It's Not Just a Billionaire Problem
We obsess over conspiracies instead of looking at ourselves
It’s not only the money that helps monsters get away with pedophilia. It’s also the passive complicity.
We pour our attention to Jeffrey Epstein and Diddy documentaries because it’s cathartic in these times when someone gets caught.
But in pouring over these spectacles, or losing yourself in online conspiracies, we’re missing what’s happening to our world.
The tasteless jokes, the attitudes that are allowed to be perpetuated, it all added up over the decades.
I remember a moment back in1999. Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time was released, and it was big enough to be in the hands of the kids in a particular suburban neighborhood where I happened to be talking to some of the neighborhood guys.
One of the men was showing the CD to us. I barely knew who she was. Spears wasn’t eighteen yet, and on the cover she looked even younger. The men started making very suggestive statements about Spears, and for a moment, the men made jokes about the prospect of fucking someone who looked thirteen years old.
I never said anything. I just waited for the conversation topic to change and went about my business. I never called anyone out.
Several years before that, I went to my old Christian Youth Organization where some classmates were hanging out over school break. They kept glancing at the younger girls in the group, mentioning how they were…growing…and making suggestive gestures behind backs.
I never went back after that, but I kept that to myself as well.
I don’t even have to turn that clock that far back. I can remember the summer of 2002, sitting in a Rhode Island church while Boston was smack dab in the middle of the clergy abuse scandal. Because the person I was seeing at the time thought this was the perfect time to get religion.
The Rhode Island priest at one point thanked the congregation for “not being the ones casting the first stone.” Mind you, at the point he said that, multiple stones had been cast.
I should have cried out “Bullshit!”
I have more personal examples, but I don’t even need to bring them up.
There are so many more recent examples.
I could bring up the sex trafficking case with a man in Canton, Massachusetts from about two years ago.
There’s a former Stoughton police officer is part of an ongoing case where he is charged with grooming and eventually killing a woman, all while being a policeman.
Why do we still see people blindly putting up “Back the Blue” bumper stickers after hearing stories like this?
Because who will arrest all these pedophiles, I guess!
It’s a cliche at this point, a “Simpsons” meme: Who will think of the children?!?
Except we as a nation don’t really care about children, do we?
Not really. Not anymore.
We just had a police officer in Mississippi shoot a one year old over shoplifting. It barely lasted a news cycle.
Bills are being passed banning child marriage and AI deepfake porn of children, but there is opposition.
If that teaches us anything, it’s that Trump’s base, the new decadent conservative voters, only care about their children if they parrot back what they say and do.
Some see their children as less than human, breeding stock to carry on their twisted values.
Otherwise, why would they keep supporting a president who is not only a convicted rapist but a suspected pedophile.
For the last two years, Trump and Friends have done everything short of faking an alien invasion to cover up the Epstein Files they claimed would be released in full.
And they’ve succeeded.
We’re not mentally equipped to process the growing horror in our world.
An “online rape academy” was recently revealed to the the world, and all Snopes can do is dicker over the exact number of site visitors.
As if that puts any of the horror back in the box.
We’re still not able to deal with the fact that Trump has taught us a terrible truth:
When people look the other way, it gives you the power to do anything.
The rest of the people living in dwindling sanity have long stopped hoping for Trump to be dragged out of the White House in chains. We can only hope that he dies soon and takes his Teflon coated soul with him while his followers are dragged back into the world of consequences.
But how can there be consequences when it seems like everyone is guilty?
In 2024, millions of people were willing to vote for a man who was photographed with a convicted and dead pedophile.
It’s safe to say that more than one person is okay with the president possibly being a pedophile.
Logic would dictate that some of these people are okay with pedophilia itself.
And these people are potentially able to identify each other more easily offline just on the basis of their clothing and paraphernalia.
That’s all it takes now to create enablers co-conspirators. No private island or millions in cash required.
That’s all it takes to create a clandestine group of people who feel empowered under what we jokingly call the current political climate.
When Trump was first elected, there were reported cases of men harassing women, feeling emboldened to act on Trump’s base instincts.
How else are evil people going to act when evil is allowed to perpetuate?
We are not ready to stomach or deal with what is potentially coming down the road.
If we choose to limit our ire towards the billionaires and Hollywood, we are overlooking the horrific complacency that has emerged in our society.
And the monsters in waiting will be more prepared than us.