Have you ever watched a pot of water come to a boil? A pot with cool, still water is placed on a stove and the gas is turned on. At first there are little bubbles forming on the pot bottom, then as the heat builds, the bubbles drift to the surface, more bubbles form and enlarge, rise and the process repeats, expands, grows until the surface is roiling away. America is like that now, as the heated MAGA rhetoric has been turned up, gas bubbles rising, now popping, releasing very heated steam.
The scalding steam you see in our country now comes in the form of verbal rhetoric and even on X postings. Anne Coulter said on X: “We didn’t kill enough Indians.”Other MAGA mouthpieces turn up the heat with statements from the likes of Tony Hinchcliffe calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”Of course, the leader of the pack is always Stephen Miller who claims that “America is for Americans and Americans only” adding, “restore America to the true Americans,” presumably not meaning the Indian nations.
Another loyal MAGA proponent, Rep. Clay Higgens, took aim at Haitian immigrants, “These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, Vodou, nastiest country in the Western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters… All these thugs better get their mind right and their asses out of our country ….” Of course, there’s always Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (interesting they always use her three names, as they do with perpetrators like Lee Harvey Oswald and Jared Lee Loughner of Tucson). Rep. Marjorie is prized for her outlandish BS-heat making with “Jewish space lasers” causing forest fires or arguing that Reps. and Rashida Tlaib were not official members of Congress because they didn’t swear in on the Bible (neither did Trump put his hand on the bible last inauguration either), or that Obama is secretly a Muslim, or equated vaccine requirements to the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust, and, worst of all, once lied that Nancy Pelosi had said that “We need another school shooting.”
When challenged, these folks always resort to, “…we do have freedom of speech. I’ll say what I want.” All the while they perfectly know they are turning up the heat, setting fire to normalcy.
And their “freedom of speech” rhetoric affirmations are bringing whole gangs of MAGA supporters out of hiding, out into the open, like the Neo-Nazi rallies in Nashville, Tennessee, Columbus, Ohio, Portland, Oregon, Cincinnati, Ohio and a town soon near you. And do you see any of them being arrested or charged? That’s part of the usefulness of the MAGA sponsored steam heat, it frightens away true law-enforcement.
So what does one do with a pot of steaming hot water, to which more and more heat is still being applied? Online you can find sensible solutions like, “Listen and Understand” while you disagree, or “Manage your own reactions, keep calm” or “Engage constructively while looking for areas of agreement.”
Or you can do what real Americans do: Hold individuals accountable for using harmful language and lies. But be careful, when their words of stochastic terrorism becomes overwhelming and boils over, you are likely to become aware of your urge for physical retribution —said another way: riots. It is what they are counting on, for you to get so scalded, and then react with violence.
And here’s the lesson: Martin Luther King and Ghandi had it right: Protest in force and numbers non-violently. Oppose them with your presence, be like the young man in Tiananmen Square before those tanks, show up and protest and take the beating, show the real America what is right and expose the real message of fascists. Be the calm of righteousness, not the poison steam of evil. For these people are evil and want to change our nation to gain control over your life — all of your life, every aspect, every moral, every code, every freedom you currently have and will lose if they prevail. We have to oppose them, turn off their heat, before they scald us all.
Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, New York, now lives in Gila, New Mexico.
