As you see from the last entry, I have taken a break from this blog. After months of writing about the danger imposed by Donald J. Idiot on our democracy and our population in general, I needed to back away and take a longer perspective on it all.
And, what I am seeing has both good and bad implications. For starters, Joe Biden has stepped into the office of the presidency and done a much better job than even liberal pundits expected him to do. He has worked steadily on several fronts to create a new government that is the almost exact antithesis of what the Idiot had in place. Instead of a daily litany of lies from his pathetic press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, who obfuscated and lied without even a twinge of conscience, we have Jen Psaki, who comes across as clear-headed and honest. And, I do not believe that is some clever acting on her part. It's who she really is, and the transparency and competence that she brings is like a fresh breeze blowing in off the ocean on a muggy day.
So, perhaps the easiest approach to understanding where we are at this point, is to simply ask ourselves: "Am I better off than I was six months ago or two years ago?" And, of course, the reality of living inside of a pandemic is a complicating factor.
What I have noticed, and I am not alone in this apparently, is that I don't face each day with a deep sense of dread. "What is the asshole going to do today to fuck-up our country, our lives?" This has been a very disheartening four years, on so many levels that I won't even attempt to elaborate on it here. You know what I am saying unless you're a Kool-Aid.....one who took the Trump poison and lost all connection with decency and even 'reality', since 'truth' has become an elusive thing for anybody who sucks on the conservative lie machine.
I don't care what the conservative punditry says. The line-up of Fox, OANN, and NewsMax pundits is like a line-up in a police station. Tucker Carlson is perhaps the big winner in the category, having told more egregious lies, fanned more hatred of others, warped anything resembling 'truth' into something much darker and more devious. He's vying for 'Scumbag of the Year', as far as I can tell. But, then, we also have Sean Hannity, whose lips are in a permanent lip-lock on the Idiot's sphincter. Laura Ingraham is an astonishing piece of cynical, lying, hate mongering, racist and even mysogynist work. Her world-view is utterly devoid of anything resembling honor, compassion, clarity....and on and on. This is just the beginning of the endless list of GOPs and pundits who are, collectively speaking, prosecuting an assault on our democracy itself.
For the reasons that all liberals and progressives immediately recognize, these people do not want an America that is run by elections....fair and transparent ones that make voting as accessible as possible...for ALL PEOPLE. The above mentioned punditry works for the oligarchs, whether or not they would ever admit it. They, either consciously or out of ignorance, want the uber-rich to run the world. There should be no limits on how they are free to eliminate all impediments to their continued looting of society. Whether it means letting oil and mineral companies rape the environment in order to wrench all of the remaining oil and minerals out of the earth, or removing any obstacles to their continued plundering of the financial world. They already have more money than God, but, that is not even a consideration when it comes to what they are planning in the near future.
They want it ALL.
Simple as that. The uber-rich do not have any idea that you can actually have enough money. In their warped reality, that is impossible.... not while there is anything left to plunder. Of course, the net result of this approach is a planet left in ruins. Wars, environmental catastrophes, financial collapse, famine and endless suffering is all just an inevitable result of the endless greed that they have turned into some kind of arcane and very dark religion.
Increasingly, it is clear that we are living in both a deeply wounded and dysfunctional society, and that the conservative plan for the future includes more of the same, with it all run by old white men, who are both racist, and fascist. They don't want, and certainly cannot afford to allow people of color, women, non-Christians or anybody who is not of their choosing to run, well, any damn thing. They want complete control and all necessary mechanisms to maintain it. And, when you begin to sort out what that would look like....regimes like the Nazis suddenly begin to pop-up.
You don't have to be a history buff to realize that the people who assaulted America on January 6th had many and alarming qualities that they share with the Brown-shirts of Hitler's Germany. They actually...many if not most of them....expected that they could kidnap democratic members of the house and senate, and turn the government over to the Idiot. Yes, it's become clear that stealing the government seemed doable. This is a level of delusional thinking that is quite astonishing...but, it is real. Nobody needs to make-up stories around that whole sorry chapter. Yes, it really did happen. Yes, it was provoked by the Idiot in Chief, and yes, it could have been a huge disaster, much greater than it was.
It could have been the actual END OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY.
But, thanks to some heroic and timely actions by a spectrum of individuals, it did not turn out that way. And, now we have a man in the oval office who will do his best to heal, undo and mitigate the vast damage inflicted on everything the Idiot touched. Joe Biden, whatever else you can say about him, is SINCERE. If you cannot see that about him, then you are looking at him through distorted lenses.
I have been observing people all of my life. I have made every effort to understand why people are how they are, what they do and for what reasons. I spent my undergrad years working to clarify for myself what is right and why...and what is wrong, and why. It's not as simple as some might think. In the course of doing this, I have put considerable energy into gleaning where people get their world-views. Yes, the old 'nurture vs. nature' conundrum is in the mix. But, it goes much deeper than that.
People are these complex organisms, made-up of hair, teeth, meat and bones. But, this organic vehicle is inhabited by a soul. You can deny that or choose to argue against it but I have several actual life experiences that will override your ideas. I have been almost killed twice, once in a car wreck, and once on a scaffold that collapsed. I left my body and watched these situations unfold from a bank camera perspective. I know beyond any doubt whatsoever that we have a 'spirit' , a 'soul' or whatever name you want to give it. So, leave your theories in the realm of the blithely theoretical. They cannot touch actual experience.
And, as much as people have souls, so do the organizations they create. America has a soul. True. It is the amalgam of all of us. And, right now it is acting like it has some very dark and potentially lethal cancer. Every time there is another mass shooting, you are watching this cancer at work destroying parts of the greater being that is US.
Our society is gravely ill, and, as a result it is producing individual 'cancer cells' who turn on it and seek to inflict lethal violence as evidence of their own pain. Making guns harder to obtain won't eliminate this ongoing and frequent phenomenon. It could slow it down a bit, which would certainly make daily life a little safer. But, ultimately, we need to work on finding a vaccine that will stop it.
That vaccine will have to have some level of compassion and understanding. It won't be effective if it merely identifies lethal 'cells' and allows us to isolate them. We already have the largest prisoner population on the planet and it is actually making things worse rather than better.
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| Ruth Bader Ginsburg modelled compassion perhaps as well as any modern figure |
I do not give a fig if what I am about to say sounds 'new agey'. The simple truth is that we need to find a way to harbor enough compassion for our fellow human beings that we can stop attacking them for simply being who they are. Compassion is not 'new agey' in fact. It is the most common and visible form of WISDOM that humans are capable of manifesting. Compassion is very straight-forward and easy to comprehend: it is the acceptance of the underlying and over-arching knowledge that despite the appearances of differences....we are all deeply and inexorably connected by our shared humanity.
The cancer will continue to metastasize as long as we continue down the road of rejecting those who disagree with us and put our energy into dominating them instead of understanding them and knowing that one way or another.....................................we have to decide to get along.
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