The Destruction Proof

My oldest son's introduction to Lego was largely through the release of Star Wars Lego in 1999 (which makes me feel fucking old, now, realizing that that was 20 years ago). He was three and totally in love with Star Wars, and I was still collecting Star Wars stuff at the time and bought some of the initial Lego releases. Of course, he also fell in love with Lego, though the Star Wars Lego releases were always his favorite, as opposed to my younger son who loves Bionicles the most. Which doesn't mean that he, also, doesn't have plenty of Star Wars Lego.

At three, though, building Lego was a bit beyond what my oldest could do. We would sit together and I would build the pieces while he watched and "helped" me find pieces and, sometimes, push a piece into place. And all was fine with the world...

...until we got the x-wing fighter Lego. The x-wing fighter was a bit larger and more complex than the other Star Wars Lego my son had, and he quickly learned that his favorite thing to do with it was to crash it. Of course, when he did, he couldn't fix it.

So, see, you have this Lego set that took... Okay, I don't actually remember how long it took to build it -- that was 20 fucking years ago -- but more than an hour, I'm sure, based on the build times for smaller sets I've done more recently. Not that it took that long to fix it, but it still took me much longer to put it back together than it took him to crash it. Over and over again.

Fortunately, the x-wing was a pretty simple design. Usually, it was just the wings he'd knock off, though, sometimes, he'd break the fuselage in half, a more complicated thing to fix. Still, it could take 10-15 minutes to fix it, and he'd turn right around and immediately crash it again. A few seconds worth of time.

All of that changed when we got him the Millennium Falcon. The Falcon was a large set that took hours to build and was a complicated design. That didn't stop him from having "crashing it" being his favorite thing to do with the set.

This is when this behavior became a huge issue, because there was no "fix" for the Falcon that took less than half an hour and, sometimes, he'd do something to it that would require sections of it to need to be deconstructed before it could be put back together again. There were times fixing the thing took almost as long as the initial build.

Then there was the Gungan sub, which had these long, thin, blue tube pieces that served as the propulsion system, like long thin straws that were too tiny to actually drink through. On top of crashing the sub all the time, he also chewed up the propulsion system. Yes, my son did that, not the dog. The tail piece got funkier and funkier as he went from chewing one tube to the next until it couldn't be put back together at all.

And, yes, we did talk to him, repeatedly, about crashing the Lego sets and chewing on the "straws." Especially about chewing on the straws, because he got more and more upset about the fact that the tail piece to the sub didn't look right and wouldn't spin correctly. And, yes, there were times when I wouldn't fix his Lego, especially the Falcon, because it just took too long to do. He'd go throw a fit about it and eventually go back to playing. It took him a long time to get past the breaking stage of his Lego play. Basically, it took him getting to the point where he could build things himself; then he no longer what his sets to be destroyed.

Which might be a metaphor in and of itself.

The real point, though, is that destruction is much easier than construction. I'd say that ease of the process is a clue as to what is going on.
So, you know, when #fakepresident Trump says he's "making America great again" and does something like rolls back environmental guidelines or puts people in cages or gives money to the rich, you can see that all of those things have "crashed" decades worth of work from other people. This is not creating or making anything great; it's just the destruction of what other people have worked to build.

Sometimes for the sake of doing it, like doing his best to destroy everything that Obama accomplished while he was in office, especially the affordable care act. Some of the things #fakepresident Trump is doing cannot be rebuilt, the equivalent of my son chewing up those blue straw pieces. Possibly, the environment will not recover.

What I'm saying is this:
If someone tells you they're building something great, look at the process. If it's something that's quick and easy, it's more likely he's not building anything at all but just acting as a wrecking ball. #fakepresident Trump is someone who gets off on destruction. On destroying the work of other people. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that destruction is never great. Sure, sometimes it's necessary, but it's always destroying the work of someone else and should never be done just for the sake of doing it.

Maybe if #fakepresident Trump had ever actually built anything himself he would have more respect for the work of others, but I'm pretty sure Trump isn't actually even capable of building a sandwich, so what we're going to get are his repeated attempts to tear down what other people have done.

The Burr Advice

Obviously, I never knew Aaron Burr so never received any advice from him. I don't really know if he would have uttered the words, "Don't let them know what you're against or what you're for," or not. It doesn't really matter as it's the words I'm dealing with moreso than Burr. Well, moreso than Burr the historical figure. I'm definitely dealing with Burr, the character, from Hamilton.

