2024: Monsters Revealed
If we want a happy ending to our human story, let’s make a vow today that we won’t drag 2024’s horror show into the new year.
2024: Monsters Revealed
by C. A. Matthews
Every genre of fiction has its purpose. While the horror genre is far from being my favorite, even I can see it has its uses. In a horror film, we see true evil and learn who the real villains are and what sort of monsters we’re up against. The plot of a horror movie usually revolves around fighting against the monsters, sometimes losing, but sometimes winning. In the end, the Blob is defeated. The teen slasher is himself slashed. The vampire gets a wooden stake through the heart.
If there was one genre that sums up the world’s happenings in 2024 it would be the horror genre. To be more precise, 2024 has been a first-rate, B-grade monster movie where the monsters and their terrorizing actions have been revealed for all to see. There’s no doubt who and what the monsters are, and what we’re up against in the new year. It’s now up to us to survive the coming horrors and to take out as many monsters as possible before they get us.
If there were such an award, I’d award The Monster of the Year title to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. (For more on Blinken’s “winning traits” read Liar, Liar! World’s On Fire!) No one person encapsulates everything that is so purely evil simply for the sake of evil than Antony Blinken does. Sure, soon-to-be-former President Joe Biden and Bibi Netanyahu are in the top three, but Blinken is the ultimate monster in the fact that there’s no good reason he should lie as monstrously as he does, as much as he does, but he does. He just can’t seem to help himself.
Joe Biden has always been a liar, a cheat, a plagiarizer, a racist, as well as an Senate intern sexual molester and child hair sniffer. The public has been semi-aware of Biden’s horrendous character traits for a long time. They weren’t exactly well kept secrets. In 1977 Biden called predominantly African American schools “jungles” and stated that he didn’t want his children to attend desegregated schools in “racial jungles”. Biden being labeled “Genocide Joe”, an ethusiastic genocide-enabler for arming Israel in its racist total destruction of the Palestinian people, is probably considered icing on the cake to him. He has always maintained that he’s proud of his actions.
And Netanyahu? What would you expect from a zy-0-nist bigot on a power high? No surprises there. He hates all Palestinians, from the oldest grandfather in a wheelchair down to the newborn babies freezing to death in refugee camps this past week. Of course, Biden and Bibi are monsters, but would you expect any more of them knowing their sordid histories? They seem fated to dwell in the halls of infamy.
But with Antony Blinken you get a hint of intelligence and an appearance of decorum with his racism while serving as the top diplomat of the United States of America. He should know better than to continually lie about what’s happening in West Asia. He knows what’s happening to the innocents there, not just the propaganda put out by CIA-tutored and Israeli brainwashed mainstream media pundits. Blinken knows that the actual death count is now at least a quarter million and rising daily, but he won’t admit it. He’ll repeat whatever hasbara his Israeli masters tell him to repeat. He isn’t bothered to see justice done in the world.
Or maybe it’s that Blinken gets off on the fact that he’s covering for the genocide happening in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria…? He really enjoys seeing others suffer while the rich get richer. That alone is the defining trait of a monster. The total lack of empathy while smiling at the cameras at press conferences while lamely excusing the latest massacre in Gaza and then wishing everyone on his Twitter/X feed a “Merry Christmas and Peace on Earth.” What a performance! What a cold-hearted, sadistic hypocrite Blinken is!
Other monsters revealed this past year were, of course, the Israeli military. Whether you call them the “IDF” (defense forces) or the “IOF” (occupation forces), they’re the most despicable excuse of an army ever created. These young men and women have been brainwashed from birth to despise and fear the natives of the land their elders have stolen and bombed since 1948. They shoot little children in the head and burn down hospitals with patients inside and then joke about it openly online. They force Palestinian doctors and nurses to strip off in the cold and then march them off to Israeli torture prisons. They’ve killed over 200 journalists in Gaza since October 2023. Sick.
You want to think there’s some flicker of humanity lurking somewhere inside these soldiers’ hearts, but their sadistic TikTok videos and Instagram posts reveal they suffer the same soul sickness as Blinken, Biden, and Netanyahu. They have no empathy. They qualify as sociopaths or psychopaths. Israeli soldiers are legions of demons in the making, if not already full-blown creatures of racist hatred. An army of monsters creating hell on earth.
But not every monster revealed in 2024 was to be found in a battle zone. Americans have experienced the malevolence of the monsters called “For-Profit Health Insurance CEOs” for many decades now. They have lived in the fear of these “death panels” of the health insurance capitalists who made over $75 billion in profits last year by denying health care claims. Truly, dealing with private health insurance is a nightmare most Americans wish they could wake up from.
