No Christmas Spirit in Me

It is impossible to live in this world (look all around) without being depressed.

It's a city too late to be rescued from those who mean to destroy it.

The people of NY are protected by those in power who hate patriotism, the Constitution and the American way of living.

Who didn't own slaves back in colonial America?

I love and miss the freedom we once had.

Good in the world? Where? Who? The Bible tells me otherwise. Ever read the book of Revelation? Take time to read it one verse at a time. The world is so good and people are so nice that God destroyed the world with water long ago and will soon destroy it again with fire. God is wrong and we are right. We have no idea what lies ahead.

Quote:

I love and miss the freedom we once had.

What freedom have you lost?

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The story of Richard Patterson, once you delve into it, is consonant with Pape’s research. Trump appealed to him as an “in-your-face, brash ‘America First’ guy who has the interest of ‘We the People.’ ” But there was more. Decades of personal and political grudges infuse Patterson’s understanding of what counts as “America” and who counts as “we.”

Where Patterson lives, in the Bronx, there were 20,413 fewer non-Hispanic white people in the 2020 census than in 2010. The borough had reconfigured from 11 percent white to 9 percent.

Patterson came from Northern Irish stock and grew up in coastal Northern California. He was a “lifetime C student” who found ambition at age 14 when he began to hang around at a local fire station. As soon as he finished high school he took the test to join the Oakland fire department, earning, he said, outstanding scores.

“But in those days,” he recalled, “Oakland was just beginning to diversify and hire females. So no job for the big white kid.” The position went to “this little woman … who I know failed the test.”

Patterson tried again in San Francisco, but found the department operating under a consent decree. Women and people of color, long excluded, had to be accepted in the incoming cohort. “So, again, the big white kid is told, ‘**** you, we got a whole fire department of guys that look just like you. We want the department to look different because diversity is all about an optic.’ ” The department could hire “the Black applicant instead of myself.”

Patterson bought a one-way ticket to New York, earned a bachelor’s degree in fire science, and won an offer to join New York’s Bravest. But desegregation had come to New York, too, and Patterson found himself seething.

In 1982, a plaintiff named Brenda Berkman had won a lawsuit that opened the door to women in the FDNY. A few years later, the department scheduled training sessions “to assist male firefighters in coming to terms with the assimilation of females into their ranks.” Patterson’s session did not go well. He was suspended without pay for 10 days after a judge found that he had called the trainer a scumbag and a Communist and chased him out of the room, yelling, “Why don’t you **** Brenda Berkman and I hope you both die of AIDS.” The judge found that the trainer had “reasonably feared for his safety.” Patterson continues to maintain his innocence.

Later, as a lieutenant, Patterson came across a line on a routine form that asked for his gender and ethnicity. He resented that. “There was no box for ‘**** off,’ so I wrote in ‘**** off,’ ” he said. “So they jammed me up for that”—this time a 30-day suspension without pay.

Even while Patterson rose through the ranks, he kept on finding examples of how the world was stacked against people like him. “I look at the 2020 election as sort of an example on steroids of affirmative action. The straight white guy won, but it was stolen from him and given to somebody else.”

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