That said, Burr was a despicable figure, a true scum-of-the-earth human being. And, for what it's worth, I'm willing to go along with Miranda's interpretation of him, on the whole, since it's based on Ron Chernow's book about Hamilton. I would say that Chernow is a more than reliable as a source.

The Burr of the Broadway musical is a conniving piece of trash, a man constantly playing the middle so that he can make sure he comes down on the winning side. A bit of historical curiosity for you: He's the politician who invented going door to door and getting out in the neighborhood, which was not exactly a good thing. He wanted to get people to vote for him because of how friendly he was, how personable he was, not because of what he stood for. He wanted it to be a popularity contest, something like running for class president in high school.

"Vote for me because we could buddies!"

When I was a kid, I was into GI Joe and Transformers. Mostly, I was into the toys, and I collected them and kept them on display in my room. One day, my mom was in my room talking to me about... something I don't remember... when she abruptly inserted, "I wish you didn't have all of these war toys." It was completely out of the blue and, while not exactly confusing, a little confusing.

So I said the logical thing, "Why?"

And she said, "Because if you were ever drafted, you wouldn't be able to tell them you're a pacifist."

Which totally blew my mind. I think I said something like, "Why would I want to tell them that?" I don't really believe in violence as an answer to things, but I'm also not a pacifist. It would never have occurred to me to try to lie to get out of being drafted like, you know, claiming to have bone spurs.

Which brings us back to this idea of keeping your political leanings out of your public life. Not that most of us have a "public" life but, as small as mine is, I do have a public life. The general "wisdom" among my "fellow writers" is that we should keep our politics and our personal beliefs out of our public lives. Rather in the same way that people are saying saying that football players should keep their protests out of sports.

Not that the two things are actually similar. People want football players to keep their mouths shut (or their knees unbent) just so that they don't have to think about what it's like to be African American in America. Writers tell other writers to keep their politics and beliefs to themselves because they'll alienate potential readers if they're open about what they believe.

And that's true. I know that I have lost followers since I started writing politics.

However! The trade off is keeping your mouth shut about the injustices in the world (or, if you're a Trump (#fakepresident) supporter, supporting and praising those injustices). You know why the Nazis succeeded in so much destruction? People kept their mouths shut. People played it safe. People tried not to draw attention to themselves. And you can pfft all you want at this being similar to a pre-WWII Germany, but you can only do that if you're ignorant of the history. Ignorant.

Look, here's the thing:
When I was a kid in school learning about World War II and the Nazis, everyone always said, "Oh, I would never have done that. I wouldn't have kept silent. I would have taken a stand. I would never never never have let anything like that happen or have been a part of it." Everyone said that. But we're in those days right now, the days when people need to stand up and protest fascism and racism and all of the abuses of the Trump (#fakepresident) administration.

Well, for good or ill, all of you out there keeping your mouth shut, we know which side of that equation you would have been on. And all of you out there supporting Trump (#fakepresident), we all know you would have been right in with the Nazi party.
Congratulations on that.

In the end, I'm with Hamilton, "I'd rather be divisive than indecisive; drop the niceties."
Seriously, the Republicans have moved all of this way past "civility." Don't fall for that trap. It's just meant to get you to let them do what they want to do without complaining about it.

Make America Great: Stepping into the Future

While it can't be said that America was ever great in practice, an argument could be made for it having been great in concept. Or, at least, in concept in its own collective consciousness. If that time existed, and I think it did, it was in the post-World War II years and lasted up to around 1970. The assassination of Kennedy and, then, King wounded it, but, really, it was Nixon who drove a stake right into the heart of the idea of American greatness. Then he twisted it around a bit and pissed on the corpse for good measure.

Let's take a quick look at post-WWII America:
First, America had just saved the world. Almost literally. Whether that was actually true or not doesn't matter, because that's how Americans viewed it.
Second, America was helping to rebuild the world, including offering great assistance to peoples who had just been its enemies. Sure, maybe some of that was motivated by the guilt of having nuked Japan but, still, we were doing it.
Third, there was a push toward equality for all. True, it hadn't gotten there, but people began to see it, finally, as a possibility. It brought hope.
Fourth, World War II led the US into a technology boom, which was heightened when Russia launched Sputnik. We had a great focus on education and science and the future, and we really believed that anything and everything was possible.
Fifth, because we believed in the future, we began to build for the future and infrastructure expenditures show it. It was all rather altruistic because it was an idea, not for those doing it, but for those who would come after.