Working class Americans’ lives—as well as the lives of their children and other dependents—rest in the hands of these CEO bogeymen in expensive designer suits. Whether Americans will receive needed surgery or medical treatments, whether or not they will be able to afford live-giving medicines such as insulin, whether they will live or die tomorrow is all up to these smug devils sitting behind desks. You are deemed worthy or not of health care simply because of how much it will “cost” your health insurance company, a capitalist enterprise that gladly accepts your money in premiums but very slowly lets go of any of your money when you are sick or injured.
One CEO monster revealed to the public recently was United Healthcare’s Brian Thompson. Gunned down on a Manhattan sidewalk, was there anything unique about Thompson, a drunk driving millionaire who was being investigated by the feds on insider trading charges at the time of his death? Probably not. Thompson’s face could be the face of dozens of other for-profit health insurance industry executives, capitalists who willingly allow an average of 68,500 Americans to die each year due to lack of health care while the health insurance and pharmaceutical corporations rake in hundreds of billions of dollars in profit.
How many Americans have died or been seriously harmed due to Thompson’s corporation’s actions alone? Thousands upon thousands? The man who is accused of shooting Thompson, Luigi Mangione, is being hailed as a hero, a monster killer. If your entire city was wiped out due to the actions of one CEO, anyone willing to stop this CEO’s merciless killing spree would be considered a hero, wouldn’t he? A brave slayer of monsters deserves our thanks and praise, not the mass murderer.
Now that some of the monsters of 2024 have been revealed, let’s consider ways to rid ourselves of their sociopathic villainy once and for all.
There’s always one teenager who makes it through the slasher flick and survives to tell the tale of the chainsaw/kitchen knife wielding psychopath who came after him and his buddies during their camping trip. Put yourself in the survivor’s shoes and think how we can cull these creatures of hatred and bigotry. We might have to think like they do in order to defeat them, but it’s hard to think like a sociopath if you have an ounce of conscience, isn’t it?
Perhaps that’s a good thing. Last week’s post (The Peace Tree) should act as a testimony that releasing more hatred, bigotry, and greed into the world isn’t going to make it a better place. Just the opposite. We need to replace the world’s monsters with gentle, brave, and empathetic doves. Doves that rebuild shattered cities and societies. Doves that provide humane care for those who are sick or hungry or homeless.
We don’t need to change out the old monsters with new ones as many suggest. We need a whole new system of being, a new way of relating to one another that doesn’t require CEO devils in expensive suits. We don’t need to create more monsters who’ll bomb and genocide our way into more problems. We need actual diplomats who won’t keep covering for war criminals through the use of false words and disingenuous smiles.
The power of greed is demonstrated perfectly by the CEO monsters, so the greed element must be eliminated. Health care—in fact, all human rights designated by the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights—must be provided without question by all governments. No questions, just basic human rights maintained.
Scientists in a recent report state that a mere 30% of the Earth’s resources could support the 8.5 billion people currently living on the planet. There’s no need for anyone to go without their basic needs to food, shelter, health care, and education being met. It’s the diabolical distribution method of the monstrous capitalist system that causes “artificial scarcity” in the race for more profits, not Mother Nature.
Our rapidly heating planet—and the growing number of hurricanes, floods, and storms—proves that wars for climate-destroying fossil fuels must end and clean energy methods developed. Violent conflicts such as the ones in Palestine and Syria were created for the sole purpose of generating profits for a small number of monsters called Big Oil CEOs and their paid-off politicians. We’ve already determined these monsters don’t need to exist. If we want a happy ending to our human story, let’s make a vow today that we won’t drag 2024’s horror show into the new year.
Happy New Year to you and yours. May the monster slayers reveal themselves and may the peaceful doves land in the positions where they are needed most to make this a welcoming world for all its peoples.
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Related Articles and Other Interesting Links
In Search of Empathy https://scottritter.substack.com/p/in-search-of-empathy
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Blinken gets my vote for "Monster of the Year"! Kamala Harris would be second because she tried so hard to not look like the monster she is. https://dianeengelhardt.substack.com/p/monsters
I wish this was a funny horror movie, but it isn't alas. The monsters are real and they've fooled millions into thinking they're the heroes of the story. We've got our work cut out for us this coming year. Down with the monsters! Up with the workers of the world!