From the point of view of ogres, fairy tales are for sissies. The heroes and heroines are all fluffy characters with perfect hair and pointy shoes, but the ogres! Man, we should pay more attention to those ogres! They have muscle and girth and power!

Well, welcome to the dark side of a fairy tale. We are inside the ogre now, learning first-hand what it is like to live the ogre’s character.

We’re pushing poor people, women, people of color, gay and transgender people way back into deep shadows with our mighty fists, stuffing them out of sight and out of mind. The news we watch on TV and read in our newspapers and magazines – that’s just so much dust under our feet. We don’t need facts or data, so we smash research findings and rip them from government files any time we find them inconvenient.

We torture children. We are ogres.

The immigrants coming through the southern border are sleeping on the ground, crowded by the hundreds into a room so small they have to stand and sit on one another, imprisoned for months on end with nothing to do but watch the guards with guns watching their every move. We don’t treat their illnesses, or let them keep their children with them. We lose their children and let their children die.

We put them in the ogre’s cave. Captured, shaking in fear.

If anyone gives water and food to migrants fleeing for their lives, we  lock them up in jail. We are ogres.

If women dare to make their own decisions about their own bodies, especially in the case of abortions, we threaten them with a murder trial. We are ogres.

We don’t need environmental regulations and can live just fine with dirty air. Climate change is something a few scientists made up just to scare us. We need oil and more oil, and we have the right to dig up Native American burial grounds and any other pristine landscapes we want in order to move oil from one place to another.

“It’s mine! All mine! This land, all your gold and jewels and riches. Give me everything you have. It’s mine.” Famous words of infamous ogres.

We have no need for health care, or a public education system, or relationships with other world leaders. We can get by without safeguarding our social media and our voting system from the Russians and other hackers who want to destabilize our democracy.

Oh, and by the way. Christianity is a different religion than the one you thought you knew. We do not help the poor and needy. We do not heed the cries of children and migrants. Turn away. Turn away, for we are ogres.

We do not love everyone. We have exceptions. In these days of the ogre, you are supposed to exclude and vilify people you don’t like, everyone who isn’t in the mainstream you know. Rather than being compassionate, you are supposed to lash out at your enemies, bully them and call them names. Christianity is only for those who are “pure” in the eyes of certain elected officials and mega-church preachers.

“. . . It’s mesmerizing and hard for anyone to look away. Me, too. It is the nature of grotesque things that you can’t look away.” What was this person speaking about? A TV reality show? The killing of whales or giraffes? Some horrible creature created in a lab?

Actually, it was Pete Buttigieg, a Democratic candidate for President, speaking about the repetitive belittling he and others have received in the tweets and comments of Donald Trump. By using the word grotesque, Buttigieg captured the most bothersome elements of Trumps personal attacks on people: they are a distorted, repulsive, twisted, mangled and mutilated use of the office of the President.

“It’s a very effective way to command the attention of the media,” Buttigieg said. “I think that we need to make sure that we’re changing the channel from this show that he’s created. . .”

The problem is, the ogres are in charge. And ogres do not like to be disturbed, or crossed. They will eat you alive if you get in their way.