That was the environment the Boomer generation grew up in, one in which there was huge growth, plenty of everything which was handed to them on a platter so they didn't have to work for it, and the future was so bright they had to wear shades. Perhaps, it's no wonder they long for "the good old days."

Of course, their focus is on the physical output of the ideals of a previous generation, ideals they themselves don't hold. They are a generation of consumers and profit and, now, through Trump (#fakepresident), Republicans are engaged in an act of necrophilia. The focus on coal and other dead industries is nothing more than trying to fuck a corpse back to life.

And the worst part? Trump (#fakepresident) is doing it on live TV and twitter for the whole world to watch, dragging us along for the ride. Not that Turkeyneck McConnell, Paul Ryan, and a slew of others aren't humping away with him.

I think the only way to step into the future is to push the Boomers out of power. Probably all of them. Even the "good" ones (and I do think there are some good ones). Leave them to have their orgy of the dead on their own.

It's time to stop letting the future slip away.

Because we are well on our way to not even being on the bus to the future. It's like we were driving that bus, then let China take over, and, now, we're just getting off entirely.

There are so many things on the verge of happening:
Self-driving cars
Flying cars
Sustainable energy
Laser guns! (oh, wait, China already did this!)
a Mars colony
Asteroid mining
Feeding the whole world
Curing cancer
Well, I could go on for a while...

Do you know why none of those things are actually happening? Boomers and their fear of profit loss by not being allowed to rape the Earth and kill species.

It's time to put or focus on the technologies of the future because we can't go there by trying to make coal the fuel of the future. It's the fuel of a long-dead past, and we need to leave it there.

Look, I'm not saying you're ever going to get that personal jetpack, but, if you do, it certainly won't be coal powered. It's time to get rid of the G.Old.P. They are the proverbial weight around our collective neck tying us to the past. Personally, I'm tired of the past.
It's time to step into the future. I want to see it before I'm dead.

Neil Diamond and America

Let's be a little Biblical, here, because there's nothing "christian" extremists like more than cherry-picking their Bible verses and misusing them while ignoring the ones that condemn their current actions.

Matthew 5: 13-16 describes the role of the Christian in the world. Be salt and light. Draw men to you. Specifically, "You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden." Be a lamp that will share light with everyone because why? It's dumb to light a lamp and cover it with a basket. Seriously, what the fuck good is that?

And, you know, when I was growing up in the Bible Belt in the South, there was this idea that America was supposed to be that city on a hill for the whole world. That we were supposed to draw people to us because we were a beacon of hope. It was therefore unsurprising that Neil Diamond scored  a huge hit in 1981 with his song "America." We celebrated the fact that refugees of all sorts sought the shores of the United States.

Not to mention the Statue of Liberty right there for all to see and declaring:

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, the tempest-tost to me...

So here we are with this song that celebrates the immigrant and the refugee coming to America, and it's this huge hit. Not just is it a huge hit, but, in many ways, the song burrowed its way into the American subconscious. In a good way, because it's a good song. It's a song that epitomizes Matthew 5:14.

It's such a good song that it has been a traditional part of the fireworks show on the 4th of July here in Sonoma county. Not that we've gone every year in the last two decades, but we've been to an awful lot of them (because that's what you do when you have kids), and that song has been a major part of the music that played along with the fireworks every... single... year.
Until this one.

Okay, I'm not sure if this is the first year they left it out because we actually didn't go to the show the past couple of years, so maybe they cut it out last year. But I'm thinking it was probably this year because, suddenly, that song is... politically controversial.

And, you know, I'm sure they just did it because they wanted the event to be good fun for everyone so why include something that might get some people all twisted up and belligerent, right? Just leave the politics out of it. Like sports. Nothing that might raise the awareness of people.
(Because we wouldn't want people to bother to think.)

However, when you leave out something that has always been integral to your celebration in order to not appear to be making a political statement, you have, then, made a political statement.

