I’ve been having a harder time focusing than normal and that’s saying something. It’s been harder to settle down, organize my thoughts or even focus on what I’ll write. I’ve come to learn recently that I’ve got ADHD. Learning that has been comforting in that it’s made some things make more sense for me, but that’s not what this post is about. The source of the swirling vortices in my whirlpool mind, dragging down all semblance of ordered thinking and plans to the murkiest depths, isn’t the fault of my diagnosis. What is it?

Trump.

I don’t usually write this man’s name. I hate reading it. I can’t stand hearing it. I do all I can to avoid the face and voice that belongs to it. I’ve watched years of this failure of a man undeservingly grab news coverage, sometimes lately even being feted, and I do whatever I can not to see that arrangement of letters. Honestly, that name, in my opinion, should be seen as fetid, not get feted.

No matter, it’s everywhere. Inescapable. I’m days behind on reading my Substack subscriptions. Latest Substack podcast episodes dropped? Fuhgedaboudit. I wonder to myself why that is. Then, I scan the titles of the days of backlogged reading and it becomes clearer. Nearly every one of them reads like; “Court defies Trump!”, “How to beat Trump”, “Trump’s plans to steal the election”, “Stop Trump from stealing the election”, “Will Republicans finally break from Trump?“, “Is Trump finally going to stop the war?”, “Trump lies again when he…”, “Let’s mass and raise our voices to show Trump…”

God damnit! I’ve had it!!

I get it. This country failed an open book test for the second time, with the correct answers written in bold, highlighted and circled, once again saddling itself with a loathsome cretin in its highest office. This irredeemable, uncouth, babbling, incontinent, flatulent fool is the elected leader, and the actions of the person holding that office are generally newsworthy. Other things are true now, though, that weren’t in prior presidential tenures. Those include:

• He’s grossly incompetent, which is only eclipsed by the laziness with which he approaches the job.

• He lies on a monumental scale. Brobdingnagian, even. Nearly everything he says is a lie or exaggeration, often packing loads of them in the same sentence or whatever passes as a sentence from him.

• He’s unread, unstudied, undisciplined, unmoored, and completely deluded.

• No one in his Cabinet or recently hired to perform any duty in his branch of government, is trustworthy or honest. Most of them are as incompetent as he is, if not more so.

• He doesn’t have an original thought, and outside of the outright grifts that enrich his family, nothing else you see come out of his office is his idea. Anything that has potential lasting electoral, constitutional or legislative impact came from the Heritage Foundation, Koch or some other right-wing think tank.

• There is no grand plan or multi-step approach to anything you see him doing. If Heritage or Koch didn’t write explicit step-by-step instructions to carry out some boneheaded idea, whatever hastily cobbled and Sharpie-signed Executive Order he flashes from behind the Resolute Desk between bouts of narcolepsy is the extent of it.

With those things established, any ponderings about “his” grand plans to do this or that are wastes of breath and ink. He doesn’t plan. As Jeff Tiedrich often writes in his Substack, “he acts first and thinks never.” Truer words were never written.

He’s not playing global chess, checkers, Chutes and Ladders or Candyland. As he fights to stay conscious, he’s slapping that EKG of a signature on some Executive Order with a magic marker, bellyaching about how this person or that wronged him, threatening someone with revenge over some petty-assed slight, waiting for whichever of his hires stands behind him to clap like trained seals for doing some basic task, then retiring to watch Fox News turned up to earsplitting volume or go to sleep. Otherwise, he’s scheduled to struggle at playing golf at one of his courses.

To paraphrase the self-proclaimed apostle, Paul, we do not struggle against royalty, principality or a cunning, calculated and methodical long-range political plotter. We’re not even facing off against the best politician of the last few years, much less of his or any other age. Yes, he is the person signing the orders, but he’s not the one conjuring up the ideas. He has no ideas, besides using his position to leer at women and enrich himself.

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That’s why there’s no specific, detailed plans for anything. That’s why there’s never a clear goal. It’s why vaguely stated goals for the same action, shift or change completely. It explains why disastrous results, that were predictable to everyone with a working brain, become a total surprise where “no one could have known this could happen.” Frequent retreats to discussing his happy places, like the unauthorized ballroom he wants to build, old gripes and recounting his Apprentice ratings, stand in for the attention to governance people have come to expect from a president.

Worst of all, he’s starved for attention. He CRAVES it. He can’t get enough. He’s never seen coverage he doesn’t like, even when it’s unflattering reporting where he responds by barking at women reporters, just to tell them how “horrible and disrespectful” they are. He knows those outbursts to unfavorable news will get coverage, and he’ll keep the one thing he loves staring at more than pageant contestants in the news: his own name.

I think it’s this point that enrages me the most. He does wild things expressly to keep being seen, noticed and reported on. The news services know this. All of us at home know this. Despite that, and the growing number of us with unfavorable opinions of him, these sadists can’t help themselves. They’ve been so thoroughly trained to pull sour milk from the udders of the cash cow that is this single-person pandemic, they’re apparently incapable now of stopping. Dedication to keep tweaking nerves with constant coverage of his every ridiculous word or move, cascades into further opining and think-pieces examining the possible machinations behind the warped mind sitting in the Oval Office.

Can there be a total blackout of coverage? Of course not. For ill and even worse, we’re stuck with this albatross for the remainder of his term and presidential actions get reported. In respect of the bulleted points above, the old adage that as president ‘whatever’ he does is newsworthy is a bullshit claim and no longer applies. He doesn’t do much, thankfully, so lots of what is reported is what he says, and nearly all of his statements are baseless and empty. Every stupid, unsupported utterance he makes isn’t news, it’s noise.

Look at coverage of the current expensive and prolonged Iranian military engagement, utilizing a significant number of men and materiel, that is somehow not an undeclared and illegal war. It’s over, we won. It’s not over but we won. Maybe it’s not over. They’re completely obliterated. Ok, maybe significantly weakened. Yeah, they’ve got a few things still, but not as much as we have! They surrendered! They didn’t surrender. They agreed to a ceasefire! Oh wait, they just shot at one of our ships and shelled another military base. They’re dying to negotiate. Wait, what? Iran released another animated, Lego-styled banger of a hip-hop video, taunting, talking shit and pulling the US admin’s card?

