I live in Utah. This is the land of the Jethros, there are so many here. I call these individuals Jethros, not in the way the Urban Dictionary defines them which is that of a hunky/hot guy. I define them as those that are the same ilk as the Beverly Hillbillies. That is a disservice to the hillbillies, but I think you get the meaning. So in the land of the Jethros, there are those that live here like me, who are NOT Jethros, but people that believe in science, democracy and the U.S. Constitution. I just got my Biden/Harris lawn sign for instance and renewed my membership to the ACLU, there is also a large portion of the U.S. that feels the same way.
The Jethros are those that believe the QANON bullshit, those that carry huge assault rifles to demonstrations about their rights to not wear a mask, without a mask, during a pandemic, those type of Jethros. Jethros exist all over the United States right now.
Myself and a lot of people that I know are quite distressed by these Jethro-types. We are disturbed (I think) that people could possibly be what appears to most of us that aren’t Jethros, to be absolutely bat shit crazy. I want to make sure that people know that this is not coming from my professional opinion as a therapist, I am not even going to go there that is a rabbit hole in itself and I don’t feel like I have the energy to address that right now. I just quit doing therapy after an entire week of at least 8-10 clients a day and I am putting on my “Citizen Tammy” hat, it is after hours. Not in the mood to diagnose the Jethro-type personality traits to tie it up into a nice tidy bow with the DSM 5. I am going to approach this as a patriot of the United States that loves their country, their fellow citizens and that believes in the power of the constitution that through the last few years has been used for toilet paper by the current administration if they even acknowledged it at all.
There is no sense that I can see these people following. If someone tells their sycophants that all news is fake, then they will not believe any news. So that is ensuring that you can pretty much do anything, such as shoot someone on 5th avenue and nobody will do anything. Because if it is on the news, which with how spread out our country is, is the only way we would know something like that happened, those people would literally sit with their hands over their ears going “lalalalalalalala” while the news is on. If there is only a few places that this so-called-leader tells people that the news IS real and that only says favorable things about him, how would said people ever know if the individual did anything wrong? Does anyone else see the insanity in this?
There are fancy words for what this all is, I am just trying to put in plain talk. If you take away the courts and the legal system by putting in corrupt individuals to run this branch of the government, then you take away the checks and balances. If you put someone in office that also wipes his ass with the constitution, this is also incredibly dangerous. No checks and balances. This is corrupting the entire government. If you then put people in key positions to destroy the education system and even the postal service, you are pretty much taking out the government and any form of education for a systematic dumbing down of the citizens you are even tampering with the voting process during a pandemic. None of this is conspiracy theory, this is actually happening. It is being done before our eyes and nobody seems to be doing anything. This is bat shit crazy.
People that blindly follow someone that consistently lies, is caught on tape doing so and doesn’t even deny the words that everyone can hear but always appears to have an excuse that makes no sense about why he said it and they believe him are bat shit crazy.
People that don’t believe in climate change when the entire fucking world is on fire are bat shit crazy.
People that think that they won’t get a virus that can kill them (they have seen ice skating rinks in New York used for morgues), are bat shit crazy. Those that get angry are even more crazy.
I guess if it is survival of the fittest, maybe we can wait for Darwin’s views to finally actually come to fruition. If people keep going to rallies shoulder to shoulder with no mask on, or even protest without masks, (the BLM movement at least has the smarts to wear masks, bless their hearts, so that tells you who is smarter about this matter), may just start the “herd mentality” (herd immunity, I was just making fun of Donald Trump there) in motion on it’s own. That will cause the maiming and people dying that are Trump supporters stupid enough to not wear a mask. I mean it is mean to say, but might possibly end up being true.
I wrote the following earlier today in a social media post:
“Herd immunity, is another term for ‘survival of the fittest’. You are a selfish prick if you think like that. I think ‘herd immunity’ said like that, rather than ‘survival of the fittest’ is trying to reconcile it to feel better about yourself and a way to justify genocide. Like for instance, it is ‘herd immunity’ to give the Native Americans in the U.S. in the past, Small Pox exposed blankets to kill them off. I am afraid that is genocide. ‘That way they have it, so that they can't get it again’.”
