dictator. His empire stood for twelve long years.

We cannot let that happen. He / they need to be stopped now.