If memory serves, all of the above happened over the course of a few hours last Tuesday. None of that coverage informed. None of it appears to be fact-checked before it hits screens. All of it reads like junior high students, ferrying disses back and forth between two enemies, hoping they instigate them into meeting after school to fight. Most of the misinformation came from the same leader that reporters documented lying thousands of times over his first term. None of it includes the subsequent cottage industry of hot takes, opinion and “analyses” of every single play in that play-by-play.

I told friends of mine that one of the things I lamented most, during frequent bouts of anxiety about his second term, was knowing this unceasing stream of chunky, feculent sewage was on its way. All would be followed by reports and analyses of every single noxious spurt. I admitted celebrating the “boring”, capable and competent government of the Biden administration in comparison. It wasn’t a traveling carnival’s roller coaster of a government, and I was glad not to be hanging on screaming, expecting at any moment that some neglected but crucial part would give out, it would all fly off the rails, hurt and kill untold numbers of people on and around the ride.

That’s no longer true. Neither is peace, whether of mind, body or environment. So, what is it I’d prefer instead? I probably don’t have the answer but I have an answer.

I’d like to see better effort, from news services and those analyzing the “breaking news” that’s often slapdash, full of holes and marginally informative. We’re supposed to get news, not a tennis match or looking on as two people take turns snapping on each other. It’s not enough to report, he said this, they said that, he said this, they said that and so on, ad infinitum. For instance, in the Iranian not-war example, the report should say, President claims cease-fire, but Iran has not verified an agreement.

Those doing further examination of these developments would…wait and not write a damn thing. You see, there’s nothing to analyze because only one unreliable proven liar has made a statement. Without some independent confirmation or clear communication from the other party that this evolution has veracity, any further breakdown of what it could mean is just a waste of time. Life is short, and what’s left of my life’s wick is getting shorter. As I get older, I get more crotchety, and I don’t like anyone else wasting my time.

It’s not that I don’t want to be informed. I do. I just don’t want to be overwhelmed by thoughtless parroting, followed by poring over insignificant statements like annoying gnats in a growing swarm. Every bit of this man is toxic. I’d like to keep my exposure at the lowest parts per million possible, while maintaining awareness and absorbing thoughtful examinations of and with substance.

“If you don’t know me by now, I doubt you’ll ever know me. I never won a Grammy, I won’t win a Tony.” KRS-One, MC’s Act Like They Don’t Know

As the Oscars ceremony approaches, the number of nominations for Sinners, a movie directed by Ryan Coogler, starring his preferred leading actor Michael B. Jordan, is in lots of discussions. It’s been nominated a record sixteen times, and is one of a handful of films with a story centered around Black leads and characters to be recognized in many categories by the Academy.

There tends to be excitement around Oscar nominations generally anyway, but there aren’t many years for Black film fans to be as personally invested as this one. In fact, there have been many years that have gone by without a single Black actor, project, score or anything else being nominated for an Oscar. It got so bad that the hashtag #Oscarssowhite was born out of the obvious exclusion.

Winning an Oscar is not only a metric to validate skill in cinema, it opens doors for more projects. A film that can boast “Academy Award Winning ___”, is generally a more marketable film. An actor, director or other winner they can boast as part of that project makes it bankable, generally considered insurance to increase the likelihood film projects are profitable for studios. For the winner of an Oscar, it can change their careers immensely, going from scrambling to read for roles or struggling against typecasting, to swinging the gilded gates open to a lush, promised land of seemingly limitless opportunities.

Black artists haven’t been completely shut out. There have been wins here and there. In scanning over some things as I wrote this, I was reminded that Mahershala Ali won Best Supporting Actor for the movies Moonlight and The Green Book. However, as memory serves, although the Academy liked The Green Book, I remember disgust from some Black viewers about the film perpetuating white savior tropes. Other criticisms were that it glossed over racism with its depiction of the friendship between Black entertainer and the white driver he hires to chauffer him through the South.

To be fair, I have to take the critics, both for and against The Green Book, at their word. I didn’t see it. The plot didn’t grab me, and as much as I liked Mahershala Ali as Remy in House of Cards, there wasn’t enough good will to get me invested in The Green Book. I’m only one person and I don’t represent Black people at large, but for me, I’m weary of new releases of slavery depictions or sunny, “See? Black and white people can be friends!” films. We’ve seen both types, ad nauseum, and although those are experiences for depiction, so are other worthy aspects of Black life.

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There was a short period of time, or at least it felt like it to me, where Black film showed experiences that were more expansive. Film could be about more than friendships forming across prejudice between Black and white people, or African enslavement and the torture porn depictions of white plantation owner savagery that go with them. Black people love, live, marry, experience loss, go to college, start businesses, file bankruptcy, have children and more but it’s hard to find films that are about any of that.

Rewind a few decades and there were the House Party films, comedies with all Black casts and rap stars Kid and Play as leads, cutting up and getting in harmless trouble to host a legendary party. You had Spike Lee joints like She’s Gotta Have It, Do the Right Thing, and School Daze. In an overly generalized summary, those respectively pondered Black women’s agency in claiming their sexuality, showing how racial tensions in abutting neighborhoods erupt and some stylized depictions of the HBCU experience.

John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood gave a glimpse of Black lives in LA, following three close friends and their different life tracks. It spawned some other, in my opinion, lesser copycats but even those may have been worth it. Black love was at the center of Jason’s Lyric, and a favorite I should rewatch again, Love Jones. Coming of age got its due in The Inkwell, and complications of family dynamics got shown in Soul Food.

I’m oversimplifying many of the above for time, but merely wanted to give a snapshot of the variety of Black experiences that film was just beginning to tell. Why? Because it feels like that door is nearly closed, and I think it relates to awarding Oscars and the arguments for who and what make bankable films and stars.

It’s not just the Oscars that are won that determine opportunities, it’s also those that are lost. Denzel won Best Supporting Actor in the movie Glory, for his depiction of a former slave who enlists to fight in the Union army during the civil war. It’s a great movie and his performance is excellent. Even better? His turn as Malcolm X. I remember being disappointed that Laurence Fishburne wasn’t cast, thinking his physical appearance and voice better suited Malcolm, but Denzel’s performance shut me up and made me a believer. He didn’t only make some physical adjustments and portray him. He breathed him in, back out and became him. He was spellbinding.

