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A phrase I’ve always detested whenever I would hear it goes something like, “First they came for me for I X, then they came for him because I Y, lastly they came for me and there was no one else to defend me,” or some idiotic diatribe like that. There are far too many examples in society of pathologically altruistic people who spend way too much time advocating for the interests of groups who in turn, quickly turn right around and dispose of them at a moment’s notice and never saw them for anything more than a useful idiot to be discarded after all the value had been extracted out of them. I’ve seen it with every group out there including my own family. People who will come to you with a sob story so you’ll take them in and then they proceed eat you out of house and home and after you’ve been consumed and spent, they say to themselves “The well’s all dried up here,” and then they move onto the next victim. They’ll quickly forget you ever existed and stop taking your phone calls when you need them. I had this discussion with a peer a long time ago who did a prison stint for activity he was part of when he was still in a gang. Got out and found he was PNG’d. He said to me, “All that work put in and this is how they’ll treat you. Damn. The hood forgets you really fast.”
I’m an enjoyer of parodies of that poem. One example that has been making the rounds:
First they came for the gypsies—I said nothing for I was not a gypsy.Then they came for the Somalis—and I said “good, make sure you get all the Somalis.”
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