Repeal the Second Amendment

Americans are being killed in the streets, killed in their houses of worship, killed in their schools, killed when they celebrate the Lunar new year. Killed in groceries because they are black. Killed in synagogues because they’re Jewish. Killed in schools because we let our children and the wonderful people who want to devote their lives to teaching them be murdered and do absolutely nothing. Change absolutely nothing.

A religious-like attachment to a flawed document from the 1700s renders us helpless, uttering platitudes that are even more meaningless than usual.

The Second Amendment must be repealed and replaced with something that works in the modern era.

First, let’s dismiss any strict constructionist argument. The founding fathers meant this or that, so it is inherently perfect. NO. The constitution is the most imperfect and racist of documents. How could it not be so, when it’s born out of the intersection of commerce, and the opposite poles of liberty and slavery? The constitution, just like the foundations of the early republic, was so deeply flawed we’ve made 27 amendments to it, including amendments that repeal amendments.

A document so deeply flawed due to slavery and the racist underpinning of human bondage in the US, that three major constitutional crises, and a number of minor ones, occurred in the first 70 years after its signing. The last crisis led to a civil war that killed the equivalent of 7 million killed today. To fix the constitution after that bloodbath required two amendments.

The AK47

The 13th outlawed slavery except in cases of imprisonment. The passage of the 13th sets the backdrop for Daniel Day Lewis’s great role as Lincoln in the same-titled movie. Congress added the catchall 14th amendment about a year later – part rights guarantee and part get back at the southern elites. A classically vindictive winner move that I heartily agree with in this instance. The 14th includes the ringing bravado of article one,  which prohibits state or federal officials from enacting a law which can  “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Of course, 14th’s article one would be interpreted for the next hundred or so years to mean no white citizen can be deprived of liberty.

Who wouldn’t want these clowns to be packing loaded weapons of mass destruction on a public street?

Enough about that. The second amendment must be repealed. First I want no militia’s roaming the streets. Second people wanted the amendment because they were worried about slave rebellions, poor farmers from the hill country coming into town with guns at the ready to complain about taxes, and being allowed to kick the remnants of the first inhabitants of this continent off their ancestral lands.  Various laws/dictums by both the British and early state governments tried to control guns (a limited resource in a colonial America where manufacturing was held down by the Parliament’s policy). The people wanted none of that, hence this amendment.

The second amendment’s as necessary to modern life as amendment three which prohibits the government from housing soldiers in our homes.

I am not against gun ownership. I know many people who own them responsibly.

We have no right to own a bazooka in America, well we shouldn’t anyway.

If someone wants a gun or guns for hunting, target shooting or protecting their home, fine. Kept in secure locations, I have nothing to say. However, when an adult keeps a loaded pistol in a location where their six-year-old can find it and use it to shoot a teacher (yes, this happened two weeks ago), that adult should go to jail.

As long as a weapon can’t be used or easily modified to be used as a weapon of mass killing and it has a legitimate hunting, target shooting or home protection use, fine. Let it be manufactured and sold.

To those second amendment folks who believe in the unlimited right to own a gun. There is no unlimited right to own things that kill others. Should people have the right to a bazooka? It’s hand held and kills quickly, just like an AK47.

Here is what I think the 28th amendment should say:

Article One: This amendment repeals article two of the US Constitution.

Article Two:  Every citizen of the US has the right to gun ownership for personal protection or sport.

Article Three: Congress or a state government may regulate the sale, ownership or manufacture of weapons in the United States to ensure public protection.

Article Four: There is no right for private citizens to band together in armed groups, be they called militias, gangs or assemblages of clowns in costume.

Ok the last article was tongue in cheek, but only slightly.

Climate Change is On My Mind

It snowed today. I live where I can look out my window on untrammeled water crystals coating the gardens and little hills of my yard. Some shrubs and trees wear blankets of anachronism, but that will mostly melt tomorrow and be entirely rained away in a few days. This is the new winter in the northeast US. Most of the winter, including nearly all of January, my yard has been bereft of snow cover.

We did get a six inch barrage of icy snow in December. The dense snow created an icy layer that you could cut out blocks from that would easily have laid the foundation of a three story igloo. This type of snow is indicative of the new winter . Up until about 10 years ago this kind of snow was a rarity, now we get this dense, nearly rain snow two to four times a winter.

