Winter Cold Moon
“We’ve never had a major national leader as professionally unprepared, intellectually ill informed, morally compromised and temperamentally unfit as the man taking the oath on Friday. So let’s not lessen the shock factor that should reverberate across this extraordinary moment.” The Internal Invasion, NYT, January 20, 2017
Winter Cold Moon
Yes. Tomorrow.
Groups have begun to emerge. Right here in Conifer there’s a good start, one I intend to join. A couple who make kites has organized it and the general thrust sounds good. Will also be a chance to meet fellow progressives who live here. Beth Evergreen has not, yet, gotten anything started though I believe that will happen.
The Wall of Meat must be checking their bikes right now, making sure their pipes are loud because loud pipes save lives, or so say the bumper stickers. The Rockettes. Wonder what they’re thinking about? All those women. I hope it turns out massive and raucous. Those bibles, Trump’s family bible and Lincoln’s. My question. Will they burst into flame when he puts his hand on them? Just sayin’.
I will spend the day with good friend Tom Crane who’s flying in today. We’ll have dinner here tonight, a fire and conversation. Tomorrow, inauguration day, we’ll motor over to The Happy Camper, where Kate and I buy our maryjane. Not sure, of course, but dispensaries all across the U.S. might see an uptick in sales after tomorrow. Gonna watch cabinet secretary appearances before the Senate? Don’t bogart that joint, my friend. Take it down and pass it over to me.
As to the knee. Which now comes near the end of my thoughts as I write. Little pain, mostly gain. My physical therapist said I was healing “incredibly well.” Good to hear. The big deal now is restrengthening muscles that have weakened over the years of arthritis caused bad biomechanics and lack of exercise post surgery. My right hip muscles are especially weak. Kat and Katie, p.t.’s at Select Physical Therapy, have me putting a small red rubber band around my ankles and walking sideways for two minutes at a time. May not sound like much, but ouch!
Jon and Jen have a good offer on their house. They accepted it and now await inspections, then closing. Provided all goes well this will relieve the last major impediment to moving on after the divorce. Jon will use the money to buy a new house in Aurora, the large Denver suburb where he works as an art teacher. He will be glad to give up the commute from Conifer, returning to riding his bike to work.
2017 will have some upsides, then. Never underestimate the power of unintended consequences, even with the Trump. Could be some positive things there, too.
Winter Cold Moon
“Cox said that Bikers for Trump is a “patriotic” group ready to protect all Americans during inauguration weekend and that its roughly 200,000 members trust that law enforcement can do the job.
However, he told Fox News a day earlier: “In the event that we are needed, we will certainly form a wall of meat. We’ll be shoulder-to-shoulder with our brothers. And we’ll be toe-to-toe with anyone who’s going to break through police barricades.”” FoxNews
When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-Leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the game is over. A Yale history professor’s powerful, 20-point guide to defending democracy under a Trump presidency Quartz, November 28, 2016
Winter Cold Moon
Friend Tom Crane found this. It made me cry.
Karim Sulayman – I trust you from Meredith Kaufman Younger on Vimeo.
Winter Cold Moon
A gentle snow falls at 5:00 am here on Shadow Mountain, kicking off inauguration week. As my brother, Mark, wrote, we’re about to have the biggest political change in our history on Friday. Irony, thy name today is the calendar. Yes, it’s Martin Luther King day and our president-elect, knowing still his base, has made it a day to declare John Lewis a man of too much talk. The layers of irony could not be separated without a welding torch.
There is this, too. The world’s 8 richest men hold as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion, half of the world’s population. (NYT on Oxfam report, 1/16/17) In what must be the chief irony of this moment (choosing from so many) a billionaire who has gold plated rooms, towers named after himself and a callous disregard for truth, justice and the American way came to the Presidency thanks to those left behind by this Gilded Age on Steroids.
The takeaway from this challenge to the roots of our Republic lies in understanding the power of the left behind. In this case those left behind are the former rulers of the land: white men and their families. Their advocates include the KKK, the White Citizen’s Council, various militia and tea party groups and Donald Trump. Wow. Look at that sentence. Yes, the election was lost because former manufacturing workers, miners, those without a college education, came together for one last grasp, leaning far off the carousel horse for the brass ring.
Note that they are far from the only left behind. Think of those 3.6 billion. Think of those whose residence here has suffered barrier after barrier to equal citizenship: blacks, Latinos, LGBT folk, women, immigrants, Native Americans, those very Americans whose champion, Martin Luther King, we celebrate this day, four days before the inauguration.
