'Beds Are Burning'

The President of the United States twisted and bobbed in front of the American people in his address on Thursday night like one of those inflatable tubes with faces painted on them that wave at you from roadsides in front of tire stores.

Cheap and tacky and full of hot air.

The simple act of reading is an endurance sport for Donald Trump. A lifelong defect that has calcified in his old age.

There was no equilibrium or grounding - in body or mind.

Just an avalanche of indecency and slurred election conspiracies rushing forth from a mottled visage with the ruddy pallor of a dollar store ham.

A gelatinous hunk of salt and fat that is better left on the shelf but somehow ended up in our homes. The funk and rot extends beyond the tin and makes it way to our kitchen tables, sickening us with incompetence (much like the parasitic lettuce that carries Cyclosporiasis and escapes any honest recall from Taylor Farms thanks to an allegiance with MAGA).

Spinning in the wind like a rusty weathervane, as he heaved and jerked and rotated via his own internal propulsion and an able assist from pharmaceuticals, Donald didn’t so much stand - he convulsed.

As if his own body was rebelling against the insanity of it all.

Grabbing the sides of his lectern like a ship’s captain steaming headlong into a nor’easter; lashing himself to the wheel, allowing no spasm or seizing up of gnarled appendages to keep him from sailing the phantom seas of resentment.

An octogenarian Ahab set course for a destination that he alone believes to exist and every one else knows to be farce. His very own fantasy island where Trump always wins and suffers no bruises from facts or truth. The leviathan swims in his mind alone.

You could actually see the moment in the speech when the initial Adderall rush wore off and he began to float back to earth, like some deflated party balloon, ready to wash up among the flotsam and crab carcasses on the Jersey shore. More detritus for the green flies and sand fleas of an injurious, overheated July.

I am angry at how toxic my country has become. We are drenched in dirty rain and choking in smoke. This is not the fault of our good neighbors to the North, despite an inglorious POTUS attempting to cast blame and levy further tariffs on them.

Kicking a friend and ally who is down instead of offering help is not the American way -but it damn sure is Donald’s.

This is a man who just last week reneged on a deal for the Gordie Howe Bridge on the Canadian border with Detroit, shaking down our trusted allies for 50 percent of the tolls - after they paid the entire cost of construction and we benefitted immensely from the project, not just from the bridge itself but also from the jobs it created and the U.S. materials used to build it.

It was a fair deal and Trump turned it into a travesty and a shameful shakedown.

A mob boss move that illuminates both the criminal mindset and lack of morality he has forced upon us. He makes it hard to look the rest of the world in the eye. My hope is that as nation, when he is finally gone, we will take on the task of making amends and paying restitution for all the harms he has caused in our name.

A man too ignorant and venal to recognize the threat of Climate Change, and to think a nation with the second largest wilderness area on the planet, much of it so thick with majestic pine trees one can barely walk between them, could somehow be guilty of ‘willful negligence’ by not ‘sweeping or raking them out’.

POTUS is not capable of understanding the priceless beauty we are all losing with this catastrophic combustion and the integral part the Canadian Boreal Forest plays in our shared continent’s ecosystem. Not to mention the heart wrenching destruction many First Nations are experiencing because of these wildfires.

We have a lunatic in charge of the United States, who is too uneducated and intellectually lazy to understand basic atmospheric science, let alone the natural wonder of one of the world’s great countries - or have any empathy for the lives affected and beauty lost.

Those trees are burning because of us and the planet we are rapidly overheating due to our continued consumption of fossil fuels. The U.S.A. has all but abandoned renewable energies and removed itself from existing climate treaties at the behest of the oil and gas industry which donated nearly half a billion dollars to Donald Trump and MAGA candidates in the last election cycle; a drop in the bucket of their record profits.

On Sunday morning, Trump celebrated incoming UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s statement that he wanted to fast track existing oil and gas projects in the North Sea, with DJT erroneously stating the ‘people were dancing in the streets of Aberdeen’ while attacking windmills and Britain’s current fossil fuel importation with Norway. POTUS is a cheerleader for our demise. To him everything is about power and profit; he cares nothing for the health of this planet or the life it supports.

It is ironic that in the same week Trump eliminated over 90 percent of two of our greatest and most majestic national monuments, Big Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante (handing over 3 million acres of public lands to private oil drilling and mining interests), he attempts to blame catastrophic Canadian wildfires on lack of forest management.

Trump’s actions in Utah on behalf of a lobbying effort by private industry was the largest rollback of public land protections in American history. Corruption which will come with an incalculable cost.

It may not be fully evident to most folks what we are losing in such rapid fire succession: I’m not sure the United States has faced a greater emergency than what we are enduring in this second Trump term.