That December snow took on one godawful three inch rain storm and won. That day the weather swung from 8 degrees (US old school, and stupid) Fahrenheit to fifty in under 24 hours. However, a solid week of far above average temperatures melted every last bit of that icy layer.

Atmospheric CO2 over the decades. there were forests on Antarctica and they estimate sea levels were about 30 feet higher the last time we hit 400ppm, and 500ppm seems just around the corner.

Given the prediction for two rainy days in the coming week, I expect this latest five inch snowfall to melt away within a few days as well. Alas, my pretty view will be gone. Even if we get some hard-assed winter weather, the kind that makes you suck in your breath carefully so you don’t scar your lungs, and it snows, the snow will not last.

Winter’s fury has become like a tepid faucet.

This image from an article on the accelerated pace of Greenland ice melting outpacing previous estimates.

This is not the first tepid winter in the northeast. We can all see how the temperatures have changed, how every year there’s markedly less snow than ten or fifteen years ago. And the world of difference compared to winters prior to 2000 is evident to anyone willing to remember and then step outside.

Every year feels a bit worse than the last. The last eight were the hottest on record. Quite depressing, though there’s less and less need to dream of the Caribbean.

Of all the cascading terrestrial effects of global warming, the results of tepid winter weather are the easiest to see, and to see the effect on humans. Lack of snow fall is critical for year round moisture the world over. The conversion of what would have fallen as snow in the 1990s, into rain due to higher temperatures means winters former bounty is now in the ocean. Rainy winters have and will desiccate huge swaths of our planet that we rely on for food.

Examples are literally everywhere already, on every inhabitable continent, driving refugees like the former farmers from Central America driven off the land due to drought. The entire hydrology of the US west was based on snow slowly melting. Snow that will inevitably decrease, just as the climate models predict, no matter how many atmospheric rivers pop up in the future.

Prior to some recent huge winter storms due to the atmospheric river wreaking havoc in California, the hydrological systems were near collapse. Right now they’re just critically endangered.

I encourage people to seek out studies, articles, whatever. Try a search on “Are climate predictions underestimating the effects of Global Warming” and you can’t help but be worried about the very, all-to-near future. The bald truth about the lack of glaciers, the increased pace of melting in Greenland, the slow dissolution of the North Atlantic current Ben Franklin first discovered in the 1750s (fun fact) or the latest hunk of Antarctic ice sheet calving, is in plain sight.

And ignored. By us all. Ignored as it speeds up in plain sight.

This image of the Gulf Stream (orange) shows how what was once a mass of moving water is now sloshing around the US east coast – leading to some of the fastest rates of sea level rise right in our back yard.

As the United Nations 2022 Climate study put it: “Some extreme events have already emerged which exceeded projected global mean warming conditions for 2100, leading to abrupt changes in marine and terrestrial ecosystems.” They had “High Confidence” in that statement, one notch below the Very High Confidence level. The report is chock full of info, technocratic jargon, and statements of doom.

This issue receives the most attention with the least result of anything we face, well except racism, sexism, gun violence… Sure we fought over idiocy during Covid, but we somehow managed to develop amazingly effective vaccines that helped slow the death toll. If we managed to muddle toward that amount of effort, even with the kicking and screaming of those who would deny reality for political or monetary gain, it would be significantly more effort than we currently put toward the issue.

I don’t want to be right in ten years when parts of the US are sucked dry, literally heat wastelands. We can change this now. I believe we can still change the outcome technologically and through carbon capture (both natural and augmented). I also believe that without the US leading the effort it has zero chance of succeeding. And the thought of the effects on my children and grandchildren is heartbreaking enough, but the heat will mess with everyone’s lives and MUCH sooner than people are willing to believe. I’m in my seventh decade of sweet existence and even if I’m granted just a little more time, I too will feel the heat.

Is there the will to address the issue now? Will we listen to scientists and etc just pointing out the obvious? Just pointing out what everyone can see and feel?

