I recently saw a “salty meme” telling people if they had turned a blind eye to Biden flying border-crossers helter-skelter around the country in the middle of the night, they had no right to whine about the fifty people DeSantis flew to Martha’s Vineyard.
A real “galaxy brain” in the comments below said something to the effect that if you had supported Biden coming into office, you weren’t entitled to whine about him now that things have gotten so bad.
Obviously, this person had never played Red Rover.
Not to give any Squid Game Season II spoilers (I’ll crap myself if they actually play some version of Red Rover in the next one – lol) but Red Rover was a game that we played in grade school in the “before-time.” Before phones. Before laptops. Before Nintendo and Super Mario Bros.
It was a little like dodge ball – only there were no balls, just people – running headlong into a wall of other people.
Yes – you heard that right. It was basically a physical representation of “trolling a comment thread” before either the Internet OR “trolling” had been invented.
You’d split into two (hopefully) evenly matched teams. Then one team linked arms as tight as they could and began to chant the magical siren song of my childhood.
“Red Rover, Red Rover, send Jenny right over!”
When Jenny heard her name, she’d start out at a maddening sprint toward the other team with the goal to “make a hole” in their Wall. If she burst through and wasn’t stopped, she brought one person from where she breached back to her own team. However, if she was stopped, she then had to play for the other side.
Of course, there’s strategy involved. You want to pick the weakest players from the other team first. When your name is called, you look for the smallest people in the line and try to make your breach there.
But generally, since this was a game we played as “a class” we were all friends. And when we were “captured” by the other team we laughed and happily joined forces with our new alliance. Oh yes – on occasion there were “saboteurs” – kids who purposefully let a friend breach the line to take them back to their “preferred” team. The thing about Red Rover though was that no team “won” until the very last team member of the “opposing” team was captured – meaning no matter how “stuck up” you were, you couldn’t have a “popular-kids-over-the-nerds” victory because the objective was to become ONE team.
There are a LOT of “teams” in our current political climate.
Sure, we think of the Big R “Right” and the Big L “Left” as the main ones – but the reality is we’re just as fractured within our collectives as the two primary collectives appear to be fractured from each other.
On the Left you’ve got your Jimmy Dores and Bridget Phetasys who call out so-called Liberal Progressives for supporting policy that enriches big business, strengthens the military industrial complex, abuses workers and curtails free speech. But you have your Ryan Grimms and Brian Stelters who defend nearly everything the establishment Dems do as “political savvy” and smart maneuvering.
On the Right there’s a constant push-pull between the Dinesh D’Souzas who want the 2020 election investigated and possibly decertified and the Ben Shapiros who just want to pick new candidates and move on. You’ve got Alex Joneses who blame the WEF and corporate Globalists for the decline of civilization and the Seth Holehouses who blame the Communists.
And online we’re ALL taunting one another…
Send Cheney right over!
Send Tulsi right over!
Send Crowder right over!
Send Kulinski right over!
You know who taught us to play Red Rover? Our teachers. (Obviously.)
Sometimes we played at recess – but several times, in my grade-school years, I remember teachers taking just OUR class out to an otherwise empty playground – lining us up, splitting us into teams and pitting us against each other for 10 – 15 minutes at a time.
Why? Because we’d YELL. We’d RUN! We’d COLLIDE. And when we came back inside panting and thirsty and wiping sweat from our foreheads, we didn’t have the energy to talk to each other, pass notes or talk back. We would just sit down and do our multiplication tables or spelling or reading and the room would be SOOOOO quiet you could hear a pin drop. Pretty crafty – huh?
Make no mistake – YOU didn’t choose your Political Affiliation Jersey any more than you chose whether to be a One or a Two when your teacher counted you off down an arbitrary line you’d formed to go out the door.
THEY have split us into teams. THEY sit back and watch amused as we YELL at each other. RUN headlong into each other. COLLIDE with each other. All the while THEY keep hoping we NEVER figure out that the game would be over if we all just became ONE team. Meanwhile – it’s truly in our best interest to work WITH the ones who “come right over” instead of picking them apart and giving them bizarre purity tests.
“Oh – you took the vax??? Well I’m a “pure-blood” so I can’t be friends with YOU.”
“Oh – you don’t want to #DefundThePolice? Well, I CARE about communities of Color so you’re #BLOCKED.”
You know where you got those ideas from? News pundits and social media. You didn’t wake up one morning BURSTING with knowledge from GOD about mRNA and BLM. A holy angel didn’t descend from heaven in a pillar of light and tell you to take or not take the shot. George Floyd didn’t appear to you in a dream and tell you to Venmo some money to Patrisse Cullors so you’d be purged of your personal sins of racism.
You looked at information being fed to you by VERY well-funded sources and took your cues from that. Some people leaned into some narratives and away from others. And behind MOST of our sources (and “favorite” politicians) are vast quantities dolla dolla bills. Some of them come from corporate pharma. Some of them come for foreign governments. Some of them come from US-based lobbyist organizations – all willing to pump BIG money into shaping our thoughts and opinions.
But those of us who grew up playing Red Rover right before reading time haven’t been so trustful. We suspected the dividing lines were being formed by people whose main interest was to get us to spend all our energy fighting each other, so that once the dust settled, we’d sit down, shut up and let THEM be in charge.
If we had just chosen to become one team without the yelling and running and shoving, our teachers would have needed to find another way to wear us down into submission.
I’m not mad at my teachers. I don’t regret playing Red Rover. Little manipulations like that conditioned some of us into be manipulated. For others of us, it pulled back the veil of control and showed us the game BEHIND the game.
As much as I want to see humanity unite into a common team, I don’t think all proposals in the marketplace of ideas are equal OR tenable for a joyful, self-actualized society. I don’t think we should stop seeking the best ways forward just for the sake of “peace and quiet.”
But I’d sure like to see what new game THEY’D have to invent if we did team up long enough to just stopped fighting each other…