Denzel was nominated for Best Actor that year, but he would lose to Al Pacino’s portrayal of a blind veteran who tutors his young assistant in life and love. Pacino’s is an entertaining performance, if maybe a bit too much, and I’m a Pacino fan. In my opinion, if you go back and compare those two performances, Denzel’s Malcolm X stands up over time more than Pacino’s. Denzel would be nominated a few years later for Best Actor again, for his role as a shifty, charismatic, dirty cop, running schemes with a crew of other dirty cops in the film Training Day and he would win.

I liked Training Day, and I think Denzel was great in it. I’m glad he won the Oscar that year but I have to admit that the victory left me torn. You see, it felt like a pattern. Which Black stars win Oscars for what work, appears to set the rules of the road for what films and roles depicting Black people are honored later.

Denzel won a Best Supporting Actor depicting a runaway slave, who enlists in the Union Army and dies, patriotically holding the Stars and Stripes from laying on the ground. When he portrayed a Black man criticizing the hypocrisy of the United States, its inequality, arguing the innate dignity of Black people and declaring their right to protect themselves when threatened by white supremacist violence, he lost. When he portrayed a crooked cop, an immoral man committing crime under the cover of his badge, he’s honored with an Oscar for that portrayal.

Halle Berry won an Oscar for playing a beautiful, down and out Black woman, whose husband is executed on death row. She falls for the racist guard played by Billy Bob Thornton who, unbeknownst to her, escorted her man to the chair. The basis for this man’s change of heart to enter this relationship, other than that it’s Halle Berry, a stunner that would get most men to lop off limbs to hook up, to me is never made clear. He just meets a foxy, Black woman and magically doesn’t do racism anymore.

Most of the film’s buzz came from the fact she went fully nude for the graphic sex scene between them, and if you ask me, that’s what won the Oscar. Come on. On a scale of 1-10, she’s a 12, and she had to pretend to be aroused by a man that’s lucky to be a 5 on his best day. I think she’s a good actress, although her performances can oscillate too wildly between bad and good, but I can’t say I saw full film performance there for a statue.

In contrast, Angela Bassett put up two performances I think were worthy of statues: Betty Shabazz in Malcolm X and Tina Turner in What’s Love Got to Do with It.

In the first role, she depicted a fully realized character, not the usual cardboard cutout of ‘the woman next to the famous man.’ Her depiction of a wife, protective of her husband and children, filled with love and tenderness, fearful of the dangerous threats their family faced, yet a true partner and adviser to Malcolm fleshed out, with depth and care, a woman I only read glancingly about. When they’re courting, the interplay is delicate and sweet, and she’s winning the hearts of the audience right along with Malcolm’s. The scene where she and Malcolm argue in their kitchen, she makes so many subtle choices and shows impeccable timing, it’s masterful.

Ms. Bassett’s turn as Tina Turner, an internationally famous woman who most have seen perform, and who was still alive when she did it, was a daunting challenge. She came, she saw, she blew the doors off. The transformation from shy, naive country girl Anna Mae Bullock, into iconic rock star Tina Turner is mesmerizing. Her performance as the face, gas and engine powering the Ike Turner Revue, while suffering Ike’s horrific abuses and betrayal from those she hoped would help her break away, was real, raw and gritty. It was like you were set in the room when Tina Turner actually endured and survived it all. Few people have better dramatized a woman being demanded to perform brilliantly, but stay small enough to placate the brittle ego of an abusive man.

Angela Bassett wouldn’t be nominated at all for her portrayal of Betty Shabazz. She would be nominated for Best Actor for playing Tina Turner. She would lose to Holly Hunter in The Piano.

Before Halle Berry won her Oscar for playing a woman who falls in love with a magically reformed racist prison guard, the last Black woman to win was Hattie McDaniel. She played a character named Mammy, a slave in Gone with the Wind.

Every role is a performance, and every actor has to do more than read back lines to create a character. Both Berry and McDaniel had to come to work and bring those characters to life on the screen. Every role will not be heroic or glamorous. I get that. My issue is that the Academy doesn’t seem to appreciate that becoming Betty Shabazz or Tina Turner isn’t something that anyone can walk onto a set, flip a switch and do. It takes at least as much skill as pretending to be a stammering King giving a wartime address.

The Academy also seems particular about which acting transformations from Black casts and directors get honored. Maybe it believes that every Black person is such a talented mimic, that any of us can portray other famous Black people with ease, and without any particular acting training. Or is it that they believe portraying notable Black people takes no effort or skill at all? You just show up and, in the parlance of Robert Townsend’s satirical film Hollywood Shuffle, the actor gives the director, “more Black.”

Is it that the Academy believes that depictions of the best of us isn’t representative of “real” Black people? Only ghettos, gang wars, cartoonish jive talk, exaggerated ditty-bops, plantation slaves, hard luck single mothers, crooked cops just this side of a drug dealer will do. Anything else that depicts us as parents, lovers, professionals, heroes, thinkers or activists is some kind of fiction, and pushing and rewarding the other roles is some kind of cinema vérité enforcement in depicting Black people’s experience.

Some time ago, I decided the Academy Awards aren’t representative of any particular standard of discerning taste. I noticed they would sometimes honor films no one had seen, just to show that they were such auteurs of the esoteric, that commercial success didn’t influence them. I’ve watched over-the-top demonstrative “acting” get rewarded over true acting. True acting, you ask? Yes. I’d describe it as becoming a character in such an effortless way that the viewer forgets there’s an actor they recognize performing.

I realized that some of the performances, films, directors and scores that they fell over themselves to celebrate were discussed for about a week or two afterwards, and those weren’t on anyone’s lips again after the fanfare died down. One of my favorite films is the movie Goodfellas. Friends of mine and I quote that all the time. Anytime someone gets a friendly verbal jab in we yell, “Ohhhh! Spyduh! That’s fuh you, Spyduh. Don’t take shit off nobody!!”