What the Republican Speaker Spectacle Says About Climate Change

Like most news junkies, I paid attention to the 14 votes for Speaker of the
House in the US. While this is the usual tempest in a tea pot news coverage, there is no escaping the fact that the Republicans elected a speaker who failed at
the first job of being a speaker, knowing when something will pass the house,
let alone your own caucus. I understand that profit, mostly gained through the
drugs of fame and power, is the motivating principle behind much of the
Republican squabble. And I agree that for the current Republican machine, you
should be seen as someone who can’t govern, who doesn’t believe in government and wants to burn down the government in the name of democracy.

That’s the brand

Kevin McCarthy agreed to political neutering to get the job.

This messy stain on Reups resume ( soon to be forgotten by even worse behavior ), hinges on a right wing power politician who’s loved by the NRA and hedge funds, who will likely allow the house to vote on legislation designed to reform social security out of existence, and who endorsed Trump’s aborted coup,  being  considered not conservative enough. Compared to whom? Jair Bolsonaro?  

This muddleheaded thinking seems like the natural outcome of a group of people who are content to discount scientific fact when it gets in the way of profits or politics. Right now a sizeable segment of Americans distrust science. I believe this lack of faith has everything to do with the right’s delusional rhetoric going back decades (and anti-vax idiots on all sides, but I digress). Right wing frothers have used any means to dissuade reasonable thought on things like tax policy, the racism at the core of US history, or on something as simple and accepted as the role we fossil-fuel-burning-idiots play in heating up the globe one MPH at a time. I’d like to add here that I know that corporations account for well over 50% of US greenhouse gas emissions according to the EPA.

We all need to play our part because it should be obvious that adding CO2
in vast amounts to the atmosphere will result in human devastation. Forget
saving the planet, the earth will barely notice. Even the catastrophic loss of
species will be forgotten as new lucky survivors branch out. Over eons that
shit recovers, and a whole new vibrant world emerges.

But we as an 8-billion-person species will be decimated by the effects of
climate change. The last time the atmosphere held 400 PPM CO2 seas
were about 30 feet higher than they are now. We’re at like 425ppm atmospheric
CO2 now and rising fast, fast, fast. Together we’re discounting
settled science, and ignoring the steady stream of research letting us know how
fucked we are.

It takes a belief in magic to ignore that winter has already ceased to exist
in much of the US. In the Northeast, we just have some mild cold snaps
separated by not quite winter drear. Ticks are very happy with this change in
weather.

 Battling climate change requires our own changes and international cooperation. That means that, as a species, we will just continue to burn baby burn. Given that paradigm, current projections of a few feet of rise by
2100 are way too conservative.

The consequences will be nearly every seacoast city in the world underwater, the devastation of cropland leading to worldwide famine. Lack of food and living space will lead to very unwholesome shitstorms of violence. What happens to sea level when CO2 levels soar past 500 and 600 PPM in the very near future and something like 800 by 2100? I’m guessing seas rise 30-40 feet of sea level rise by 2100, but that might be too conservative.

At just fifteen feet Miami is long gone.

Expect that crisis in the 2040s. By the 2060s NYC will be at least a third smaller and shrinking fast. Philly, Baltimore, and Washington DC all underwater. Perhaps that’s the Repubs long term goal. They do shout about the dangers of government, and the need for smaller government, until a huge storm hits Louisiana.

If you have to be delusional about the climate crisis, than voting for a
speaker fourteen times and  rich white guy fighting (please hold me back I might hurt my ego) are fine spectacles to host.

I expect Republican stupidity in the next term about the military, about abortion, about taxes, about keeping the government running and paying people who do the work of the people, and especially about the war in Ukraine. But could it be too much to ask for some sound, scientifically-based thinking on the true over-riding topic of our time?

FIFA Should Join the Modern World

I love the world cup. If I lived in a city with a soccer team, and tickets and beer were reasonable, I’d go to a game or two.

But sweet Jesus, can Fédération Internationale de Football Association, better known as FIFA, bring the game into the modern world?

Once upon a time on an NBA basketball court where players could literally brawl with an entire team, two pairs of eyeballs tried to see everything, and failed miserably. BTW see Willis Read decimating the entire 66-67 Lakers in one game and probably playing in the next one for reference to the brawling thing. After about 25 years of ineptitude, the NBA realized that with ten freakishly athletic pituitary giants buzzing about a rectangle 90 by 50 feet, two officials wouldn’t cut it.