But. Working class whites were left behind. Their pain is real. Their anger justified. Their choice of solutions abysmal. 100 years from now historians will be able to see this strange time we call the 21st century and perhaps be able to pull apart the strands of circumstance making it what it is. Was it really globalization that cost all those good-paying blue collar jobs? How much did automation have to do with it? What role did the increasing diversity of the United States play? We are moving to a nation in which no ethnic group will be a majority of the population.
One real and very difficult problem is education as a divider of the nation*. This excerpt from an ABC News article and the reality of 8 men owning more than 3.6 billion people make a quick explanation for the rise of right wing populism not only here in the U.S., but in Europe, too. The truth is neither liberals nor conservatives know how to repair this chasm. Liberals have ignored the pain of downwardly mobile whites and paid in the coin of the political realm for it. Hopefully, we will now come together as a left-wing and promote policies that will lift up all working class people, once we discover what might work.
BTW: repealing basic health care is not the route toward a solution.
*”Americans with no more than a high school diploma have fallen so far behind college graduates in their economic lives that the earnings gap between college grads and everyone else has reached its widest point on record.
The growing disparity has become a source of frustration for millions of Americans worried that they — and their children — are losing economic ground.
College graduates, on average, earned 56 percent more than high school grads in 2015, according to data compiled by the Economic Policy Institute. That was up from 51 percent in 1999 and is the largest such gap in EPI’s figures dating to 1973.
Since the Great Recession ended in 2009, college-educated workers have captured most of the new jobs and enjoyed pay gains. Non-college grads, by contrast, have faced dwindling job opportunities and an overall 3 percent decline in income, EPI’s data shows.
“The post-Great Recession economy has divided the country along a fault line demarcated by college education,” Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, said in a report last year.” ABC News
Winter Cold Moon
We have entered a long tunnel, dark at its core, though there may be a faint light faraway. This tunnel is the first two years of a Trumpist America. Perhaps it has a sign, somewhere near the entrance: Chamber of Horrors, Fun House, or Hall of Mirrors. It is a Disneyland populated not with Mickey Mouse or Goofy, but the spectre of starvation, a ghoul of no medical care, a banshee of Twitter posts. No one knows what to expect on this first ride through the politics with no name, the policies with no shame.
Each time I read the paper my breath catches, a silent groan followed by a not so silent oath. “God, can you believe this?” This is a theme park in which the theme is noblesse with no oblige. It is a neo-Gilded age fantasy realm in which bankers regulate bankers, climate change deniers run the EPA, a racist is Attorney General, an enemy of public schools runs the Department of Education and generals run the Department of Defense. Were this a parody, it could not have been limned with more precision.
One temptation for third phasers is to hunker down, watch our nest eggs. Keep out of the way. As energy, that most valuable of health resources, wanes, it would be easy to say I have no leverage here, no power in a Trump dominated political realm, so why bother?
That would be a mistake. We third phasers are the group with political experience, who know how to fight asymmetric battles with powerful establishments. It was our generation’s birthright to take up that fight in the 1960’s. We may not lead, but we must support. Why? Because if not us, who? An advantage, a strong advantage we have, is most of us no longer have careers to safeguard, families to raise. We can take risks, challenge politicians with less personally at stake. That’s a powerful tool in this fight.
Our ride through this Chamber of Horrors is no longer optional. That ended on November 8th. Our boats have docked and in just nine days we have to get in and brave the darkness. I hope the person next to you is someone you love.
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
I’ve not written here about the Standing Rock protests. At least not much. Neither have I posted about them on Facebook though many, many of my friends have. Several people I know, including ex-wife Judy Merritt, have been out there. She’s going a second time this week.
The issues are complex because they deal with pipelines, fracked oil, climate change and the string of broken promises that have been U.S./Indian treaty relations. The simple issue concerns the possible contamination of water for the Standing Rock Reservation. The current route of the pipeline takes it under the Missouri River near the res. Pipelines break. This is common knowledge and documented well. The objection is reasonable and has not been refuted by the developers of the pipeline.
Then, there are burial grounds. The Standing Rock folks don’t want the graves of their ancestors dug up for a project that will add to the growing carbon load in the atmosphere. What if the project’s economically feasible path took it through any of the many National Cemeteries around the country? Easy to see the problem from that perspective.
Building more pipelines and fracking in the North Dakota oil field for more oil actively contributes to the climate change problem. Keep it in the ground would solve the Standing Rock problem and aid in carbon sequestration.