POTUS has singlehandedly made the climate disasters we are facing worse and doomed protected species and sacred indigenous places to extinction. He is selling things that don’t belong to him and essentially pocketing the money. It is the greed and malfeasance of men like him that is mostly to blame for this planet’s worsening ecological crisis.

Trump is the greatest threat to the environment this world has known. His ignorance and venality will cause untold suffering for generations to come. Wisdom will be lost, and millions will go without, so one man and his corporate cronies can continue to profit from the plundering and destruction of our planet.

Winston Churchill said, ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going’ - it certainly feels like we are all marching through Perdition at the moment.

Do not be tempted to look away or grow hardened to the horror, as that is understandably quite easy to do. We must remain steadfast in our ability to wake up our fellow Americans to the madness our country is causing in much of the world.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Stephen Miller spoke at this week’s so-called ‘Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism’ as a sort of precursor to DJT’s speech, and to kick off a full court press to usurp democracy and steal the midterms by promoting lies and fear.

Their alarming rhetoric, branding the entirety of the Democratic Party as ‘far left radical terrorists’, and communists, is the sort of fear mongering that has deep roots in red state USA.

This was backed up by the cartoonish Markwayne Mullin threatening state election officials with prison time if they don’t hand over voter rolls. Part of the Trump administration’s attempts to manipulate the midterm elections in their favor through voter intimidation, interference and stripping citizens of their right to vote.

Add into this toxic scenario POTUS giving a primetime address at the White House as a backdrop to sow even more lies regarding the 2020 election - and you have an environment and a threat to our civic well-being and physical safety unlike anything we have faced before.

The first ever GOP midterm convention in early September in Dallas, Texas (of course), will only add to this cavalcade of disinformation, and provide a sort of carnival backdrop to their attempts to mislead the American people in order to separate them from their democratic rights.

DJT will attempt to seize the ballots on election day if he feels like he is going to lose by accusing Democrats of cheating. All of his recent antics are leading to this and he has folks in place who are both stupid and corrupt enough to try it.

We are so deep in the danger here at times it seems we have run out of alarms. The time to act is now, yet because so many here in the U.S.A. live in relative privilege - and even modest privilege can prevent you from properly diagnosing and reacting to the threats we face.

There is a tendency to think people are overacting to the danger he poses: I would say to you that is always a mistake. Trump is capable of anything. Most especially when he knows that the other side of a free and fair election and a Democratic victory in the House and perhaps the Senate, means both impeachment and more exposure of his role in the Epstein files and his decades of sexual predation and sex-trafficking.

The resentment and entitlement that Trump so clumsily exploits in his MAGA base pale in comparison with the poverty and life threatening dangers he is forcing on the Global South through his Project 2025 policies and nationalist goals of ‘America First’.

In other words, we need to somehow convert the message, ‘You think you got it bad?’ to, ‘You should see what the guy you voted for is doing to everybody else in your name.’

This is not to say Trump’s policies are not punishing American citizens, both economically and in terms of our civil rights, they most certainly are, but his base is still largely unaware of his most egregious misdeeds and the full extent of his corruption.

POTUS is indeed hurting almost everyone but the wealthiest among us. Some just can’t see it yet. Our mission is to change that - and speaking truth to power is the way.

We think of our institutions as failing us in this moment, and indeed they are in a catastrophic way, but perhaps the real failure began decades ago. Ronald Reagan and the advent of the Heritage Foundation cut the brake lines on our vehicle of state, and that has allowed us to veer off the cliff in this moment.

They did this through marrying modern conservative ideology, with a precursor in the John Birch Society, to evangelical Christianity and a preponderance of reactionary and racist NRA dogma infiltrating red state, mostly Bible Belt American culture.

It spread from the there like the wildfires now filling our skies with smoke.

How else can you explain a generation of men and women, so casually accepting of horror? I speak of my own, Generation X, and the fellows I grew up with that voted for a monster in their adulthood, not once, but as many as three times. Fox News rotted their brains.

MAGA turns a blind eye to Climate Change when danger and disaster is all around us. They were raised in a way that was all that has allowed them to abandon empathy in their adulthood, and I find it both shocking and repugnant. One must always assume they know better, but do they really?

At this point members of this hard right movement may be so brainwashed and deadened into their own humanity, that the effort required to change and learn is lost to them.

I offer these thoughts, not as an excuse, but as a way to understand - so we can fix the problem. We must find some way forward, and it would help to know who we are traveling with. Otherwise, we are going to keep going in circles - and that spiral only goes one way - down.

Most damaged people don’t know what to do about it. Sometimes it feels like we are born broken, a product of the kicks and stings this life gives us and gave those that came before. Trump is a master at exploiting the generational resentment of working and middle class white folks, and offering them the illusion of redemption.