At best, that statement is, "We're scared of Republicans and the GOP and what they might do if we play this song that is so obviously pro-immigrant and pro-refugee, so we're going to leave it out so as not cause any trouble."
At worst, you have someone in charge who is a Trump (#fakepresident) supporter who dropped the song so as to remove any and all show of support to the people being currently abused by the government.

It's probably the first because this is Sonoma county, but you can't completely rule out the second because Right-wing fanatical assholes seem to show up everywhere.

But going with the assumption that "America" was left out of the lineup because of cowardice, I have to say, C'mon! This is Sonoma fucking county! If you can't play a song that has always been in the show and give even that much support to the people that Trump (#fakepresident) and his goons are fucking over, then where can you play it? Where can you show support?

Needless to say, I was very disappointed that the song was left out and at the message, intentional or not, that was sent by its absence. We're way beyond coddling the Right at this point. They talk big about civility and how we ought to be being nice to them, but they removed all civility from the conversation when they started kidnapping children and putting them in concentration camps. We're way beyond "playing nice." Not because we are, because they are. They quit playing nice...

Man, they quit playing nice so long ago, it's difficult to remember a time when they were playing nice, but, certainly, all pretense at niceness went out the window when Obama was elected. That's when they really started letting their racism come out for all to see.

All of that to say that whoever put together the fireworks show in Sonoma county this year should be ashamed. They should be ashamed for not being willing to do something as simple as keeping a song in the show that has always been in the show. If you can't do something that small... well, if you can't do something that small...

And if it was a Trump (#fakepresident) supporter who pulled the song, well, that person should just be ashamed for being.

It's seriously time for the Left to start pulling themselves together and standing up to the Conservative fucks who are currently holding the reins of the country. In all the ways, small and big. Especially the small, because everyone can make small gestures of resistance, and we need to all be doing them all the time. The small gestures, even as small as a song, add up.

#resist

And they didn't even replace "America" with anything good. It was shitty big band music. Which sounds about like what Trump (#fakepresident) and his ilk want to replace the USA with.

Make America Great: Building a New America

Many of the lessons we learn in life are inadvertent. They're just things we pick up that stick with us somewhat like the gum on your shoe on a hot summer's day that gets all the way up in the cracks and you can't scrape it out no matter how hard you try. One of those moments for me was from my mom.

We were having a... disagreement about something: I don't remember what and maybe it's not really important; after all, it's what she said that matters. Well, it is important to know that it had to do with my performance on something or other at church in relation to the youth group. She was telling me how I wasn't doing a good job or not doing it to my potential or some such. It was the kind of thing my mother never really said to me, maybe because she didn't need to or maybe just because we didn't have those kinds of conversations -- I don't know. We never had those kinds of conversations, but I don't know if it's because we never needed to have them or not. -- but on that day she was, I felt, berating me for some imagined shortfall, and it pissed me off.

There were two things going on here:
The first was that I was doing better than everyone else involved in whatever it was that was going on. By a lot. I felt it was entirely unfair of her to be getting on my back by telling me I wasn't doing a good job when I was ahead of everyone else.
The second was that I knew she was actually right. Whatever it was we were doing, I was only doing just enough to stay in the lead. I wasn't doing a good job, I was doing a "good enough" job. That was what was making me mad, getting called on the fact that I was coasting. And I knew I was coasting, but, if I could get by with coasting and still be doing better than everyone else, why shouldn't I?

So, you know, I did what teenagers do, I yelled at her. Right there in the hall outside of the kitchen at church, because that's where she worked, as the cook at our church. So I yelled at her at church and at work. At least there was no one else around, though, right? I yelled something like, "I'm already doing better than everyone else!"

And she said, probably also yelling, though I don't actually remember, "But you're not doing your best!"

And I probably yelled back, "I don't care," and stormed off down the hall. I do remember the storming part. Because I was mad.

High drama, I know.

But, man, I have never been able to get that out of my head, the difference between being simply better and being best. Not "the best," because that's relative, but actually being at your best. Period. And that it's not enough to simply be better than everyone else, especially if that means you're not making any effort to be in that spot. What's the good of that?

Let's put it another way:
If 10 is "Best," you don't get to claim you're the Best merely by being a 6 while everyone else is a 5 or below. You're just being better than them, not actually being "Best.".