The rulers of the NBA (All white, all very, very rich, and mostly, let’s be honest, happy assholes.) decided to pay for a third official. Now fans only endure half as many bad calls per game. See? Progress.

Stoppage Time is Just a Guess

FIFA maintains the fiction that one guy on a pitch of 105 meters by 68 meters can see everything on the field. Why did I just use meters for one and feet for the other measurement you ask? I’m an American, we’re only a third of the way metric. I know the ref’s receive assistance from two on the sidelines, but c’mon FIFA no one person can see everything, be everywhere on a field so fucking huge.

I know they’ve added VAR to help the refs out on offsides and such. I think VAR stands for Video Assisted Review. As if a sporting review would be anything else but something you look at? Would some other league have their review system based on sound and echolocation? By the way, echolocation works so well bats snatch mosquitoes out of the night. Eating mosquitoes must suck.

Fourteen minutes of stoppage time? Shenanigans must have gone on in that game.

But I digress once again from my silly point. Redundantly, even.

Back to the greedy motherfuckers who run FIFA and will peddle the World Cup, the most prized prize in all the world’s beautiful game, to any dictator with the money to bribe them.

How much more would it cost your bazillion dollar extravaganza to have another ref on the pitch? I think the bottom line wouldn’t be hurt that much.

And, what the hell is it with football at all levels and the halfway kind of running time that rules football? There’s no commitment here. Either leave the clock running through all the stoppages due to the players protesting their deeply held belief that they were injured on the tackle, and the only remedy is a yellow card, or just stop the clock.

This is not a hard thing to do. Accurate enough clocks have existed for about two hundred years that would do the job.

But no. The ref, the same one making some calls from less-than-prime positions because there’s just one of them, keeps track of how much time should be added. They do this while dealing with players yelling and writhing on the ground for ridiculous amounts of time in an attempt to get a free kick or a blessed yellow card on an opponent.

Or just, in a game where people run like 7 miles, players gaming the system for a little breather.

The amount of stoppage time added by the refs to each half is just extravagantly imaginative. In some games, seven minutes of stoppage time seemed just right. While others saw four minutes for basically the same game. Stoppage time is always some full minute, never something like six minutes and thirty seconds.

Stoppage time and imaginative approximation are synonymous.

 I got a stopwatch on my phone. I’m sure that FIFA has enough cash to give each ref their own silver stopwatch with FIFA’s name and logo engraved on it. Perhaps they could just spring for modern ones that link to the scoreboard so everyone would know how much fucking time is remaining.

Hell, I’m sure FIFA could afford to pay for a timing official.

Loosen up the wallet FIFA and, concurrently, dive into the modern world.

And while you’re at it, give the coaches a timeout so the players can rest without having to fake injuries to do it. Football’s a beautiful game but these guys are terrible actors.

The Biggest Problem is Me

I dearly want my younger body back. That ain’t happening, but since keeping to reality has never been my strong suit, that’s my goal. Reaching this unattainable goal is why I have decided to train for a triathlon; that and I’m an idiot.

It takes work to train for a triathlon, the kind of work I both like and like to avoid. Adding to this exercise schizophrenia, during times of stress, like the time of my life right now, I eat too much, smoke too much, and generally take care of myself as if reclining is an Olympic sport.

In the past couple of weeks, when I should have been exercising an average of one and a half hours per day, I’ve gained something like ten pounds. I only exaggerate slightly. Is it redundant to add that I’ve not done enough working out?

What have I done you ask? I’ve ridden about 125 miles on my exercise cycle, but not at nearly enough tension. I’ve only run twice. I did do an afternoon of pick and shovel work for my new garden and that just exhausted me the next day as well. Never underestimate how much effort using a pickaxe requires. I have done a bit of shadowboxing, but still not nearly enough.

If I keep up at this level of exercise I will be a fat, out-of-shape dude in August and that is not my goal. I mean most people don’t have the goal of an ugly body, but I digress.

On the good side, my carpel tunnel surgery was successful so I can actually ride a bicycle on a roadway. Prior to surgery, I couldn’t do that so I’m pretty excited about it. As I still do not have a working bike I need to address that problem asap. My bike will be going to the repairist tomorrow. BTW, there should be a nongender word like “repairist” but my spell checker doesn’t think so. Besides the bike repairs, I’ll need a helmet, gloves, something reflective to wear, and perhaps one of those cute bike outfits. I’ll only get the bike outfit after I’ve lost a suitable amount of weight. I ain’t squeezing this body into some form-fitting garment. I’d scare the kiddies.

