Remember the Tea Party, (the real one, in Boston, not the anti-American, racist-inspired one of late)?  Remember when freedom of speech and an individual’s First Amendment rights took precedence over anyone else’s irrational desire to stifle them? Remember when the United States of America was a homogeneous amalgam of immigrants who collectively embraced the bold mandate that, “All Men Are Created Equal”?  Well, if you remember that last one, you either have memory issues or your history has been influenced by erroneous reportage and…you’re not black or brown, recently married to an English prince or a player in the NFL.

On Wednesday, at the NFL owners’ meeting, rather than focusing on the issues of players’ health and welfare, (or whether every fucking play should be able to be reviewed so that games can last for eight or nine hours of rad truck and life-threatening pharmaceutical ads), a posse of very white, mostly-wealth-inherited billionaires knuckled under to their bottle-tanned, Jabba the Hutt-ish leader and revoked their players’ Constitutional rights.  Please, don’t scoff at the notion that this is but a single, sports-metaphoric issue in an avalanche of cascading totalitarian momentum tumbling us toward a fascist state.  Daily, the President of our country disdains any responsibility for being truthful, rails at the notion that he is accountable to the rule of law and openly stirs his Tweetering pot of hatred to bring more and more brown or red-shirted, confused souls into frenzied lock-step.  He is but a few despotic proclamations away from unspooling the bold attempt at national equality, decency and fundamental morality that has been our foundation at home and our allure around the world.  In a blink, one horrible man, unfathomably narcissistic, inexplicably charismatic has risen to an unimaginably high station with the evilest intent…just like it’s happened over and over again in ‘real’ history.

…can’t you see?