In my view, it’s a complete film. Cast, costume, sets, cars, score, soundtrack, direction, editing, script; all of it’s top tier and it all works as a complete piece. It’s not just a great movie about organized crime; it’s a symphony of a film. The only Oscar it got was for Joe Pesci’s unforgettable turn as Tommy. The rest of many of the big categories went to Dances with Wolves. Dances with Wolves?! Go sleep with the fishes. I’ve seen that film once and I’ll brace for whatever hate, but I thought it was, “meh.” Nothing about it set a desire in me to see and experience it again, and to me that’s what makes a film magical and worthy of honor. Goodfellas? In college, every film watching friend I knew had two films in their collection that were necessities: one was Scarface with Al Pacino, the other was Goodfellas. Both got watched until they wore out.

If I were depending on the Academy’s advice, hadn’t seen either film, and only had the time or chance to choose one, I would have missed Goodfellas and sat through Dances with Wolves. Then, I’d hear everyone I knew reminiscing about all of the great scenes in Goodfellas and be pissed about being misled.

The Academy may have been the arbiter of what makes good film at one time. Maybe they never were and everyone deferred to them for too long, to their detriment. Either way, I think their time has passed and no panel of faceless judges knows any better than your own eyes, ears, brain and heart what you enjoy and think is good. To paraphrase Duke Ellington about music, “if it’s a good watch, it is good.”

So, back to Sinners. I think it’s great that it’s been nominated a record number of times. I hope that it wins key categories, like best actor, supporting actor, supporting actress, director and picture. I’m doubtful that it will be awarded based on past events. A film with a majority Black cast, with Black leads, director and strong Black protagonists taking no shit, isn’t what the Academy seems to like honoring.

History has shown that the films that get the golden statue don’t always have staying power or resonate with film lovers. Sinners is already being hailed by cinephiles of all hues. Ryan Coogler’s genius as a director is getting noticed, Michael B. Jordan continues to bolster his cred as a premier leading man and the success of this film is indisputable.

It’s a shame that funding and more doors opening still hinges so much on winning an Oscar. The Academy seems more and more out of touch, out to make a point about how erudite they see themselves as tastemakers, than rewarding good film that connects with people. They also seem stuck in a narrow-minded view of which skillful depictions of non-white people deserve accolades, occasionally rewarding a good Asian film to blunt cries of bias. However, it generally continues to only want to honor depictions of Black suffering, subservience or overly simplistic racial reconciliation with all the depth of an after school special.

Until that changes, I don’t expect much out of the Oscars, as far as honoring skillful Black filmmaking and acting, including this year. Not only that, so long as they make enough money to keep getting funded, I don’t care if they honor our films or not. We know what’s good, we always have and we don’t need the Academy’s seal of approval to make it official. When we watch it, we know it’s good, so it is good. Oscar or not.

Before I get started, I’ll make clear that I’m not a voter who stays home in protest. I’m also whole with the fact that until a third-party candidate has the polling to win outright, the election landscape is a two-horse race. I vote blue because, compared to Republicans, Democrats aren’t generally debating my value as a person and if I deserve rights.

Having said that, not all Democratic voters are like me. Where I’ll let pragmatism win the day and vote for the Democrat, even if I’m holding my nose to do it, others won’t. More and more, Democratic voters are looking for candidates to take bold stands, and meet high stakes situations with gutsy ideas. If that doesn’t happen, they’re voting third-party or staying home in protest.

For many people, that is a ‘cut off your nose to spite your face’ kind of approach. I understand that sentiment because in plain math and effective results, it is and it gives Republicans the win. From a voter’s perspective, however, should a party stubbornly offer candidates and positions that smugly dare you to abstain or vote against your preferences?

Lately, that seems to be the Democratic Party’s approach. It’s a losing strategy because it’s arrogant. Even when registered voters tell the party what they want, its leadership ignores them. It reminds me of this scene from the movie Cars:

You see, Democratic voter, you don’t know what you want. Party leaders will tell you what you want. They’ve got a script together, and they’ll be damned if you or anyone else makes them depart from the DNC and big donor approved talking points.

posted a note with a clip of Joy Reid and Wajahat Ali interviewing House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries. I watched it and for nearly seventeen straight minutes alternated between wearing a screwed face, sucking my teeth, hissing, sighing, cursing under my breath and asking myself what planet the man is on. You can see it here:

The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries CRASHES OUT When Asked About "Abolish ICE" and AIPAC

Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries apparently couldn’t “understand” me when I asked him why our taxpayer dollars should continue funding a masked, armed, lawless Gestapo that murders Americans and terrorizes our cities…

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3 months ago · 1523 likes · 714 comments · THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali

After the usual intro pleasantries, they got to it. Ms. Reid asked whether or not Dems will hold firm on their DHS demands. Rep. Jeffries replied that he believed they would. He proceeded to say that taxpayer dollars should go towards making their lives better and not brutalizing and killing them in the streets. He then said that ICE has gone too far, should be reined in, their conduct corrected, and he wanted meaningful, transformational and bold changes to bring that about through legislation.

Then, Ms. Reid followed up by asking, why bother to fund ICE at all? Wouldn’t abolishing the agency and going back to the previous Immigration and Nationalization Service (INS), the agency her mom and both of my parents entered the nation through to become naturalized citizens, be a better solution? Wouldn’t that be a bold and transformational change? It’s at this point that his programmed script ran its course and the Rep. Jeffries-bot glitched.

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He recounted a history of the Big Billionaire Blowout Bill, that Democrats voted against it, listed what Republicons cut in it that benefits working people, and so on. After running numerous laps around the bush, he returned to saying the solution is passing legislation to make ICE answerable after beating, disappearing, raping and killing people. Wouldn’t abolishing the agency prevent people from being harmed by it, they asked? As Ms. Reid and Mr. Ali asked repeatedly why Minority Leader Jeffries isn’t seeking to abolish ICE and return the country to the prior INS arrangement, he repeated the same answer, without deviation or contemplation.

This country has had months of coverage showing nationwide protests with signs and chants demanding the abolishment of ICE. Other voters and I have been calling legislators’ offices and demanding they abolish ICE. The hosts mentioned during the segment that polls show over 60% of respondents want to see ICE abolished. Comments popped up in a flurry during the interview with variations of, “abolish ICE”, “put ICE on ice” and other sentiments showing that viewers think the agency is irredeemable.

