When you have the opportunity to love and you choose to hate instead you miss out on one of the fundamental experiences of being alive.
There’s no shorter path to a wasted life than denying another human being compassion.
To witness entire states enshrine this malicious, misguided insanity into law is beyond disheartening.
One thing about billionaires is that they feel that their money is more important than our money.
They hand down fortunes to their heirs without paying estate taxes.Protecting generational wealth has become the primary fiscal policy of the GOP, the party they own in full.
The super-wealthy essentially leave paying taxes to the poor.
For even those solidly in the middle class are poor - by the standard of those who have amassed so much wealth it begins to take on a power of its own.
Republicans flock to these radioactive power centers of concentrated wealth.
The wealthiest among us believe their money is too powerful to be taxed - that it should instead be protected - and that is exactly what Kevin McCarthy and the GOP are doing in holding President Biden’s debt negotiations hostage.
The GOP don’t believe the wealthiest 1%’s and corporate money that floods their coffers at election time should have the same responsibilities as our money.
The super-wealthy feel entitled to keep more of it by dint of already having so much of it.
In essence that is why it’s called an exemption. ‘I shouldn’t have to pay this because……’ has been turned on its head to allow a relatively minor percentage of our population outsized influence in our civic and governmental life.
All anyone needs to do is witness our caustically corrupt Supreme Court, where conservative justices put their decisions up for sale in exchange for cash-back rewards and lavish vacations.
Their recent rulings have effectively made abortion illegal in most of the South and far too many of the ‘flyover states’.
Places like Nebraska and Iowa and South Dakota have become just as greasy and Kentucky-fried-fascist as you would expect in Alabama or Florida or Arkansas.
A place where venal politicians in beauty pageant hair and cowboy boots preach hate and ‘conservative values’ for their chance to feed at the trough of the big bucks flowing into conservative foundations bought by skeevy billionaires.
The governor of South Dakota posed smiling with a dead black bear she had murdered for ‘sport’ on her social media pages and Gov. Jim Pillen of Nebraska celebrated his state’s vote to restrict access to abortion and transgender medical care by boasting about his protections of ‘pre-born boys and girls’ to ‘grow and live happy fruitful lives, and this includes children struggling with their gender identity’.
His flowery language aside, what he is doing is punishing children and women in his state so a bunch of conservative, racist and bigoted troglodytes can feel better about themselves at church, then go back home and eat a Sunday dinner of factory farmed animal products that were processed by child labor and watch Fox News.
Why would you want to deny someone the opportunity to live out their own truths in terms of gender identity and reproductive freedoms?It is none of your damn business and the better play in life is ALWAYS lifting up those around you - to be their most authentic selves and live their best lives.
That’s the only time you can truly put the shine on the gold that is humanity.Why would you want to deny someone the opportunity to live in a full-fledged family unit as an attack on gay rights and the marriage equality act would surely encompass.
A healthy and vibrant family enriches and strengthens any community.
The Republicans reactionary policies are not just an offense to love but to stability itself and the very values they proclaim to profess.
Because it has never been about compassion or equality - but asserting power and dominance as both a means to address their own fears and internal repressions and hoodwink their flock of gullible xenophobes and bigots.
The USA has a long history of hurting other peoples in the name of freedom and democracy.
From the jungles of Vietnam to the fiery sands of Iraq we have had no problem calling ourselves the good guys while weaponizing our political and military might under the guise of protecting others from tyranny or the evils of communism.
Now that legislative vengeance and call to action is being directed at our fellow citizens to further conservative ideology.Which has of course now become interchangeable with Christofascism, and the ambitions of grifter politicians willing to exploit bigotry and racism to serve their own needs and desires for power and profit.
Democrats aren’t just running against Trump and the other GOP candidates on the ballot in 2024 - they are running against all the ignorance that they represent.
That is why MAGA birthed so many imitators. So many pretenders to the crown all want to be the next Trump because their base made it look so damn easy.His hateful rhetoric was rewarded at every turn. What Trump exposed was just how many Americans were basically pure trash when it came to their political beliefs.
Ignorance and resentment had been festering in the suburbs and exurbs for decades. I blame Reagan and ‘White Flight’ in the modern era.
At least for the recent resurgence of what seems to be America’s original sin.
I grew up in the generation of folks whose parents and grandparents had fled the cities for the leafy promise of homogenized suburban living.
In my case, this meant spending most of my teen years an hour north of New York City.In the mid-80’s you got a sense of how the themes Reagan was promoting and exploiting filtered in.
A ‘war on the poor,’ a willful disregard for the lives of minorities and the LGBTQ community was playing around the kitchen tables of middle and working class white folks.
Many of whom came from families that were only a couple generations into life in America themselves.
These themes are, of course, front and center in Republican rhetoric but with the outright brutality of the current crop of MAGA ideology, manufactured crisis and targeting of their fellow Americans thrown in.
It’s as a low a point as we have reached in our modern history as republic.It is however not without its vulnerabilities as a political strategy.
Trump has made it clear he would rather run against HRC in 2024 than President Biden who has already handed him his deepest and most scaring humiliation.That is why the narcissist in him cannot let it go; every opportunity he has to vent his mottled spleen is used to address how the election was stolen from him.
It wasn’t.
Trump got his ass kicked and he knows it.
He knew it before the polls had even closed on that fateful Tuesday.
I could hear it in his voice when he visited a Trump campaign office in Northern Virginia to rally the troops as Americans were casting their votes.
Trump has many tells - for those of us unlucky enough to have been in his presence in any professional capacity they can be easily spotted.
He doesn’t want a repeat of 2020 so he has instructed Jim Jordan to open investigations into Hillary Clinton (in 2023!).
Which will of course go nowhere but will be parroted by the talking heads on Trump-friendly networks.
He will try and fashion the upcoming election into a retread of 2016 and tap into all the animosity and misogyny in his base that still exists.
Judging by the ability of his base to laugh at his mockery of his sexual assault victims in the recent CNN ‘Town Hall’ this is safe bet.
We must not allow him to assert this narrative: every opportunity to point out what a criminal disaster his presidency was and how many folks in his orbit went to jail for acting on his behalf is a good start.
Making sure he is held accountable for his crimes is an even better one.
Here’s to a long hot summer for Donald Trump, especially in Georgia.
18 Comments
16 more comments...No posts
Maybe you’re the one to get the ball rolling on another ‘We Are The World’ for USA
I Do Not take issue with your Kentucky -fried comment. How could i? I live there. ;-) .
All beautifully said. Thanks!