Exhibit B

This reply right here is the encapsulation of neoprogressivism. It's all about regurgitating a narrative without thought (the other side of the MAGA coin.) The guy responding is Belgian. Belgium was created by taking territory from the French and the Dutch. It was created because of the stupidity of war and religion, and it basically is the reason we have the equally as stupid concept of modern borders. 

Unfortunately, rightwing extremist politics is taking over there as well, as the Dutch speaking Flemish think they are better than the French speaking Walloons. I guess 80 years without war isn't good for them. Coincidentally, 80 years is the length of the war that started the process of the creation of Belgium.

Yellow Flag

Let me tell you about how I came to own a bright yellow Hezbollah t-shirt.

I left DC one July day not knowing my life was about to change forever. I was a year into a job and airbound for Paris, and then to the Paris of the Middle East.

As we descended into this new-to-me city, I stared out at the blue honey of the Mediterranean wondering how it was possible for any place to be that beautiful. I had been starved of travel for a couple of years, and I was beside myself at the prospect of going to this mysterious city by my favorite sea.

As soon as I left the smokiness of the Beirut airport and felt the outside air that was as wet as the sea, I knew I was in another world. I was INSIDE the news. I would be there for two weeks of meetings, with one weekend between them to see the proverbial sites. I met with various dignitaries, from the US ambassador and the country head of USAID to the Lebanese minister of economy and the Lebanese Obama, Minister of Interior Ziad Baroud. The first meeting was in a bar where I witnessed young people hold actual hope for Lebanon, for Ziad's electoral reforms had been substantial. The second was in the massive palatial office inside the Ministry of Interior itself, where he looked tiny behind the biggest desk I have ever seen in my life. In the end, he WAS tiny, and he ended up having to resign due to political bullshit, thus effectively ending a period of relative stability in a country where stability was a luxury.

But that was later.

I had that weekend to myself. On Sunday, I took what passes for public transportation from Beirut to Baalbek, one of the most preserved Roman ruins sites in the world. (That trip is a story itself. Suffice it to say that the Lebanese I met thought I was insane for undertaking it.) A fully standing temple to Bacchus stands on the site, sans roof but with most everything else intact. At the complex's exit sits one of the oddest places I have ever encountered - a Hezbollah gift shop.

You see, Baalbek is controlled by those Party of God fascists who fly a yellow flag with a violent green rifle on it. Because the site and the adjoining city are situated in the Bekaa Valley, being in Baalbek gives them access to fertile land to grow their drug crops. That's how they buy their weapons, in a nutshell.

Like every other religious group on this very stupid planet, they are absolute hypocrites -  growing drugs, making money off a temple to an ancient wine god, and controlling the distribution of alcohol they allow for us tourist infidels near the site.

No, I did not buy the t-shirt in their gift shop. I had a hard enough time justifying the admission fees.

After I had been climbing through the ruins for a few hours, I decided to have a snack and an Almaza beer across the street. While contemplating what it must have been like to be a pilgrim traveling to this temple complex in its full splendor, the scrawniest man I have ever seen came up to my table in the hopes of earning anything for a scrap of food. The man was clearly starving. I gave him what was left on the table and bought one of the bright yellow shirts from him. It was $5.

Lebanon is a microcosm of global inequality. Beirut is home to glittering skyscrapers built by billionaires and playgrounds for wealthy Gulfies to express their religious hypocrisy in drunken, drug-induced, whoring stupors. At the same time, you have neighborhoods like Dahieh (if it still exists after Israeli bombings), the Akkar region in the north, and pockets like around Baalbek scattered throughout the country that are some of the poorest on the planet. Desperate people tend to cling to whatever person or group tells them that they will save them. That's why Hezbollah exists. That's why the PLO existed and why Hamas exists now. That doesn't make it right; it's just the miserable state of human nature.

Let me be perfectly clear: I HATE Hezbollah. I HATE fascism in all its forms. What Hezbollah has done to the Lebanese people is akin to what Hitler did to the Germans. It was Hezbollah that destroyed that period of stability. It was Hezbollah that brought Israeli bombs. This world is better off without Hassan Nasrallah in it, though innocent people shouldn't have been murdered to end his life.

It's Hezbollah that keeps its followers mired in poverty.

I still have that t-shirt buried in a box in a closet. It's beneath a flag of the Christian fascist party of Lebanon, the Phalange, one of the two parties responsible for starting the 15 year war in Lebanon. I pulled that one down from a light pole, disgusted that it turned up in my neighborhood when I was living in Beirut a half a year later.

Why do I keep these symbols of hate, I wonder. They are no different than a swastika or a confederate flag or a MAGA hat. They all represent ideologies of hate for The Other.

I think I keep the t-shirt to remember that man, to remind me that people don't always consciously choose hate, that sometimes they are drowning and clinging to any life raft they can, even if that raft is sinking itself and will take them down with it. Yellow is the perfect color for those people. Hate is for cowards.

As for the flag, it reminds me of what people can do when they encounter hate. Rip the damn flag down. Don't just put up with it.

That's what we have to do in the coming darkness, no matter the danger to ourselves.

Blue

Let me tell you about the color of the European sky.

I noticed it almost immediately the first time I set foot on European soil. Before then I'd never been further north than Michigan, which starts nearly at the same latitude as the Mediterranean Sea. The scatter of sunlight appeared as the deepest blue I had ever had the good fortune to see, and to this day I make a note of it every time I'm in Europe.

It was under the spring version of this sky when I walked through one of the gates of Hell. Birds were celebrating the rebirth of the northern hemisphere with song. Flowers sprung up in every corner and crack in a sidewalk. The day was so clear that there wasn't even a haze over the mountains in the distance.

The beauty of that moment made standing on the site of one of the greatest atrocities humankind has ever known seem like just a plot to a horror movie. But as I walked through Satan's gate past the railroad tracks that carried more than a million human beings to their deaths, as I entered the rooms with the hard wooden bunks that had been the site of tortured sleep, as I looked up at the showerheads that had carried not water but deadly gas, as I kneeled by the ovens that had turned that cerulean sky to ash, I understood the evil that human beings can carry inside them. I cried.

I was 22 years old. The place was Auschwitz.

It wasn't even the first concentration camp I had visited. I had been to Dachau in Munich, where I saw the "work makes you free" slogan for the first time, and to Terezenstadt in Prague, which served as the "model" camp to lie to the world about what these camps really were. It was a place where they used human beings - many of them children - as living propaganda. But seeing Auschwitz was on another level.

And for what? Ethnicity. Race. Religion. Sexuality. Political ideology. Disability. Immigration status. The same categories of human being a candidate for President of the United States has been inciting certain Americans to hate.

The Nazi concentration camp system started out as a mass deportation system. It ended up murdering millions of human beings.

God, I hope America didn't choose this path today. It CAN happen here. It IS happening here. We don't live outside of history.