Most poignant, of course, is the dismal Federal record of maintaining treaty accords, of forcing native children to go to “indian schools,” of slaughtering bands and tribes, of moving whole nations from their homelands, of keeping reservations poor. It is an even more original sin than slavery. I learned about it from my home state, Oklahoma, the end of the trail of tears.
The tragedy here is that the tragedy is not new. We’ve left a trail of broken promises and whatever happens at Standing Rock will likely reinforce that trail.
The promise and the hope of Standing Rock is the amazing national and international gathering of native peoples in solidarity with the water protectors. White allies, too. And, perhaps even more amazing, a contingent of former military folks going out to guard the water protectors. This may usher in a new era of cross-border alliances for native people all over the world.
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
from a facebook feed:
My friend, Cynthia Levinson‘s husband, received this in the mail yesterday. He is a prominent constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School. The postcard reads: “Hey Sandy, You just got your kike ass kicked. Fuck you hymie. We’re gonna drain the swamp at Harvard Law. Juden Raus!” That closing means “Jews Out!” and was a Nazi rallying cry, shouted by the Nazis throughout the ghettos when they were trying to force Jews from their hiding places.
They’ve reported this to the Anti-defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center, as well as to the university.
The Holocaust did not begin with killings: it began with words. Never forget.
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
A man who lives on Conifer Mountain, across from us and next to Black Mountain, posts on Pinecam.com as the weathergeek. He provides those of us who live in the Shadow Mountain, Black Mountain, Conifer area weather forecasts tailored to our peculiar microclimate. His tagline to his posts is: “Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get.”
As I woke up, weathergeek’s tagline crossed over into the political. Why? Because of this picture. The father of a student at Isabella Bird posted it on facebook with the note: this is personal.
I’ll say. Both Ruth and Gabe go to elementary school in Stapleton and live near it. They attend Schweigert Elementary. And, they are both Jewish. This is the sort of toxic display, coming from an equally toxic inner world that frightens Jews in particular. By extension this evocation of Nazism and the holocaust puts fear into the lives of all of us not perceived as, well, white, straight, Christian and patriotic Americans.
In Ruth and Gabe’s neighborhood. At an elementary school in their neighborhood. Not. Acceptable. Ever.
Here’s how weathergeek came into this. My immediate thought was to blame Trump, to connect his racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic, climate denying campaign rhetoric with this specific act. But, of course, I can’t. Not with the information I have now. This kind of graffiti pops up in American cities and small towns from time to time. Just go on the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center if you don’t believe me.
And so. Climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get. Trump and his rhetoric is now the national climate for acts of hate. I expect people like the KKK, Westboro Baptist, climate deniers, women haters, anti-Semites have been emboldened to act both by Trump’s rhetoric but also by the violent, thuggish behavior he not only allowed but reveled in at his rallies. In other words the climate relative to non-white, non-male, non-European, non-Christian, non-straight life is turbulent and chaotic, tending toward personal acts of violence and scorn.
When we get a particular weather event, we have to follow the evidence to certainly connect it to the change in the national political climate. Once we’ve done our work often enough and comprehensively enough, we will be able to connect individual events with Trump. The “alt-right” video from the Atlantic posted below is one example. As we gather these instances, we must begin to create a defense strategy. The safety pin is one such strategy.
On these matters I believe defense is the strongest act right now. Reaching out to the government for help against these grievances will prove futile. Jeff Sessions as attorney general? Come on.
How would that defense look? I don’t know. It might be small reaction teams formed in churches, synagogues, Buddhist temples, mosques; or, in local branches of the Democratic party, the NAACP, JCC’s, the ACLU, civil rights and human rights groups. Even many small businesses and other non-profits like unions and Planned Parenthood might form teams, too.
What would they do? Not sure. At least go to the site of an incident and do some investigating, produce a report, send it to the Southern Poverty Law Center or some other place serving as a clearing house. On site they could also co-ordinate efforts to help victims with money, legal help, emotional support. They could also co-ordinate, as was done by parents in the instance of Isabella Bird school, actions to erase graffiti, repaired damaged homes and buildings. Probably other things occur to you and I imagine, if these teams came into being, that there would be multiple ways they could engage with acts of hate.
In Stapleton. Swastikas on an elementary school. In a community where my Jewish grandchildren attend elementary school. Never again. We must all say it and mean it and ally with each other to prevent this virus from spreading.
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