That said, America has never been "Great;" it's merely been "greater."

Even that has not been a claim it could consistently lay claim to, and it's certainly not a claim it can make now when we lead the world in... hmm...
We lead the world in gun deaths.
We lead the world in military spending. So that we can promote more gun deaths.
We lead the world in bullying. Because we have an administration that believes that power should be used to push people around to get what you want.

We do NOT lead the world in education.
We do NOT lead the world in health care.
We do NOT lead the world in science research.
We do NOT lead the world in renewable energy research or implementation.

The point, then, is that we cannot "make America great again," because it was never great to begin with. Which, you know, hurts me to actually say, because I have spent a lifetime, my lifetime, believing in "America."

Of course, I've believed in the ideal of America, not the way it actually turned out. I suppose I just have always we believed, until two years ago, that we were closer to that ideal than we actually were. Which is not close at all.

Having said all of that, America could be great. It could be Great.

• It could aspire to the ideal of itself!
• It could believe in education again. Believe that education is the door to the future.
• It could quit focusing on a past that never existed and actually work on making tomorrow a better place instead of trying to make tomorrow into something that resembles an old b&w TV show.
• It could promote equality for all people, the way it has always supposed to have been.
• We could actually become a country of the people, by the people, for the people and quit letting rich old white men and corporations run everything.

Look, today is the day we celebrate stepping away from one egotistical, rich white dude who just wanted to boss people around for his own gain. Maybe we should look at whom we've replaced him with and quit being bossed around by the current egotistical, rich white dude who just wants to boss people around for his own gain.

It's time to make America actually great. It's time to build a new America, the one that should have always existed.

"We hold these truth to be self-evident, that all [people] are created equal, that they are endowed [through creation] with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among [people], deriving their [powers] from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it..."

Don't give consent to the current administration, the current administration which is destructive to Life, to Liberty, and to the pursuit of Happiness.

#resist

Day 31 (a future history)

Monday, February 19, 2018

Trump announced his new America for Americans program this morning. I’m not really sure what it all means, but it sounds like it’s something special for white people to help white people live all together without anyone who is not white. He said if you’re white and live in a place where mostly minorities live, you can apply to have the government move you to a white neighborhood. They’ll even make sure you get a better house because houses in minority neighborhoods are always trashy. Or something like that.

He also said that if you live in a white neighborhood and have people in it you don’t like being there, minority people, you can apply to have them removed. I think he said relocated. Yeah, relocated because they’re going to have relocation camps.

The scary part is that he made that crying Nazi guy in charge of something called hud. Hud is going to be the organization making sure that America is for Americans. That’s how he said it. But the Nazi guy, when he got his turn to talk, said it was about making something he called a pure ethno state. Something like that. He said ethno state a lot. And he wore some kind of Hitler armband, which was the really scary part, because he was right there on the TV with the president wearing a Nazi thing. AND EVRYONE WAS OKAY WITH IT!

Then, he gave Trump some little gift pin thing, and Trump put it on, and it was also some kind of Nazi thing! He just put it on and everyone clapped and he called it beautiful. It made my stomach hurt like I wanted to throw up and there were people in the auditorium who were crying, but I don’t know who it was or how many.

Then all the stupid little Trump Youth Bastards started cheering and Caleb got up and said he was going to write everyone down – everyone, even teachers – who wasn’t cheering. And he did, too. Or, at least, he pulled out a notebook and started acting like it. Everyone started standing up and there were some claps, but Trump was still talking, so the Asshole (that’s Caleb) started yelling at everyone to shut up.

That didn’t make people quit crying, though. I could still hear sobbing.

It made me think of my friend Tamira, and I quit wondering why they suddenly moved away. I want to move away and I’m white! It all made me sad. I miss Tamira. She didn’t even say goodbye. They just left.

Lots of people have just left. But no one who is white.

And I think some people are just disappearing. Like Mrs. Madison. Because I don’t think she’s ever coming back, and no one is talking about it. Maybe they took her to a “relocation camp.”

Oh, the relocation camps.

Trump made someone called Arpieo in charge of the relocation camps. Arpieo is some other asshole that Trump pardoned, someone who has had his own concentration camps. Or something. I kind of remember when that Arpieo guy got pardoned, but I didn’t care, then. And I didn’t know he was running concentration camps and throwing Mexicans into them. It sounds like he had everything except the gas chambers. I don’t know; it just makes me sick, and I want someone to do something about it, but I guess people are trying to and that’s why we’re in a war.

