Imbolc                                                                 Anniversary Moon

So, wiretapping doesn’t mean wiretapping. It means, well, whatever D.T. might have meant if he’d put down the phone, stopped tweeting (D.T.-tweety bird) and thought.  Accusing a fellow president of spying on you is just another thing, something done for the hell of  it, with no evidence other than a right wing nutjobs rants? God, how long do we have to put up with this guy?

He has allies like Congressman Steve King from Iowa’s 4th district, which includes Kate’s hometown of Nevada:

““We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies”

While many politicians, including Mr. Trump, often try to back away from statements that offend, Mr. King amiably doubles down. On Monday, confronted about his tweet, he told CNN, “I meant exactly what I said,” adding that he would “like to see an America that’s just so homogeneous that we look a lot the same, from that.”

Mr. King, 67, represents the most conservative corner of Iowa…”  NYT, March 14, 2017

We’ve gone pretty far down the rabbit hole, my fellow Americans. D.T. has made it safe for racist ideologues, smash and grab xenophobic thugs and robber barons. He’s leading the charge for a recision of the very modest health care program instituted by Obama. The current plan would leave up to 24 million, that’s 24 MILLION, souls without health care. This is not politics, this is warfare against the most vulnerable in our society.

Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey had this to say:

“It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.” Hubert H. Humphrey

D.T. and his band of deplorable Congressfolk fail this test. An F. Cruelty is not only a bomb dropped from the sky; it’s a conscious decision to deprive fellow human beings of what they need to live and to thrive.

Imbolc                                                                  Valentine Moon

Well. That happened. The 70’s.

I remember that decade as a time where great rock went to die and when the movement began to decline. The reaction against the cultural revolution, hippies and back to the land and free sex and rock and roll and feminism and black power, began to gain momentum. Last year, on November 8th, we saw the culmination of that fulmination. And, it’s ugly.

I’ve asked myself many times in the intervening years whether the 60’s were a mistake, a wrong turn, excess turned into a political rationale. There is no easy answer. Yes, excesses were common, drugs and sex in particular. Some of them though pushed us past the traditional barriers erected by our parents and the people in power. Those excesses allowed us to fight a weighty establishment which had sat on freedom for women, for blacks, even for soldiers caught in a miserable foreign policy, for decades and in some cases centuries.

Today we have the revenge of the cis-gender, straight, white, males and their allies. Shunted aside in the rush for liberty from traditional sexual and racial mores, these folks heard a man who claimed to understand their situation. To them, making America great again meant a return to a time of unconscious and unearned privilege, a time when they had good jobs and could support their families.

As I’ve written here before, how you define is how you solve. These folks see globalization and line-jumping as the primary source of their woes. Not that simple. Automation turns out to be the culprit. We’re manufacturing more than ever before; we’re just doing it with many fewer employees. Shaming corporations into leaving plants here will not do the trick, neither will tariffs on imports. We need a complete rethink of work, of the social safety net, of our common obligations to each other.

If we consider the 60’s as the thesis and the 50 years or so since then as the antithesis, we may now be moving toward the synthesis. That, I hope, is what the next decade or so will bring. I’d love to see the new culture arising from this dialectical struggle, so I hope it begins to take shape before I die.

Imbolc                                                                                   Valentine Moon

Sessions confirmed. DeVos confirmed. Price is up next. Pruitt at some point will be up.

Elizabeth Warren is a symbol of the resistance. Her voice is my voice and I’m glad she’s in the congress to represent me. Bernie, too. And Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Michael Bennet, my actual senator, needs to get more vocal. And Corey Gardner? He thinks all the people who call his office are paid protesters.

Even though I find Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar too centrist, still, I think we can count on her to resist Trump, too. Al Franken, Paul Wellstone’s old buddy, has done a remarkable turn in remaking himself from comedian to serious politician. Like Warren, he, too, has persisted. Some people are mentioning him as a 2020 presidential candidate.

The key to resistance is persistence. Fading away as fatigue sets in or as this terrible, no good, horrible presidential term tries to make normal the outrageous and corrupt, will only ensure Trump’s success.

We need to support those congressfolk who are leaders in the fight and we need to fight ourselves. In this case the ancientrail is opposition to bad leaders. It’s an old one, didn’t start with the 2016 election, but each time it becomes the trail on which we must walk, it’s critical to the future. As then, so now.