Unfortunately, the early returns on my quixotic quest are disappointing. But the good thing is I can still turn it around. This month, May, my goals are dieting to lose a quick fifteen while exercising enough to feel like I’m training. Whether or not I succeed in overcoming my biggest problem in my quest – myself, I’ll be writing about it.

The Desire is the Thing

Over the last three days, I completed a fifteen, and a seventeen-mile excursion to nowhere on the exercise bike. During the 15 I forced myself into four miles of fairly intense tension, and six more of annoying tension. There’s a park on a ridge near our house that is about 10 miles away with about 7 hard to absurd uphill miles. I want to combine that ride with a long run in the park as well. I think that if I can do that I must be in some kind of shape. A dream and a product of misplaced desire to be sure. So I’m trying to envision that ride on the ex-bike. After the 15 miler I did five or six rounds of shadowboxing, I lost count because I was too busy texting with my family’s NBA texters. It’s playoff time so we’re busy…

I needed three T-shirts, one for the ride, one for the shadowboxing, one for the sweat that continues to pour off me for fifteen minutes after the shadowboxing. Just a tad of hyperbole there. Before I started working out in the fall of 2019, I’d gotten so out of shape that sweat poured off me at the slightest provocation. That’s one difference between being morbidly obese, as I was then, and 220 pounds of uck that does include some decent musculature; my sweat comes in creeks, not rivers.

For the 17-mile-ride, I gifted myself a nice, not really any tension to write home about, ride. I managed to get all 32 miles completed in a bit under ninety-four minutes of bike time (I’ll discuss bike time in another post). Oh, hosana, I got to my 20-mile-per-hour goal. Yay. Reaching an artificial goal, yeah…

In between the rides I ran for 35 minutes through the local suburban streets, and a couple of parks. Normally I run in the woods but we had a snowstorm earlier in the week, laying a temporary blanket of four to five inches of wet spring snow. I didn’t want to slog through mud. Been there. Like an idiot. Will probably be there again because I’m still an idiot.

Of course, from running on the roadway at my extended weight, my knees hurt the next day. Hence the second, knee friendly, 17 miler ride.

Note to self. I should probably just wear compression braces as a matter of course before running.

My plan calls for a difficult 15-mile ride and a half-hour of shadowboxing this evening, 4/23/22. I do know how to spoil a Saturday. First, I will get to play guitar with a friend, and concurrently, ruin my lungs in the process.

My desire is strong to do this level of working out. I guess that’s because my knees don’t hurt today and the carpel tunnel surgery seems to have worked. Because of that, once I get a working bicycle, shoes, helmet, gloves, and etc, I may be able to bike on the road.

Why Tri?

The why of this endeavor is the real question.

I know that goals loom large in our psyche. Achieving them moves us in a visceral way, and the journey that brings us to that level of achievement is what brings enlightenment. Or not. Enlightenment is fucking hard to come by, even for a master of bullshit such as myself.

Even some meaningless goal, said often enough, takes on the aura of dignity, of “Wow, you’re trying to do that?” I understand that often enough people are saying to themselves “Fucking why are you doing that?”

The Why is the beast of the ego, the real deep down answer people rarely ask for. After all, if you ask someone why they’re taking on some quixotic, pointless, journey, THEY WILL TELL YOU. We all love to talk about ourselves, well I do at any rate.

So you don’t have to ask. I AM TRYING TO COMPLETE A TRIATHLON .

Here I am. Not a body one associates with a triathlon. The statue looks good though.

That’s the first time I’ve made a public declaration. I did announce it in an email to a long-lost friend, as in “Dude, see what shit I’m trying to do!”

Back to the why. Even though I’m only looking at baby triathlons – 3-7 miles running, up to half a mile swimming, and 20-40 miles of biking – training enough to be able to do that level of exercise without making a fool of myself will be grueling. Unfortunately, some part of me actually looks forward to this difficult journey; training in a way I haven’t since I tried to do this last year. Yes, I failed at my first attempt to get into triathlon shape because I injured myself doing landscaping in my yard. I was in such good shape I forgot exactly what stage of life I’m in.