No matter. Jeffries repeated that the remedy is to pass new guidelines and restrictions, then help Democrats gain majorities in both houses. As they pressed him, he only became more indignant and shouty. As a viewer I heard, “Who do they think they are? How dare they challenge the glacial shaping of a deadly organization to prevent murder and mayhem! Why suggest shutting the whole thing down? All he needs is a few Republicans to come over and join him and Democrats to hold ICE accountable. Didn’t they hear him say he’s looking to tackle it with a series of statutory and legislative steps, rein the agency in and make it answerable, after it beats, steals, rapes and kills people?”

That. That right there is why Democrats keep snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Neither voter pleas, polling, real time replies during airtime nor anything else will change their minds. They’ve already declared their solution without consulting or hearing the people they represent. He pointed out the special election wins that Democrats have made. He avoided the fact that those wins have been by candidates who, unlike him and other establishment heads, hold stances like abolishing ICE.

Because, you see dear voter, you don’t know what you want. DNC bigwigs, their donors and tenured party leaders know what you want. You see it in local and national elections.

The Democratic Party poised its members to accept as a foregone conclusion, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s nomination as candidate for president in 2008. They mentioned she had experience, a huge war chest of campaign money, connections, big name advisors and name recognition that couldn’t be overcome. Then, a self-described skinny Black guy with a funny name showed up at a Democratic Party convention and gave a speech that tore the roof off of the place. He was charming, funny, cool, had a young family and voted no against the Iraq War to Hillary’s yes in favor of it.

People in her camp and the party establishment said he was brash, impatient and should wait his turn. It was her turn after all. He didn’t fold and decided to challenge in the primaries, and the establishment was livid. With each round of primaries he showed he had traction with the party base. He garnered the endorsement of the Kennedy family, who invoked homage to JFK as they did so. Who the hell did the guy think he was? I’ll tell you who he became; candidate Barrack Hussein Obama, Democratic Party nominee for president and eventually the nation’s 44th President.

Fast forward to 2016, and the DNC once again decided Hillary was its presidential candidate, before the primaries even happened. Once again, a surprise challenger rose to prominence to give her a run. That scrappy, young upstart, was a septuagenarian from Vermont by way of Brooklyn.

Bernie Sanders, proud Democratic Socialist hit the scene. He rode the zeitgeist of angry poor and working-class people, struggling with underemployment and stagnant wages after the last economic implosion, as rich people bought islands and superyachts. As he built a grass roots following, decrying the country’s coddling of “millyunayuhhs and billyunayuhhs” at the expense of poor and working people, his popularity grew. He held raucous rallies with impassioned people who felt he spoke to them and their struggles. Not only was he gaining traction among the base, he had crossover appeal to voters from the opposing party supporting its citric-tinted candidate.

No matter. The party decided, and regardless of what the polling or vibes were from the general public, they had their woman. Bernie’s supporters were impassioned and that support only solidified when it leaked that party chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was against his candidacy. Make no mistake; I think Hillary Clinton was eminently qualified, I voted for her and I think she should have won that election against the orange one handily. We know that’s not what happened.

Sanders conceded at the Party convention and Hillary Clinton secured the nomination. She won the battle and then lost the war. Dedicated “Bernie Bros” sat home. Barely hidden misogyny was evident as the election approached. The news latched onto her server and email scandals, AG Comey announced an investigation into the matter, mere weeks before the election, and the potential crossover support for Bernie went to the Republican candidate. Every one of those items colluded to keep the glass ceiling intact, with just a contact smudge as evidence of her attempt.

Democrats would repeat the mistake with Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024. She was derided for saying she would not have done anything she and President Biden did differently. This hobbled her by not taking a firm stand to support Palestine and oppose sending more arms to Israel to carpet bomb Gazans. The Democrats denied supporters of Palestinian civilian safety from speaking at the Democratic Convention. Voters who supported protections for Palestinians felt ignored, were pissed and stayed home. Republicans purged voting rolls all over the country removing thousands of voters in key Democratic strongholds, mere weeks before election day. Barely hidden misogynoir was evident. VP Harris would lose.

Manhattan’s mayoral race saw the party play out the same poor instincts and dismissal of their voters. Democratic Socialist, Zohran Mamdani entered the race and generated measurable voter excitement. The party establishment decided instead to back disgraced credibly alleged sexual harasser and abuser, former Governor Mario Cuomo. Cuomo should have been a hard no from the party, given he lost his gubernatorial office from a sexual harassment scandal involving numerous women, including a NYS Police officer assigned to his detail. A party vehemently against a proud, self-proclaimed ‘pussy grabber’ president, should have steered clear of a disgraced sex harassing ex-governor.

That persisted after Mamdani won the primary and secured the nomination as Democratic Party mayoral candidate. Establishment heads, including NY Congresspeople Jeffries, Gillibrand and Schumer, refused to endorse Mamdani. Key players maintained support for Cuomo and none of them called for Cuomo to drop out of the race, as he stubbornly kept running in defiance of the will of the blue city’s voters. It potentially prevented the party from coalescing behind its nominee. Mamdani would win in spite of his party, some of whom joined in the Islamophobia the right-wing injected into the race to smear him.

Has the Democratic Party learned its lesson? Apparently not, if Jeffries response represents the majority of its legislators and incumbent candidates. Something Joy Reid asked towards the end of that exchange was revelatory. She asked Minority Leader Jeffries what the Democratic Party’s plan was, its Project 2027, as it were. Jeffries’ needle fell back into the same record groove, and played back the answer he gave from the start, about legislating against federal agency and Republican overreach.

I despise Republican policies. They’re built on white supremacy, patriarchal domination of women, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, and classist ideas of the noble rich and savage poor. One thing their leadership is good at, though, is feeling the ground to see where the tremors are coming from. They head there, tailor messaging around their destructive policies, and make them sound like they’re in tune with the vibration they’re picking up. Then, they sell the hell out of them morning, noon and night to voters, with full conviction.

The establishment Democrats, as evidenced by Jeffries performance, and too many of Schumer’s and others to list, don’t. Just as they decide in advance of voter preference who they plan to run for certain offices, ignoring real time information that shows their direction is wrong, they do the same with their messaging and party platform. Jeffries responding with legislative baby steps and affordability, to address an agency awash in cash that kidnaps thousands, puts them in concentration camps, breaks into homes, beats, rapes and murders indiscriminately, shows that.

