My Beliefs On How This World Works
Ideas! I have’em, you read’em. That’s how Substack works, right?
After deciding to give up on writing reviews for a while, it was time to come up with what to write next. After giving it some shower-based thought, I realized that many readers don’t truly know what I, Michael Bridgett, believe about the world and how it works.
I’ve been writing both for fun and money for a long time. I’ve had various blogs and worked at various organizations along the way. One was at a legal office that gave me my own desk and everything... that I had to use to write the most boring of things to push the company. Lucky for me, I never got held in contempt. Okay, okay. You can all stop booing now.
Today, we are going to cover my beliefs about the world. It’s going to get ugly, and if you feel like I’m talking about you... I am.
Let’s do this!
1. Everything is political
Floating around the internet last few months was this idea that this anime, One Piece, is not political. It’s a 26-year running series where a group of freedom-loving pirates start a war with a restrictive world government that overwrites its past. Anyone thinking a plot like that is not political is lying. They know better, and they are messing with you. Do not argue with people playing in your face.
I’ve noticed on various dating sites that there is an option to choose “apolitical,” which means this person has no political stance. This is absurd because everything is political. Everyone has a political stance or preference. Everyone supports some groups while vilifying others. We are not bees. There is no hive mind.
Let’s break this down:
If LGBTQIA+ people bother you while living their lives without affecting yours, or if you say “pause” when anyone brings up something about butts, you are being homophobic.
If your response to “Black Lives Matter” is “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter,” you are being racist.
If you think the 10 Commandments should be in every classroom, you are being a theocrat. That’s more like a “Jesus-sponsored racist.”
If you think America was great before women could have their own bank accounts (during the 1970s), you are being an anti-feminist.
These are political stances.
More importantly, these political stances DO NOT mix with mine.
Politics is in all we do. It’s not just voting for similarly-minded bureaucrats. Every stance, every position, every thought we have about creating a better world to live in is politics. If you say South Park is political, everyone would agree. If you say that about anime, video games, films, or television shows, some trolls would say you are wrong. If you say that about race-swapping fictional characters, you might be a nazi. Just own it and move on.
Everything has a political bent. Anyone who says otherwise isn’t thinking deeply enough about what they stand for or who they care about. Or they’re lying. People love to lie.
2. Capitalism is Feudalism with more rules.
Unless your family is well off, you likely think that Capitalism sucks. I think you’re right. I believe that the American capitalist system is currently more akin to Feudalism. We have finally gotten to the point where companies run by billionaires have merged so hard, there are few small businesses left to support.
Feudalism is a term from back in the kingly times, where King Whomever would own all the land, allow people to work on that land, and pay a tithe of crops or livestock to the king. Y’know, like a church. The king, in turn, would create a military to protect the people when the king next door would get his annual hunger for more land. Whether he’d make his way to you before your fields started to burn is irrelevant. He and the king next door are going to fight, and you could get conscripted to serve or sold into slavery.
In Capitalism, we’ve traded King Charles for King Zuckerberg, Queen Elizabeth for Queen Alice Walton, and the royal jester to Elon Musk. All the work we little guys do goes up and out of our pockets and lands in the big guys’ pockets instead. Now, we don’t have the “king next door” to worry about. We just pee in bottles until our boss fires us because an AI robot can do it better. Keep in mind, billionaires thrive on exploitation; the elites are still a gang of white males, and going to the doctor could leave you bankrupt. Capitalism is all about individualism. In Feudalism, you would at least have a community
Capitalism feels like Feudalism to me.
That’s hard times, Daddy.
3. Everything begins and ends with culture.
Culture is where everything starts.
Culture is where everything ends
A culture starting out becomes deep and wise.
A culture ending is by genocide.
Lay your guns down
Let the wars go by
Hug your brothers instead
You don’t need a reason why
You can build up your culture
Stop tearing others down
Give thanks to your ancestors
Stop the genocide now
4. Jesus and I haven’t seen eye to eye in decades.
As a kid, my parents used to take me to church. I would wake up, catch half an episode of Dragonball, put on my nicest clothes, and go to a Black church. As I got older, we eventually stopped going. I think it was due to their education expanding. They were both still in college while I was growing up, and as time passed, they wanted to become better parents in raising me, and using the church less and less.
Slowly but surely, the NFL took over for my Father, and he started coming to church less and less. Going by herself with he two kids wasn’t something my mother wanted to do, so she dropped out as well. I was clearly great with it because I could get engrossed in the adventures of Skysurfer Strikeforce, Swat Katz, and that Marvel block of shows that came on back then.
Various kids around me were still attending church and participating in activities through them, which I would also join. I went to bible study because a girl from school asked me to, and I came away with a huge crush on her friend Cindy. Another friend invited me to his church, and it was very different than any I had been to before. They had a basketball court, took us to paintball, and it was 98% white.
It was at basketball church where I was knocked out of this “Jesus loves you” state by three different occurrences. One was forcing me to participate in a “true love waits” ceremony with promise rings and candles. I wasn’t sure I wanted to participate, but I was literally peer-pressured into doing so. Second, two of my church friends had a stakeout at my house when my parents left town to make sure I didnt break my vow with my girlfriend at the time. I mentioned what they had done, and I had never seen her so angry. Third, my friend and father had a long conversation about Christian beliefs. I was not engaged in this conversation and was probably playing video games. The next day, he calls and invites me to his church to play basketball. As soon as I showed up, my friend handed me off to the youth minister because after that conversation with my father he wants to see if I was secure in my faith. We get into an extremely weird conversation about Christian values. I’m stunned this is even happening. Eventually, I lay it out and ask him the following question:
If I were a person completely unfamiliar with Christianity, who knew nothing about Jesus, and nobody ever talked to me about this, would I go to hell?