I’m 61. The electronic notes from my last doctor’s visit describe me as OBESE, which is a step up from the morbidly obese person I used to be. Weirdly, I’ve always exercised quite a bit, but I have an eating disorder. I eat way too much from 8 PM to midnight and just too much before that. At this point I could “easily” do a triathlon if it were biking 15 miles, running 3-5, and swimming maybe 1/4 mile. I would probably finish last but I’d finish! In addition, I might perhaps need a bit more downtime between events than I’ll get a triathlon. You can see that I have some training to do.

I’d say my chances of completing a triathlon are at most 50% and here’s why: First, I have no access to a pool, so I shadowbox as a way of exercising my arms aerobically. This is not a fair substitute, and it looks like I’ll only get about 5-10 chances to swim this summer in lakes that require half-hour to hour drives. NOT ideal. I don’t have a working street or trail bike. I use an exercycle, the fifth or sixth I’ve owned. All of those exercycles broke because I used them to death. I don’t think they were made for the obese exerciser. This time I purchased a stronger bike.

Finally and most importantly my knees are arthritic, decayed, and annoying. There’s a piece of calcium about the size of my thumb in the back of my right knee that I can feel. Because of knee pain, I wasn’t able to run five feet from my mid-fifties until 18 months ago when, after months of steadily increasing exercise, I just could. When I say “couldn’t run five feet” I mean that. When I tried to run across the street, my wife cringed and described it as watching a tyrannosaurus with a broken leg. At first, I thought, hey she thinks of me like a king of dinos, until I realized she was just alluding to my girth.

The WHY of this silly goal is that this is my last chance. The 60s are not the new 40s. That’s stupidity. I’m doing this because decay and death are there, smiling. If I don’t do a grandly stupid athletic endeavor like this now, when will I? Also I’m hoping to shed a few pounds and make my wife think my body is not icky.

The why of this post? I figured that I should blog about my goal, so, maybe, I would be too embarrassed to go back on my commitment to myself.

Police Need to Stop Picking Sides

We live in what’s called a democracy. To be sure, the benefits of this democracy don’t accrue equally everyone, especially to our brown and black brothers and sisters. Anyone with half a brain knows the rich have stolen the benefits of this democracy for themselves through a tax and wealth distribution system that so favors them that the top 1% own more than the bottom 50%. We must also keep in mind that the oligarchs who truly own this country are neither left nor right, blue nor red, they are venal and proud of it.

We live in a land where our TV and movies depict good Americans of all colors in our law enforcement, our district attorney offices, and our courts. They all try to find and administer justice. This fiction soothes our souls. See? The police are color blind. This is the promised land where merit will take you where you need to go.

the natural outcome of violent rhetoric – Trump inspired assholes fighting with police in DC

Demographic data tells us a different story. Our society is as stratified as any feudal state. If your parents are born into poverty, and most people would cry over a $500 car repair because they don’t enough useable cash to pay the bill, then you’ll most likely die poor. The generational equity of the middle class, that mix of homeownership, a decent job or small business, money in the bank and 401ks, and access to an adequate education, that generational equity is fading away. Right now, as wealth accrues to the economic overlords, the American dream drowns in the quicksand of its own making.

Into this tragedy comes the rightful search for an answer. From Black Lives Matter to the craziness of a right-wing that must suppress facts to entertain an occluded worldview filled with hate and the embrace of thugocracy in the name of freedom, Americans are searching for an answer to this question. How do we reclaim the supposed birthright our history books, and our mythos, assure us that we are entitled to own? Never mind that we’ve passed the sell-by date on access to the American Dream for those not born into well off neighborhoods with decent schools. With the flight of decent jobs for the marginally educated, wealth accumulation in America remains a fantasy for most.

Trump inspired anger venting to police before calling them traitors and threatening to come back with guns or to string them up. Hanging being a favorite theme for these thugs .

Enter the radicalized right telling white America that all they have to do is take up arms against those stealing their way of life and all will be as it was. An argument that lacks any coherence but resonates because somehow in this land of plenty a large percentage of people feel cheated. Of course, they feel cheated. The system set up to oppress our brown and black brothers and sisters and trap them in low wage jobs is now oppressing everyone equally! How unfair. How cruel. How totally foreseeable.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that in order to keep a person in the gutter you have to be in the gutter yourselves. How right he was.

