TomFlannery.com

You can only say “what the fuck?” so many times before you just go dead inside.

I no longer comprehend the world I live in.

I’m not sure how we got here….but I’m pretty certain it’s not because we’ve been told to stay home for 2 months. No.

Shit was broken long before Scranton parade day.

Surely a global pandemic doesn’t help, but all it’s really done is thrown the covers off the bed. The sheets were already soiled, Bubba.

It’s a long festering, propaganda spewing social-media driven psychosis. It has allowed the stupids to take over. And make no mistake, the stupids HAVE taken over. Not so much in numbers, but in VOLUME. And these days, that’s really all that matters. Screaming, ranting, raving, threatening, trolling, flag waving, strapping on guns to visit the corner store….they suck all the oxygen out of the 24-hour newsroom.

The rest of us are just left muttering….over and over. To ourselves. Silently applauding Rand Paul’s neighbor. On a fruitless search for hand sanitizer.

They drive into brick walls and then back up and drive into them again and then blame the media for the damage to their cars. The war has been fought, and as it turns out, Reason brought a knife to a gun fight. It will take a generation or more to recover the lost IQ points. And our kids may never forgive us. Not that I blame them.

Nothing is subtle about any of this. The lies are so outrageously huge that they can barely fit into the brain, forcing the head to compensate by growing pointy. People will literally believe ANYTHING that buttresses their own ignorance. And of course, they’ll reject anything that doesn’t. Including, you know, the actual truth. And then they’ll head on over to Facebook and/or Twitter. God help us all.

Somebody really should have kicked the shit out of Zuckerberg et all years ago.

It’s hard to be dispassionate about this. But try.

Visit a random dumb political post (but I repeat myself). Read through the comments. The first thing you notice is the atrocious grammar and hopeless spelling. Just that alone should give you pause. But no….you are sucked into the vortex of dumb, and continue. It’s a relentless spittle of gibberish, completely devoid of facts. Then the memes start flowing…..and it’s all you can do not jab a ball-point pen into your eyeball. A dissenting voice might appear, but they are quickly gang-fisted by the majority, and will usually slink away quietly to fight another day. Or be blocked. Before you know it, you are rage-typing. You, a normally rational and progressively thinking human being, are about to enter the slaughter-pen. The place where empathy is about as well-liked as Bono. And just like that, you’ve become what you despise. An arm-chair warrior. Grabbing fist-fulls of air, screaming at passers-by who aren’t there. Like those who spend their entire day on Wilkes-Barre square.

Concerning the above paragraph, magnify it all by 100x if it’s kinda late at night and you’ve been drinking.

(If you’re smart, you’ll wake up the next morning slightly hungover and immediately delete your comments…..as comment-regret is a real thing.)

A few random observations on events from the past week. From the great state of PA.

A woman in the take-out line at a Red Lobster on Mother’s Day kick-started a brawl when she got tired of waiting for her order.

I’ll completely ignore the “Red Lobster on Mother’s Day?” angle here….maybe choices were limited? Plus the Cheddar Bay Biscuits are nearly brawl-worthy. And at least it wasn’t an Olive Garden. That would have been truly shameful.

However, if you’re the type of person who slugs restaurant workers because your lobster-tail isn’t being cooked fast enough in the midst of a global health catastrophe, these are not the days for you. Again, I’ll grant you that these are squirrelly times, but clearly this woman’s wires were already crossed pre-Covid. She is the real-life manifestation of a facebook commenter. Remember that.

The Wal-Mart in Taylor had to close for a while yesterday while cops dealt with a near naked man on the roof wielding a knife (as opposed to all the nearly naked men armed with knives inside the store who are never reported I guess). In all the coverage of the story, nobody thought to ask how the guy got on the roof in the first place. If I was a reporter that’s the first question I would have asked. But still…..this guy? I imagine he has way more online friends than I have. And you can bet your ass he’ll be…

a. trolling your feed
b. voting in November

You see where I’m going with this, right?

These are the people you are screaming at from your couch.

I offer these observations as a public service.

But as bad as we are, Wisconsin has just proven itself ever dumber.

So we’ve got that going for us.

Which is nice.

In a bit..

–tf