At the end, Trump says we are now going to be called the American States. The real American States. It was just something he said at the end, but I think that means there is no more United States, which makes sense, I guess, since some states were smart enough to get away from Trump and all of the stuff he stands for.

It’s confusing to keep up with, though, because we’re at war with China and Trump says that it’s China that has taken over those other states, which I know is a lie, because why would you change the name of the country if it was someone else who had taken over part of your land. And Russia is at war with China. And maybe something happened in North Korea, but I don’t know. All I know is that Trump said we were going to do to our enemies what we did to North Korea. And maybe there’s a war in Europe, too, but no one seems to know, only that the “war in Europe” was mentioned at some point.

It all makes me feel stupid because, back when I could know stuff and find things out, I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything happening in the world or I was trying to pretend that nothing was happening in the world. I thought everything was just going to be okay because this is (was) America and everything is always okay, even when bad disasters happen, like those hurricanes last year and everyone was freaked out but, after a little while, everything was okay again. And I just want everything to be okay again.

But I guess sometimes things are not just okay and if you want them to be then you have to do something to make it better. I just don’t know what to do. I’m only in middle school.

The New Civil War

240 years ago, we fought a war that we say was a war for freedom. For independence. But it was only a war for white freedom and white independence. From other white men. At least, that's what it became because the Founding Fathers couldn't work their way through the issue of slavery.

So we had to have another war 150 years ago to finish the first war and state that freedom is for everyone. Freedom is for everyone, no matter their skin color.

Evidently, not everyone got that memo, so, now, here we are again in the midst of another Civil War, the New Civil War. Sure, this time it's not being fought on the battlefield with guns and bullets (yet) because this war is more like a spiritual war. Last time, the Civil War was fought with actual bodies, but, this time, it's being fought for the Soul of America and what kind of soul it will be, and it's mostly being fought in the information realm.

Will we be an America filled with hate and fear, or will we be an America filled with respect and tolerance?
The irony? Those who claim to belong to the religion of love -- and not just love, unconditional love -- are the ones preaching hate and fear the loudest. I suppose they think "god" is racist, too, just like them. I don't think you can come to any other conclusion if you look inside their churches.

Of course, the "Christians" tend to forget that it is the Jews who are "God's" chosen people. I don't seen anywhere in the Bible where it says "God" changed his mind about that, so, maybe, white people shouldn't be so stuck on themselves about how cool and important they are.
But I digress... [Actually, I do digress, because that's for an upcoming post. Sort of.]

But it sort of brings me to my point, and the point is this:
All of this is still about slavery and race. Still.
I mean, Fuck. What the fuck, people? It's been 150 fucking years since the Civil War. It's time to get over it and quit idolizing your fucking moments to racism and slavery. Tear that shit down.
Look, if Germany can do it, so can you.

And my other point, which is that you can't actually talk to those people, and it's time for liberals, those on the left -- whatever you want to call the people who aren't part of the 25-33% of the country who make up these hardcore Conservative GOP asshole Trump-followers -- to stop trying to reach over to the 25-33% of the country who make up these hardcore Conservative GOP asshole Trump-followers and convince them of the wrongness of their ways. They're NOT going to be convinced. Ever. You're wasting your time and, frankly, everyone else's time, too.

Look, these "people" know that Trump is a lying pile of shit -- which is an insult to lying piles of shit, but they don't make words that go low enough to accurately describe what Trump is (and my mind just isn't degenerate enough to make that kind of stuff up) -- and they have repeatedly shown that they don't care. They don't know or care anything about what "America" means or stands for (the fact that there were people who got upset about NPR's presentation of The Declaration of Independence on fucking Independence Day is proof enough of that). They have repeatedly shown that all they care about and, thus, all they know is some deranged fantasy where white people rule the world and they get to lay waste to it as they please without suffering any of the consequences. They are not going to be talked out of that delusion.

The truth is that this is a war. An actual war, and we on the Left need to start treating it as such. This is really not a time for debating. We're long past that. The world is teetering on the brink, a lot of brinks, actually... Maybe it's better to say that world is currently finely balanced on the head of a pin. Anyway, we're all teetering on the edge of destruction, environmental destruction even if there weren't other things, and we have to stop letting asshole idiots make the decisions. Decisions which have as their sole goal of making them more rich and damn the consequences because they won't be around to suffer them.

