This is one of those Before and After moments in history. Pre-and-post hitler2 re-election. The Great American Fourth Reich. Hopefully this one will fall in four years, if not sooner. With a little help from us allies.
It looks like the consensus on how we failed boils down to Stupid People. No matter how you aim messages or info at Stupid People, they’ll just stick with the misinformation and propaganda their friends and media shove at them. They don’t respond to evidence in front of their faces. They are able to hold two opposite, contradictory perceptions of reality at once. I hope they get a rude awakening, but they may be too deluded to notice.
We dared to hope that we would live to see our democracy, though imperfect, progressing forward in an unprecedented way. Now, After, we have only dread of what the next four years will bring to every vulnerable, marginalized population, including our own loved ones. It’s sad and ridiculous that trump (and non-) voters will realize too late what they were complicit in, when their own families and cheap labor are persecuted and deported, their economy and finances go down the toilet, and they lose their social and healthcare safety nets, while billionaires dictate their every move. Just to mention the highlights.
Maybe Dems will get their act together and find an effective strategy to bring back sanity, if any legal recourse is left to them, but meanwhile, we the actual people on the ground can’t be passive and compliant, like Germans in WWII, watching our communities systematically persecuted until they come for us. The damage and setbacks to democracy that trump/vance/musk/etc. will cause will take years to undo. Our own world allies are unnerved. This is not the turning point we were looking for.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to rant on indefinitely. At some point we’ll all get the rage and grief out of our systems, and channel it toward proactive living. We can’t control many things, but we can control how we behave and model justice and mercy where we live going forward. Maybe some people use their one lifetime to be apathetic and self-centered, but that doesn’t have to be us.
On that high-minded note, back to the customary fodder you expect from me and my Blahg.
My grandkids are so artistic and creative! E is bringing down the house in their theatrical role in a production of Cabaret (speaking of nazis), and Y is a promising artist and crafter, and determined trumpet-player . We try to encourage them to be brave and self-confident in the face of extreme pressure by peers and some teachers to conform at school, as so many artists in history were treated.
Once again, erev was casual-style, with so many people coming and going. I made a big pot of chili, with fixin’s. It was “Motzi [blessing over the challah]-and Run”. Tonight I’ll stay over so as to get up and prep the Sunday B&B, a good safe place for fellow-ravers to gather and decompress.