The police mostly come from this well of white modest/low-income anger themselves. It’s natural for them to think the right wing nut jobs are their friends. That the guns and the mayhem they might cause are aimed at the other they too see as the enemy. So they stand aside as “armed friendlies” roam streets in Wisconsin or as Trumpista protestors try to take over the US Capitol to enforce their version of democracy (Their MY vote is the only vote that counts version). Perhaps the police are shocked that Trump protestors think the police are traitors for having the temerity to clear thugs and brutes from the hallowed halls of national identity. But the police must decide. Are they part of the anger that wields no solution but chaos and totalitarianism, or will they become something new, something this country has not seen maybe ever?  The police must decide if they will become an arbiter of the law for all regardless of color, or political identity. This choice has been a long time coming and I hope that the correct one is chosen.

I don’t think police are either good or bad. I do think that police culture in America tilts right-wing and that the culture itself begets racists treatment of brown and black people. I do think it’s stupid to say defund the police (like I want a cop around sometimes) but it is good to re-form the police in the image of a better society. I do think we need to re-establish priorities so that communities are spending more money on social services and job training and less on police. I think police, in those circumstances will likely have a safer, better experience with better community/police outcomes. One of those better outcomes would be not having the police take sides.

We are This Nation

I find myself unable to concentrate this morning. I’ve been unable to work because I just watched a coup attempt in this beautifully imperfect land, led by the despicable and their enabler in chief. Watching a crowd of white racist thugs march on the capitol, breach the halls intending mayhem shouting for multiple hangings, AND THEN GET ESCORTED OUT LIKE CHILDREN WHO’D MADE A MESS, without arrests, without heads bleeding from police batons hitting their insurrectionist craniums, reminds me of a sad, horrible truth: We are this nation.

Watching this on live TV I kept shouting “Where are the rubber bullets?” The same rubber bullets used on protests against police brutality this year. The same rubber bullets police used whenever a protest is done by a crowd of people with black or brown skin. Where were the tear gas canisters? Where was the robust police response to the “Wild” day that we all knew Trump and his crazed hate-filled followers had planned? A day symbolized by one of the mob parading through the capitol waving the flag of traitors.

Trump Led protestors Storming the Capitol

Perhaps the unhinged, psychopathic president kept the National Guard from being called out and that failure was the culprit for the underwhelming police response to insurrection. Perhaps, but not the whole answer. An aside, this is just one more reason why the Democrats should grant DC statehood – that and the principal that ALL the people should have the same say in how they are governed. But this failure stems from the problem with America that is reflected in our police forces.

Police departments all across the country are heavily influenced by white supremacists. Our police have been corrupted, there is no other way to read the signs going back before the presidency of this unhinged wanna-be tyrant. I know many good officers believe in the rule of law for everyone. That goes without saying. But police have responded with brutal force when, and only when, crowds are filled with black and brown people. This is no accident.

This is our semi-official, though unstated, national policy, and it was during the Obama years as well. We need a reckoning of our souls. We need to look at how systematic racism has left communities of color bereft of financial equity, educational opportunity, and basic rights like the ability to drive a car without fearing for their lives during a traffic stop for a missing taillight. We need to look at reforming police departments to shift to community-based policing and de-escalating situations. We need to shift funding priorities to getting more money and less police in communities of color.

Jackass with a confederate flag in the capitol – the irony of claiming patriotism while holding this simple of treason is of course lost on him

Trump is not the instigator of racism, or right-wing lunacy, or the finger-pointing at the “other” that they perceive has made their lives turn out bad. But his feral mind knew long ago how to use racism to his advantage. For decades the Republican Party has purposely used white nationalism to secure electoral gain. Since 1968 and Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” the Repubs have clothed more and more of their rhetoric in white nationalism as a way to stay in power. They’ve needed to use racism because they can’t win elections on their other main messages of un-taxing the rich and corporations, and letting people wear guns to everything from schools to bars. What could go wrong with a mixture of guns and alcohol after all?