The opposite of his cynical predatory maneuvers is a clear-eyed understanding of the psychological forces at work in both DJT and the targets of his manipulations.

Everyone is sick and suffering in someway (I say this not in judgment but in the interest of awareness), and we would all do better to deepen our compassion for each other and ourselves. Hard as that may be in this moment, the answer to our current predicament is always going to be love. We need to transcend this hour of crisis.

Non-violence and righteous, moral action is the best way to wake up those around us to the truth. Of course that may feel impractical, and a lofty pursuit in the face of such calamity, but when you get down to the heart of the matter, what choice do we really have?

The suffering we are seeing in the world right now, is a direct result of the egos of a few deeply disturbed and troubled men, and their inability to see the basic humanity of others. Wars are not waged by wisemen. They are the folly of fools. They consume brave souls and the innocent on the whims of madmen.

‘America First’ is spreading their toxic manifesto like poison - and the stunted, machismo and abusive tendencies of those who would hear such a brutal call to arms, and regressive, nationalistic dogma, and smile instead of shudder, must be addressed. MAGA flourishes because it separates people from the spirit of unity and our natural desire to live in an egalitarian society.

It is a bastardization of American ideals and a pornographic patriotism.

We are a nation that has come to celebrate killing at a governmental level. ICE is murdering innocent family men in the streets on a weekly basis and any attempts to even reign them in are stopped by Donald Trump - who enjoys the brutality.

His Homeland Security Director, Markwayne Mullin, said they were, ‘turning up the heat on the streets,’ in response to the latest extrajudicial killing, and ‘Border Czar’ Tom Homan (a man who looks and sounds like when he sweats, butter comes out) in response to Democrats outrage over the recent murders said, ‘there’s going to be more bloodshed unless they shut their mouth and let ICE enforce the laws that they enacted’.

Once again this week, a hard working immigrant, twenty five year-old Johan Sebastian Guerrero, a man who was described by those who knew him as a doting father and husband who relentlessly pursued a better life for his family (and who was in the United States working legally) was murdered.

He died pursuing and attaining a better life - and did absolutely nothing wrong and everything right. By all accounts, was the kind of person we need more of in this country.

Sebastian was killed in cold blood in front of his three year-old daughter by a homegrown monster, a mutant from Maine who should have been in jail, not a uniform.

Guerrero’s killer has a lifetime of abusive behavior, racist red flags and severe mental health issues - and was still given a gun and a badge and allowed to hunt immigrants on American streets. I’m sure got a signing bonus too.

What we are witnessing is not law enforcement, it is organized terrorism against innocent people and it has to stop. The outrage we feel and collective actions we take should reflect the severity of these heinous crimes. This is a moment to stand up and speak out.

Never in my lifetime have I witnessed something so threatening, and in opposition to the values we should cherish in the U.S.A., as what is occurring in the ICE crackdown.

We must stop them before it’s too late for other innocent souls whose only crime is pursuing the American dream.

Pete Hegseth thinks war is a game, and there’s tens of millions of MAGA that see no problem with it as well. My fear is these men have children and not all of them will reject the broken beliefs of their fathers, some will take up the mantle.

Seeing themselves as soldiers in a crusade of the clueless. Raised on a diet of resentment and false pride, and the adolescent stunts of our current Secretary of Defense (his response to the Blue Angels beach flyover this week in Pensacola was abhorrent).

Hegseth has created a climate in which such things can occur and is attempting to bifurcate our military from their own professionalism and safety standards. I last worked with the Blue Angels in 2016, and is hard to imagine any of the pilots I have met in over a decade of helping coordinate flyovers at the Super Bowl committing such a stunt. I am glad their team leader overrode Hegseth and grounded the pilot.

The Christofascism and sophomoric machismo we are experiencing, and Pilsner Pete typifies, is every bit as dangerous as the terrorism we have railed against and fought for decades.

In fact, it may be much more dangerous as it seems to be occurring not in the shadows, but in the sunlight. We are losing soldiers once again in Iran, and if the situation escalates further those tragedies will increase.

So will the war crimes committed by the United States, which is now attacking civilian infrastructure in violation of the Geneva Convention.

Trump and Hegseth see no problem in the suffering of innocents, such as the killing of school children in the early hours of the war, or our current attacks on desalination plants on the Iranian coast. Separating families from water in 100 degree deserts does not make you any friends; the effects of such atrocities linger for decades.

Trump refuses to even admit the ‘double-tap’ missile attack on school girls and their grieving parents and rescuers was carried out by U.S. missiles.

The world knows it was, so do the Iranians. He is the last man who should be Commander-in-Chief.

We must hold this administration accountable.

And remember this country belongs to all of us, not just the corrupt few.

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