Then there is QANON. To be honest, it just looks like a bunch of Jethros in action. To be honest, it looks too stupid to even read about. I have heard it is some movement/conspiratorial belief system that makes it out that Donald Trump is secretly smart? And is somehow doing these things secretly? Well if he was really smart wouldn’t he have shown his true colors as this absolute wizard during a fucking pandemic? Also, if he was really that smart, when was he waiting to show us these true colors, after more than 200,000 people are dead? Fucking ridiculous. What is the master plan behind that?
PUTIN, I mean COME ON, how can these people NOT NOTICE that he kisses Putin’s ass? He is doing things that benefit Putin? Okay if he is this great guy, then why in the fuck is he ruining his own country and undermining it to help Putin in Russia? HE IS CORRUPT. MY GOD! How much more do you have to see to understand this? Do you even understand or know the bullshit you are spewing?
The people that the media questions about masks are Jethros at Trump rallies and when they speak you sit just embarrassed as fuck that these are U.S. citizens. In fact they make absolutely no sense to very little. You can just see the germs crawling on the old man as he says he doesn’t believe in the virus, in some of the worst grammar I have ever heard wearing a MAGA hat.
I remind everyone about how the book Animal Farm by George Orwell described this. If the Jethros even pick up books they may have read it. They are the individuals that really should with the point I am about to make. In the book, which is based on the Russian Revolution, the animals on the farm want something better and Farmer Jones is a drunken farmer that treats his animals horribly. Old Major a boar pig talks revolution and a set of rules for all the animals. He ends up dying and Snowball and Napoleon two younger pigs start a revolution against the farmer that owns the farm, due to the fact that he treats them poorly and overworks them. Eventually Snowball is run off and made to be a villain, and Napoleon takes over as a sole and supreme leader. The animals blindly believing it when they say that they are going to make things better and they follow them. But sooner than later, they start being treated in the same way after all the sacrifices they make, some of the animals even confess to things they don’t do and suffer for it.
Also, they see and hear things that prove that something was amiss, but they later question themselves or take the blame for it in the name of the cause. At the end, they are all just as miserable and cold and starving as they always have been. They are overworked, things like the windmill that was promised for a better life doesn’t happen. Even the horse, Boxer which has been the most supportive animal of all and that helped them with trying to keep the farm going and to build the windmill, still had the job of doing the things he had always done, is eventually sold off to slaughter after he is injured and unable to carry on as he has gotten older. At the end of the book the pigs dressed as humans cavorting in the house with the other farmer and you eventually can’t tell the difference between the pigs and the humans, they look the same. Pretty powerful book, that is all by memory from reading it as a kid.
It is almost like the Jethros are the animals in the book. They will blindly follow, they won’t believe anything they see or hear, and they question their own judgement when told to, while those of us that aren’t Jethros just sit back and shake our heads in disbelief.
Utah County has people that I consider to be irrational. They were on the news for the whole nation to see, people that were angered that their children would have to wear masks to school. The epitome of a Jethro. An embarrassing, bat shit crazy, Jethro.
I just hope eventually that the bat shit crazy ends, and that maybe something, anything will get these people to pay attention to reason. So we don’t end up not being able to tell who the farmers and the pigs are. It is like they are in some kind of hypnotic and dysfunctional psychosis. It reminds me of any charismatic leader out there who ever asked people to kill themselves to ascend and drink the Kool-Aid and even kill people in their homes. Those charismatic leaders were drunk on power. The types of followers were like the Jethros. The scary thing is that most of the people were “broken” people that followed them or were easy to indoctrinate. It is scary that these days that incorporates 38% or so of the country. There are that many broken or easily indoctrinated people? Really?
Bat Shit Crazy.