We have a political party dedicated to preserving the power of the rich by employing white racism. This division gets stoked by a thousand secreted internet chat rooms, encouraged by the public rants of people like Trump, and abetted by the silence of other Republicans who seek their political fortune over the needs of the country. We have a police force dominated by those who believe in preserving white supremacism. We are a hollow democracy where one party seeks to keep voter turnout down by any means necessary and then cries foul at every loss and disputes the results.

We are this nation and it sickens me.

Will Trump’s Attempted Coup Succeed Using Proud Boys as His Stormtroopers?

Armed militants will roam the Washington DC’s streets on January 6, trying to disrupt democracy while wearing bulletproof vests while marching in a parody of military formations. Wearing uniforms branded in hate they will prey on isolated individuals who they can easily recognize as people they brand sub-human without rights and deserving no quarter. They embody the ethic of 1920s NAZI brown shirts in appearance, outlook, and political desires. They are traitors to our less than perfect democracy, and get egged on and abetted by our current president who has never felt democratic rules should apply to him.

It is amazing that despite everything, the center of our national democratic religion remains the preamble of the Declaration of Independence and the last paragraph of the Gettysburg Address.

But right now government of the people, by the people and for the people, that never obtained ideal we supposedly strive for, currently resembles a house of cards ready to implode. A confluence of a sociopathic presidency openly encouraging rebellion via tweetstorm, and the desperation of the white working-class whose incomes have been hollowed out by the inadequate schooling and the fleeing of international capital to low wage countries, leads us to the brink of open rebellion.

Proud Boys being assholes . Note how they need many to beat up one. Fuckers like this always need to attack their victims when in a pack because deep down they know they’re assholes and they need validation from other assholes.

How has the party of Lincoln become the party of Skinhead rebellion? While our president embraces the posture of a dictator by striking against the peaceful transition of power, the current Republican leadership looks on with a smile and a nod.  By their collective silence, they’ve signaled that the president’s treasonous actions regarding the election and the peaceful transition of power are justified, even after multiple courts denied the validity and reasoning behind dozens of suits. Many of these decisions occurred in the Supreme Court that was packed by this president.

The court dismissals confirm the obvious, Trump’s idiocy on COVID and in discouraging his base from turning out led to Joe Biden’s win. No cheating was required because Trump’s incessant political miscalculation lost the election.

There is no more process to play out as all allegations of fraud sink beneath the weight of no factual basis. 

Trump – shown here in all his ugliness – has spent months trying to overthrow Democracy, even though he can’t spell the word or tell you what it means.

Fighting the legitimate transfer of power is the most traitorous thing done in America since 1860. Just like then, this threat is caused by a minority composed nearly entirely of self-identifying white Americans who don’t want to share economic, political, or social justice with those who do not resemble them in skin tone or outlook. Just like in 1860 they are seeking a fascist state that would overthrow what beauty still resides in our republic.

You may believe I’m overstating things, but I believe the recent street fighting in Washington signals the opening salvo of what Trump hopes will be a revolution with him at the head. Perhaps this outcome was Trump’s intention, but certainly, this has become the only foreseeable outcome of his harebrained scheme to turn a drubbing into the win his “brand” dictates that he must have to be relevant. By stepping back because of fear of their political lives, Republicans in local, state, and federal offices are letting the president’s ludicrous lies engender baseless attacks on both voting systems and those from both parties who take it as a sacred obligation to ensure that every legal ballot is counted across the country. By their continued abetting of the ludicrous fiction of a stolen election in Democratic cities, when the loss of votes in white suburbs keyed Trump’s defeat, Republicans have signaled that they care only for their continued hold on power.

No real patriot could let a fairly lost electoral battle lead us to the brink of dissolution.

The NAZIs took power after an election where they got short of 50% of the German vote. They did because people ignored the “fringe element” as it got a stronger and stronger grip, or through their silence abetted it. Until people of courage call out this moment as traitorous, and until Republican elected officials concede the election was not stolen, the only outcome that would bring about the remedy that Trump and his fans seek remains a revolution.

I dearly hope people start speaking out against this madness. I hope that people who love this country remember that handing over the reins of power is the ultimate expression of American patriotism. I hope they remember before it’s too late, that we are strong only when elections matter.

I wrote this in mid December 2020. It gives me NO satisfaction to see that, on January 6, 2021, the worst day our democracy has had since 1860, that I was correct.