He called the proposal to make ICE answerable to oversight, remove their masks, wear badges and cooperate with investigations after they commit crimes “bold and transformational.” That? That’s bold? That’s a transformation? Making ICE obey the law and respect people’s Constitutional rights is bold and transformative? Dude, if that’s what you call bold, allow me to swap that Neil Sedaka album you’ve got on repeat for some Afu-ra or Dead Prez. It may help you reach escape velocity from Planet Tepid.

If one party is looking to completely rid people of healthcare, food, food safety, environmental protections, voting rights, labor protections, accurate history and more, legislative half-steps to “rein them in” isn’t going to cut it. You need visionary and courageous proposals.

At one point during the segment, Wajahat Ali said something like, ‘leaders, lead and people will follow.’ Not only is this a good point, leaders who lead in the direction the people already want to go, have a whole lot more people following them when they set course and move.

Democrats need to develop their own cohesive vision in contrast to their opposition’s dystopian, oligarchic, technocracy exerting full control over the people. Running on, “those guys are bad, vote for us instead” isn’t good enough. The voters themselves are already giving them a cheat sheet to work from. All they need to do is something they’ve either forgotten over time or never learned: listen.

When I was in junior high, a man named Bill Parcells was coach of the NY Giants football team. He won two Super Bowls there before going on to coach the New England Patriots, bringing them to their second Super Bowl, which they lost. He left from there to coach the NY Jets, and the Dallas Cowboys. He was known as a straight shooter and a favorite of sports writers for his candor and quotable quips. One of those comes to mind lately.

“You are what your record says you are.”

It comes to me a lot. It began to play in my head a lot more after 2016. The nation watched a lying, misogynistic, xenophobic, racist conman accuse the nation’s first Black president of being illegitimate and not a citizen. The country’s response was not scolding judgement and his relegation to irrelevance. It elected him the next president over an accomplished senator and Secretary of State instead.

Efforts were made to assuage concerns about his indecent and classless behavior, and overall manner. Gaslighters shushed us. They told us we were making a big deal over nothing, being sore losers and he would revert to the presidential mean for behavior. Just watch and see.

We watched. We saw. They were wrong.

His lies piled up at an accelerating rate and grew more bold and incredible by the day. The schoolyard taunts flung at rivals and critics got cruder and more demeaning. Saying he leaned into white supremacist and misogynistic tropes and propaganda, isn’t remotely close to describing the unbridled glee he showed repeating myths, lies and pushing gross caricatures in his social media posts and press conference responses.

In all ways he lived down to every worst fear, then proceeded to blast through the floor of infamy like a MOAB packed with 2,000 tons of gaucheness. The head of the nation bringing it disgrace in the most lurid ways possible was bad enough. Worse? His supporters ate it up and reveled in it.

Then, they excused it, incorporated the behavior, celebrated it in their kids, expanded on the depravity and proliferated it by all modes and means possible. It happened throughout his first term, continued during President Biden’s term after Agent Orange lost, and got a nitrous oxide boost after his return to the White House this past year.

The sane faction of the nation’s residents, pundits, opposing legislators and even some people no longer aligned with him are all saying the same thing. This is not who we are. We’re better than this. Are we?

You are what your record says you are.

To be fair, is there unanimous consent behind the disgusting activity we’re witnessing? No, of course not. Having said that, no country in the history of, well, all of history has ever had unanimous consent. What we do have, is a considerable portion of this nation’s voters who entrusted the levers of power to people who proudly despise minorities, women, immigrants, the disabled and anyone not heteronormative. That wasn’t a whoops. That was conscious. It was calculated. It was done purposefully.

A nation cannot claim to be better than what it is actually doing. It also cannot erase practices and traditions done in its past, things that reverberate in its bones to this day.

The founding documents of the USA were drafted by a group of white, male land owners hashing out plans in a room. Many of them owned Black people as property. Their original view of democracy was one where white, male land owners voted and decided the fate of the nation. No women, indigenous, Black, Brown or any other people were part of the conversation or consideration. None of the latter group were ever envisioned to ever be any part of the governmental process, whether as voters or politicians at the time it was founded. Black people weren’t even counted as full human beings by the men in that group.

That is the foundation of the United States of America. Is it who we all are? No, but it’s been a main load bearing wall of the gallery showing this nation how it runs and sees itself.

Every change and iteration to rights granted by the Constitution since, was rooted in discussions about who to deal in to the political process and how much of it they should be allowed to participate in. The truth is that the USA began by giving rights, freedom and agency to the narrowest possible slice of people in it. Everyone left outside of the room those men debated in has been scratching, scraping and clawing to be included as equals ever since.

The USA is a nation founded on exclusion. The gradual inclusion is something it begrudgingly accepted over time, all happening relatively recently. Inclusive is not who the nation has always been. The nation has always locked people out.

So, when people watch the nation go nativist, turn inward and a large contingent of its white people embrace hateful, racist, antisemitic, xenophobic, homomesic and misogynistic positions and policies, claiming it’s not who this country is, is revisionist and inaccurate. The ugliness we’re seeing is traditionally who this nation has been. It’s the more inclusive, welcoming, metropolitan, egalitarian version of the USA that is not who it’s always been.

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The US was founded in slavery, patriarchy, settler colonialism and occasional infusions of religion to defend expansionist land and resource grabs. People get confused and blinded because the lofty words in the founding documents seem to paint a different picture. They’ll say, “But the founders wrote that all men have inalienable rights.” True. Then they constructed a constitution that legalized slavery, saw the enslaved as property, counted them as fractions of a person and made no provisions to wind slavery down or abolish it. They excluded the indigenous who welcomed them to this landmass, immigrants, those who weren’t wealthy enough to own land and women, while declaring all are created equal.

Either people are equal or they aren’t. Lip service, lofty declarations and preambles don’t make it so, actual rights and freedoms do. You judge a person on words and deeds. If the words are lofty but the deeds stay earthbound, you’ve got a mismatch. Deeds are the manifestation of intent, where words are merely statements until they’re made real by actions putting them in practice. If a bunch of white men with property said all men are created equal, but proceeded to only give other white men with land full access to rights, that decision functionally said that all white men with land are created equal. Not all mankind, just men; white men who looked, acted and like themselves, owned other people and things.

To paraphrase a snippet from Orwell’s story, Animal Farm, all are created equal but some are more equal than others.

