Well, in at least this case, a blog post.
Edit 2024: Well I found this unfinished draft. I am pretty sure I wanted to take a look at 4-5 shirts but two shirts will just have to be where it ends....
Apparently, the people that lived at our current address must have received a catalog from a company called "The Lighter Side". Inside, however, something dark, very dark lurked. Barf-inducing t-shirts. Yeah, let's take a look. Here are some t-shirts worn by "REAL AMERICANS" they might be wearing right now!
Check out this macho shirt. That's right folks, we don't run from a fight, oh, HELL NO.
When 12 dudes decided to use airplanes for murder, we didn't run, NO SIR. Instead, we will spend at least $2.7 trillion over twenty years on war (that was in 2017).
If you want to enlarge that to the "Global War on Terrorism" we likely spent above $6 trillion.
Yeah, those terrorists that attacked on 9/11 got us good but we sure showed them. Sure, they were dead. Sure, they wanted us to bumble into a decades-long war, but we sure showed them....something.
But that's not all, it's not all about money. After all, we RELOAD!!! The result would be over 7,000 US troops dead, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi & Afghani civilians dead, hundreds of thousands more severely injured, hundreds of thousands traumatized, millions more would suffer the loss of a close family member or friend and don't forget, tens of thousands more to die by suicide as a direct result of their service or the trauma suffered during our twenty-year plus war on Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yup, good thing we didn't run, that sure would be a God damn shame.
The arrogance on this t-shirt is something to behold and it explains the way people who would buy this shirt see the world: full of danger, criminals, and the certainty that they know better.
I sure as hell don't like guns they kill about 40,000 Americans a year but you don't have to like or dislike guns to know that your house is much safer WITHOUT a gun in it than it is with it. I know this first hand from personal experience in our family.
If you have a gun in your house you are more likely to have an accidental shooting or murder in your home. This has been seen in study,after study, after study.....The fantasy of saving your family from someone trying to break into your home is a powerful narrative but life is more boring for most of us.
In fact, the gun in someone's home is much more likely to be used for suicide by a family member than in home defense action. Half of US gun deaths are suicides. But of course, no, those things wouldn't happen to you, just couldn't happen. We know 17 of the 20 states with the highest gun death rates are dyed-in-the-wool Republican states. More guns and ease of access to guns equals more deaths and more shootings. It's not that difficult to figure out, but it's a point often challenged.
The narrative of saving the day is so powerful it plays to ideas of masculinity and a media obsessed with danger, violence, and crime. In many ways, gun ownership becomes a conservative self-own.
If guns kept us safer, then our death cult country would be safer than our industrialized peers and that's not what the data shows us. We've been fooled, conned, and bamboozled into signing up to the notion that we can't change the way things are....and that the only way out of the problem is more of the problem.
