The One Grieving Stage of the TPLF

 

Dear TPLF: 

Youse guys are not having a good past couple of few years. Remember when your Dear Leader Meles Zenawi said something like, “If you want to come at us, do it like we did: by the gun.” And you all had a hearty laugh…

Oopsy.

So, wha’ha’happen is, it appears that some rando whipper snapper said, “Hold my Nobel Peace Prize” and went on to give you low-key shellacking of epic proportions. And now, after having just gotten used to seeing all your obnoxious honchos sitting on crushed-velvet-and-rhinestone armchairs, we are watching gripping perp walks of vaunted TPLF leaders paraded in front of us in ill-fitting jumpsuits after being dragged out of caves.

No bueno.

Listen, that must have hurt. To be routed like that… separated so cruelly from your hardcore nouveau riche excesses and bedazzled camouflage pants... to be picked off by said whipper snapper as if you were petulant children who finally had to be slapped around… who wants that? No one, that’s who. (We will ask you what happened later. As in, how in the every F’s did Abiy manage to make you bend the knee? Yep--  Game of Thrones reference. SorryNotSorry.)  

So now you have skipped several steps in the grieving process and gone from ouch to burn-this-mother-down in 30 seconds. You are so blinded by anger and revenge that you are on a ruthless quest to bring down Ethiopia.

When will you learn?  

It has been fascinating to watch the past few months where TPLF operatives have been rabidly throwing fistfuls of excrement on the wall to see what sticks. Meanwhile, Abiy, in Hall-of-Fame trolling of the savage kind, went about his business as if he just didn't crush TPLF and its merciless three-decade rule. 

As the philosophers Key and Peele put it, "insubordinate... and churlish."  

So TPLFers washed down several ADHD meds with whiskey and sprite and lobbed. Genocide? Anyone for genocide? Ethnic cleansing… anyone want to talk about ethnic cleansing? No, not the ones committed by the TPLF. What about... chemical warfare? 

Hell hath no fury like a sociopath scorned.

And because the media in the west has been salivating for another genocide in Africa (it’s been too long, guys?), and because the UN is now a failed state that needs any kind of crises to deflect from its incompetence, everybody jumped on the carousel and merrily went on about parroting accusations from drama queens who would rather fortify the image of Africans unable to resist a good ethnic cleaning than do the right thing—slink away with the hundreds of millions they stole and retire in DC and Denver in houses with preposterously massive chandeliers.

TPLF has fast-forwarded from Stage One of grief (shock and disbelief) and built a thorny nest on Stage Five (anger) and is refusing to budge even as the tide turns. TPLF is like the Arizona recount of the US elections: comical in the way that using X-rays to see if ballots were made from bamboo is ha-ha-ha, but serious in that it wants to carpet bomb democracy after a sound defeat.

Dear TPLF,

And it gives us no pleasure giving you advice. j/k- we do.

You are trying to do what bigger armies have not been successful in doing. In the throes of your rule, when you were at your most powerful, you constitutionally dived Ethiopia into ethnic clusters. Like colonial powers in Africa, you systematically wrought division on a population and sat back and watched it work for a while. But even then, you had to be reduced to pettiness like imprisoning superstar Teddy Afro who became wildly popular for singing about a united Ethiopia.

We know you were busy with the inflicting of brutality and the distorting of history. It’s a thankless job. We get it (not really). But what you could not solve for in 27 years was how to destroy that crazy, intangible, visceral, irrational, prevailing, annoying love Ethiopians have for Ethiopia. And if you could not destroy that when you had every possible power at your disposal, what makes you think you can now?

You are trying to stay relevant through terror and lies because it is the only thing you know. The thing is, the Ethiopian people are over paying for your unresolved childhood traumas. And a new generation is telling you, clearly, that Winter is Coming.  

Signed,

All of Us