It’s not that advancements never happened. It’s that the muscle memory of exclusion and oppression override them once they do.

From Reconstruction onward, every effort to install equality for Black people was resisted, thwarted or watered down. Emancipated from slavery at the end of the Civil War, newfound freedom also left them with no land or assets to get started. Even the amendment that ended slavery left a carve out in it to enslave: prison. Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, shows that the over-policing that built a thriving prison industrial complex, makes it as though chattel slavery never ended.

Black people were made equal citizens with rights to vote and run for elections. In response, poll taxes, grandfather clauses and literacy tests were erected as obstacles to prevent those votes or election wins. Some officials who were elected, despite sabotage efforts, were murdered by white mobs. The Voting Rights Act helped secure the Black voter’s participation, only to be chipped away at and practically undone six decades later. I could keep tacking onto this list but the point is made.

The same is true for women, including white women, too many of whom can’t seem to decide whether they prefer independence and bodily autonomy or the stifling corset of authoritarian patriarchy. For BIPOC women, their lots were further worsened by the dynamics of race, which effectively put you in an even lower class.

Some injustices women have endured include being made indistinguishable from their husbands in marriage, essentially an appendage comprised of a fully formed person, denial of voting rights, limits on career paths, refused admittance to certain colleges and military positions, and restrictions on birth control as allowed medication. Women couldn’t get their own bank accounts, loans or credit cards without a male-cosigner until the early 1970’s. Nationwide recognition that husbands can commit marital rape didn’t happen until the early 1990’s.

Similar to the trajectory of Black people’s advancements, women’s gains have been spare and too many of the wins often seem fleeting. Many of those victories are being undone by a constant barrage of reactionary attacks, in courts of both law and public opinion. Voting rights are in the process of getting stripped from married women under the guise of another round of baseless, invented Republicon panics around vote security. In the cases of abortion, birth control and protection against sexual harassment and discrimination, protections have been respectively removed, weakened and assailed.

Check the scoreboard. Indigenous people, stewards of this land for thousands of years, abused, mass murdered, stripped of rights and participation and their remaining survivors squeezed onto patches of land white men in power didn’t covet. Black people abducted and enslaved here, released to continual oppression. Immigrants, most of whom received backlash, unwelcome and second place personhood in exchange for their migration here in hope. Women, enduring the injustices listed earlier and more.

The game recap for human rights in this country is the same. From none, to some, to a few more, to less, back to a few more, to less, to almost back to square one without any. Over and over again.

This is who the United States of America has been. This is who the United States of America in large part still is.

Yet, it does not have to be this kind of country. It has shown in the glimmers that arrive in fits and starts that it can welcome. It has found periods of acceptance, enlarging the franchise of political and civil rights to those previously denied. That pattern, however, is part of the problem; deny rights, then, self-anointed gatekeepers slowly drip access to the particular rights they deem whichever group at the time has now become worthy of them. Wrong.

Again, the mismatch of lofty founding document prose and actual practice, is as jarring as a nervous new driver with leg spasms driving a manual shift car for the first time. It’s punishing on both the car and passengers, and it’s dangerous to anyone else nearby while it’s happening.

I’m unsure if something as comprehensive as a constitutional convention is necessary, but the mindset around how this country approaches rights must change. Instead of a default position of a very exclusively selected group found worthy to access all rights and privileges, while denying everyone else until further notice, this should be judo flipped.

Access to full rights and freedoms should never be handled like a country club with half-million-dollar dues for a base membership, and legacy membership and connections conferring even more privileges. Everyone deserves full rights and freedoms, full stop. Voting, education, safety, freedom of self-expression, freedom of self-determination, total bodily autonomy, including all medical decisions, goods and services transactions, real estate purchases, financial arrangements, careers and anything else you can think of should be open to everyone. To be sure, instances arise where judging if a person has adequate competency is reasonable, but that should never be predicated on who you are.

This country went wrong from the start. It made its default denial of rights, not because of what you’d done but based on who you were. Who anyone is, is not a crime. The things they do that harm and oppress others, while they’re riding this cosmic orb on its elliptical circuit through space, is what constitutes a crime.

The arguments lodged by US power centers overrun by reactionary alarmists, clutch desperately to keeping a nation crying freedom but practicing gradations of oppression. Orwellian existences, however, aren’t only dystopian in books. They’re as bad, maybe worse, when lived in real life. A country that declares itself a bastion of freedom, while a group of people declaring themselves chosen horde away liberty and rights, then hover possessively over them to prevent others access, will always roil in unrest, distrust, bitterness and tension.

Too many of this nation’s huddled masses yearned to breathe free, only to be told where they could do it, how much air they were allowed and how long they could do it. That’s not freedom, that’s tyranny wrapped in a bow with liberty printed on it in ornate script.

The USA will continue to live a lie, until the basis of its laws, perspectives and culture celebrate a baseline of everyone fully equal, regardless of color, heritage, sex or gender expression. The house is currently divided against itself. It will not continue to stand while a few men in a lavish room upstairs deny those who comprise the nations foundation, studs, beams and trusses their due.

I’ve got another piece in the Crock Pot but it’s taking me longer than usual to finish. In the meantime, we’re about to be sold out. Again.

I usually write with a wind up, a bit of a meander, some buildup and then BANG! Or maybe it’s merely (bang?) when the payoff hits. No such thing this time.

This one is short and sweet. Today and tomorrow are the last days to call Senators at (202) 224-3121 to tell them the following: SHUT IT ALL DOWN IF YOU MUST. NO MORE MONEY FOR DHS AND ICE!!

They don’t need it, promises to be more accountable or wear cameras they’ll block or turn off before they kill people aren’t a fix. I say that because I saw this Reuters story come in while I was up doing my usual late night vampire thing.

Like every time we needed Dems to stand firm, it appears Chuck and company are preparing to sell out all of us to make it rain for ICE, just to continue funding a government that:

• withdrew VA funding and services

• withheld food aid

• erased Black history from federal museums

• stripped the National Park Service of funding and staff

• tried to leave millions unable to afford health insurance

• attacked another country without Congressional approval and abducted its president

• threatens to attack every country under the sun, including allies

• used an elementary student as bait to lure his immigrant parents, abduct and detain them all

• is packing concentration camps run by private companies with stolen innocents

• still hasn’t released ALL of the Epstein files required by law

• dispatches ICE goons to abuse, abduct, blind, maim, beat and murder residents

Don’t just take my word for it, check out this snipped from Reuters.