I'm not saying we need to arm ourselves and take to the streets or anything like that (though it would be disingenuous not to point out that a significant portion of those on the Right have been stockpiling weapons for decades), but it is time to quit pussyfooting around and trying to engage in conversations. Get the fuck out and do things like voting. It's not hard! [There is no reason that Ossoff should have lost in Georgia or that Measure C should have failed here in Sonoma county other than that Liberals didn't get out and vote. And that's just messed up. At that point, you're basically just -- and I'm going to be crude here, even for me -- bending over and taking it.]

Here's the deal:
If you're Liberal or anti-Trump or whatever you want to call yourself and you're whining about how things are going, but you're not doing anything about it, then shut the fuck up! Seriously, if you're not going to take action and do simple things like voting, then you don't have the right to complain. It's time to take this shit seriously. It's not a game.
For all intents and purposes, this really is a war. The New Civil War.

We Are Not Your Machine

Let's imagine for a moment that you have a great machine. When I say machine, I mean machine. This is a purely mechanical contraption, no electronic parts. No internal computer. Nothing digital about it.

It's all gears and cogs and nuts and bolts.

Machines are fairly straightforward devices, even the delicate and complex ones. I mean that from the stance of that when a piece wears out or breaks, you remove it and put a new piece in its place. The old piece is, at that point, a piece of trash.

Machines are built with a purpose, to do a particular task, even if that task is purely ornamental. But they only work if all the parts are good.

And herein lies the problem, the corporate view of people, and, thus, the Republican view of people, is that we are all parts of some great profit machine. We are all here to generate money for them. For them, and that's the part you have to understand. We, the people, are all parts. Cogs. Gears. Pegs.

It is this view, the inherent view of people from corporate America (and the Republicans), that makes them disdainful of the "unproductive members" of society. "Unproductive members" equates to "broken pieces" of the machine. And what do we do with broken pieces? We throw them away. We do not keep them around as clutter, and we certainly don't "take care of them." That's just wasted resources.

And you wonder why the healthcare plans being offered up by the Republicans are so bad for the sick and elderly and poor...? Really? You wonder about that? These "people," because the Republicans barely view them as people, are a waste, a drain. They suck up resources that are more deserved by "productive members" of society, i.e., the rich, the 1%, the [leaches]. [Yes, let's feed the parasites even more.] So you're cries of, "But people will die if you take away their healthcare," do really fall on deaf ears because, you know what?, that's the actual idea.

Get those broken pieces of the machine out of society!

Of course, then, the problem (it's not a problem) is that we are not a machine. We are not some great biological wealth machine for the rich despite the fact that we've allowed them to turn us into one. [Over and over and over again throughout history, I might add.] That's the actual problem, we have allowed them to use us as this, and we need to stop.

Well, that's part of the problem. There's also the part where the "Christian" (because they're not really) Right, the Evangelicals, have abandoned charity and mercy in favor of the more hard-line Pauline philosophy of "if they don't work, don't let them eat." And they've taken up this philosophy because it fits in with the whole "God rewards [with money!] the just and worthy, and punishes [by taking away their money] the sinners." So, you know, if you're having financial difficulties, it's because you're a lousy sinner being punished by God and, if you'd just "get right with God," he'd reward you financially and you wouldn't need any charity or mercy. [These people are fully behind Trump and the Republican agenda, just by the way.]

All of it is about money, and,while I don't really agree with Paul on the whole "money is the root of all evil" thing, it is the root of an awful lot of evil.

No, I don't have "an answer" to all of this or how to deal with it, but I think "the answer" begins with people realizing that they've been "turned into" a money-printing machine for the wealthy. People need to realize that they are not cogs, not pegs, at least not round ones. Not even square ones.

If people are pegs, they are all strange pegs. At least, that's how we all start out, with weird little growths and arms and awkward angles and edges. Unfortunately, many of us spend our years as parents trying to take of the edges and angles of our kids and make them into these unified little round pegs that can grow up and fit into any hole. If not that, we don't do anything to stop the education system from doing that for us.