He looked me dead in my face and said, “Yes.” That event knocked the Jesus right out of me. I left the church alone after that. That kind of attitude had no place in my mind. I didn’t feel like I was here to judge anything, anything other than that sort of behavior. After that, I went to college.
College taught me the same way it taught my parents. My questions about the world changed. I was in Austin, away from my Jesus-loving friends, and learned much more about the history of the world and the terms that could describe how it was formed. Colonialism, slavery, the evils of Christopher Columbus, how most of our holidays were pagan rituals before being absorbed into the Christian religion, and atheism. The older I got, the more all of my life sounded like I’ve spent the whole time involved in someone else’s plot.
That was when Jesus and I stopped seeing eye-to-eye. How can I believe in a force that made chattel slavery a thing for 400 years and never even gave us reparations for building the country? How could we go from that to the Black Codes, to Jim Crow, and to currently making life-saving abortions illegal? That might be Texas, but it’s not a faith I can subscribe to.
5. Christian Nationalism and Racism are the same thing.
Donald Trump has proven himself to be a racist criminal for 50 years. He’s got 34 criminal convictions, is an alleged pedo, and a consummate liar. He might be a bigger liar than Elon Musk, and that is a difficult thing to be.
Trump being reelected in 2024 told me everything I needed to know about this country. The racism, hatred, and anti-blackness are so deeply embedded that people were swayed enough to vote for a monster like Donald Trump for a second time. I was incensed. I wanted to leave the country; and I think you should too. We had four years block him from running again, and that time was wasted. The Home Alone 2 cameo actor is the president… again, and we are all living through Project 2025. ICE is disappearing immigrants regardless of criminal intent, and I truly believe they want to put Black people back in the fields. I’m not saying we shall go, but as far as I’m concerned, those are the facts.
The group of Trump supporters I’m most worried about is the Christian Nationalists. A definition by Wikipedia:
A form of religious nationalism that focuses on promoting the Christian views of its followers, in order to achieve prominence or dominance in political, cultural, and social life.
This group is uncompromising. They believe that Jesus will return once all of the Jews return to Israel. The genocide of the Palestinians is part of their plan. They want the 10 Commandments in every school classroom and in front of every courthouse. These are the people blowing up Planned Parenthoods, until they got enough power to make abortion illegal. Naturally, if their daughter needed a life saving abortion, they’d cross state lines for that. Christian Nationalists believe the United States is a Christian Nation and will choke you out with the Constitution if you disagree. We live in a theocracy, not a democracy.
I don’t like these people. These people will not stop until only the “good” minorities are in the country. Of course, they don’t create a definition of “good” so they can throw out who they want when they want. I believe they aren’t worth fighting and might as well be white supremacists.
6. The United States has ALWAYS been divided, but European Americans don’t see it.
I remember a game I used to play growing up. We’d be in history class talking about King Arthur, and a white girl would say she wishes she existed in that era cause chivalry is so cool. A white boy would say they would want to go back to Viking times to fight bad guys like their ancestors did. When it was my turn, I didn’t have anything to say. I could go back to the ‘50s before my dad was born, but I’d just be working and hating it. I could go back to the 1920s and be a blues man like my grandfather, but his brother got stabbed, and he gave it all up to raise 13 kids. I could go back to the Post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, but that didn’t end particularly well for Black people.
To me, there was no better place in time to be than right here.
The thing I’m most sad about is how that has not changed. At one silly point I thought we going to try socialism for the working class. What a silly idea. The states would do everything propoganda to murder to make sure that never happens.
There is this idea that the United States is “divided.” My question to anyone who thinks this is, “When has it not been?” Was it united when the Japanese citizens were in internment camps during World War 2? Was it united during the 60+ years of Jim Crow? What about during the Korean War or as Vietnam calls it, “The War of American Aggression?” Were we more united during that scuffle with the Philippines in 1899?
The United States has never been united.
Someone is always suffering under the boots of others. Whiteness as a concept is a trick of the mind. It was invented to create racial division. There was a time when the Irish were not white. It’s the same for Italians and Jews. They’ve invited many ethnicities into “whiteness” as overseers for Black and Brown people. “White” is a designation that destroys community. It’s a word for monoculture. Like the book, A Wrinkle In Time, all the kids bounce the red ball at the same time.
Once ICE finishes with the “illegal Latinos,” they will be coming for the African-Americans. Once they throw out all the Koreans and Japanese-Americans, they’ll move on to the Chinese-Americans who haven’t left the United States yet. I wonder which white person will lose elite status first?
I didn’t understand it at first, but now it’s all I see. It’s like Maya Angelou said:
The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.
I don’t think Statesiders are mature enough to make that happen. I know people are going to disagree with me on this, but if we voted, I would vote to get out now. How many more of us need to die before we understand that the true leaders of this country do not want us here? Black excellence didn’t work. Black capitalism doesn’t work. Black people DO work. I believe we should do that work somewhere other than here. I know that might be easy for someone like me to stay, but unlike Europeans who migrated here, we Black people decided to stay in the country that held us as slaves. They will never see us as they see themselves. They will always put raisins in the potato salad. I believe the way out is not through… it is away. We need to think seriously about that.
Oh! Don’t forget, the German Nazi Party picked up all their deletion tactics from us first. The United States taught them how to do what they did in the early 1900s with our behavior towards the Indigenous population, and the slavery thing that made this country rich. That’s right. We’re an Icon. A horrible Icon.
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