But it's time to stand up for the things that diversify us, differentiate us, make us unique. We are not pieces of a machine, and it's time that we stopped acting like we are.

My Apolitical Life

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you guys out there think I'm "political." As things stand at the moment, I could certainly understand that perception; after all, I've been writing some pretty politically charged posts, lately. However, the idea of me being "political" is one of the most outrageous thoughts anyone could have, which is why I never have that thought.

Probably what killed politics for me -- maybe I should say "who" -- was Thomas Jefferson. Seriously, what an ass.

Oh, yeah, a lot of you, probably most of you, are saying right now, "But he was a great man!"

And I just want to say to that: Not so much.
In fact, he was so much not a great man and so ashamed of himself over how he handled his presidency that he didn't want to be remembered for it. At all.

And you're all saying, "But! But! Declaration of Independence!"

Okay, sure, the man could write, but, really, he did his best work when he wrote the Declaration and it was all downhill from there.

Actually, the Declaration is the root of the problem. See, I believed it. As a kid, I mean. Well, I still do. "All men are created equal." ALL humankind are created equal.

I was a really patriotic kid. It was a thing my teachers would comment on to my mom, even, about how much I knew about the Revolutionary time period and the people involved. Yeah, the Revolution was one of those things I got into sometime after dinosaurs. Dinosaurs at four. Astronomy at five (which started out being related to dinosaurs). The Revolution at six. Because, hey, it was 1976, so I started reading books and books and books -- lots of biographies -- about the Revolutionary War and the founding fathers.

So, we have this document, see, that says "all men are created equal," and we fought a war over it to gain independence from a government that treated us unfairly and, then, after winning that war, we doubled down on slavery because of "politics." And I get it. I mean, I understand why Washington and a few of the others decided that the new nation was too fragile at the time to deal with that issue and felt the need to put it off till later, but... BUT!

Thomas Jefferson, the man who WROTE "all men are created equal" would not defend that. Didn't even believe that. He kept his own children as slaves and refused to free his slaves even on his deathbed, while many, if not most, of the other founding fathers had done at least as much as that, but Jefferson refused. He adamantly refused to free his slaves even upon his death despite the urging of many of closest friends and allies. Basically, Jefferson's life and lifestyle didn't match his rhetoric, and the whole thing really soured "politics" for me. I mean, if you couldn't trust Jefferson... Well, who could you trust, right?

Actually, in high school, I became a great admirer of Alexander Hamilton. Not that that was enough to make me like politics.

It's not really politics that are the problem; it's the politicians.

All of that to say: None of this is about "politics." It's not about Republicans and Democrats. It's not about the Right and the Left. It's not even about Conservatives and Liberals. It's about what's right and what's wrong.

And I don't mean what's right and wrong as defined by some (usually false) sense of Christian moralism. I mean what's right as defined by the ideals we (theoretically) ascribe to by being American (which I will define narrowly as someone who is a citizen of the United States of America), the highest of which is, "All men are created equal."

Honestly, we weren't ready for that idea when Jefferson tossed it out there. Obviously, Jefferson wasn't ready for it, either. But he did toss it out there, and we've been fighting to reach that ideal ever since. Fighting for the innate right that each person should get to choose how to live his or her own life without someone else coming along and saying, "No, you can't do that," for no reason other than that that person doesn't choose to live that way.

Look, the USA is NOT a Christian nation. It never was, and it was never intended to be. If you believe that, then you believe a lie. In fact, the whole idea was that this would very definitively NOT BE a Christian nation. That's how the Constitution was set up: to allow people to live and believe as they want to live and believe. It is the fundamental principle that our nation was founded on.

I find it egregious that people like Trump and Bannon want to eradicate decades worth of work toward actually achieving that goal, not a goal of freedom (though it is that, too) but a goal of equality. I find it even more egregious that "Christians" have embraced their philosophy of hate and discrimination.

So, no, this is not about "politics" for me. It's about standing up for what is right and good. It is right and good that all men and women should be treated as if they were created equally, because that is what we say we believe. To my mind, the ones opposing equality (the racists, the misogynists, xenophobes), they're the ones who are unAmerican. Trump doesn't know or believe in American ideals and he wants to take away and kill the one thing that really has made America great. It's up to those of us whole believe in what "America" stands for to oppose him. It's not about politics.