U.S. President Donald Trump and Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer moved on Wednesday night to reach an agreement to negotiate new restrictions on federal immigration agents, potentially averting a government shutdown, the New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing officials familiar with the matter.

Under the plan, the Senate would carve out legislation funding the Department of Homeland Security from a six-bill package of spending measures required to fund the military, health programs and other federal agencies through the rest of the fiscal year, the Times said.

The article continues:

The Senate would pass the bills before a Friday midnight deadline, and Congress would also consider a short-term extension of homeland security operations to avoid service gaps at the Transportation Security Agency, Coast Guard and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, NYT added.

There’s still time to call Senators at (202) 224-3121 to tell them not to vote for this funding and let the government shut down if more DHS and ICE funding is part of any proposal. It’s not our fault that Kosplay Kristi blew through the money allocated for her department in record time.

Let her release the people ICE abducted, close down the privately run death camps they’re held in and use that money to keep running her department. We know that any money supposedly for TSA or the Coast Guard is going to be used for ICE instead. The best way to stop DHS from funding more ICE murders, is to stop giving DHS more money to pay ICE to execute people in the streets. Besides, isn’t it Republicans always harping on government spending within its budgeted means? Hmmmmmm?

That’s the screed: call Senators at (202) 224-3121 to vote no. While you’re at it, tell them you want ICE abolished, not reformed.

That number again is (202) 224-3121 to call Senators to tell them to vote no on a spending bill with more DHS and ICE funding.

Go forth and jam the Congressional switchboards.

I’ve got more kvetching to do and I’ll get to that later. For right now, I’ll put that aside.

I wish you all a very Happy New Year!

May 2026 bring you joy, health, peace, contentment, safety, prosperity that’s beyond material, lots of love and laughter. Have a blessed year, everyone.

We’re wrapping up (pun intended?) that time of year again. You know the one. It started somewhere about a week or two after Labor Day, when your senses came under a constant barrage of Christmas shopping season chatter and advertisements.

No year is complete, until you’ve watched an ad for the umpteenth time, of some smug asshat bringing his spouse out the front door of their perfectly decorated house, with just the right snowfall on and around it, to receive a luxury car topped by an oversized bow. She (in nearly every case I’ve seen, it’s a guy gifting his wife a car), covers her mouth with her hands and her eyes light up in surprise. This last part strains what little bit of credulity was left, as this gift couldn’t have arrived without being driven there, signed for or dropped off noisily by a flatbed truck, hissing air brakes and clanging metal as it’s being lowered included.

A national economy dependent on poor and middle-class people emptying their wallets as soon as payday hits, spools up the turbocharger. Every manufacturer, store and service provider cajoles you into filling your role. Spend yourself into debt and destruction for some crap you don’t need and often don’t really want. No matter how many times stupidly rich people, pardon me, “job creators” get tax breaks that are supposed to drive the economy, it falls on poor and working people to be GDP’s savior. Those building their own nest eggs from wages sweaty and panting from the struggle to keep up with inflation, are told they must be true patriots who shop ‘til they drop.

I’m admittedly torn about the manufactured shopping mania. On the one hand, if you do need some thing(s) you were putting off, there are often deep discounts on the item(s) to soften the blow. Saying no to savings on something you really need or will use, does seem illogical and counterproductive, especially in light of the aforementioned wage situation.

On the other hand, if you really look at most of what they’re dropping prices on, do you really need your first one of or more of the same? How many things are in cupboards, closets, and for homeowners, in basements and garages that you thought you’d die without, that now collect dust? If you’re like me, you can think of at least two or fifteen things that were a mistake and money poorly spent. There can’t be another country on the planet that has more homes doing yard sales every summer to clear out unwanted crap than the US.

I gleefully participated in “Black Out the System” and we abstained from Black Friday purchases. We kept it up through Cyber Monday and then kept it up beyond that. It made clearing the promotional folder in my email a snap. See ad, delete. Done. We’re exchanging gifts but limited ourselves to two or three and none of them bank breaking.

What do most of us need, though? As this country descends into a cacophonic maelstrom of white supremacist lawlessness, shredding decency, precedent, the economy, domestic institutions and international policy, we don’t need more useless baubles, beads, devices or lavish trips. Medical access and food have seen prices leap into the cosmos in a single bound, while supplemental social net support get slashed. A need exists there. For those of us who can afford it, support food pantries and healthcare efforts where you are instead of buying stuff.

What else do most of us need? Too many of us are starved for high quality information.

I’ve been reading and restacking fellow writers on here who’ve been pleading with the Substack-o-sphere to give small writers here their subscriptions, and go paid when they can. Not only is this worthy advice for memoirists and creative writers here, it’s especially true for indie journalists. I read and restacked a piece earlier today that pretty much summed up my thoughts on the subject, and you can find it here.

Beyond the Plantation!

Why the F**k Are We Still Listening?

Last Sunday, Bari Weiss, editor-in-chief of CBS News, canceled a 60 Minutes segment about the torture of Venezuelan immigrants sent by the Trump administration, without due process, to El Salvador’s CECOT prison. A Canadian network had already received the segment and posted it online after it passed several internal journalistic and legal reviews. Many…

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5 months ago · 20 likes · 26 comments · james

You see, corporate news has been compromised for some time. Have their earlier surrenders to moneyed interests been as nakedly blatant as this past year? No, definitely not, but they’ve been dulling their teeth little by little, year by year. The saying is that you don’t bite the hand that feeds you, and so many of the major news services are owned by some billionaire, corporation or consortium of moneyed interests, that they can’t hold any of them or their activities accountable without an axe falling on many necks. Last year’s election was the moment that many of them dropped their masks completely, openly parroted and embraced the positions of a man campaigning on white supremacist fascism.

Lots of people ask, “When will they come to their senses? What do we do to make them tell the truth? How do we force them to examine claims made by officials and refuse to give equal weight to empty propaganda as though it’s a position rooted in fact?” The position I’ve taken, and continue to calcify in is this one: don’t make them do anything, quit them altogether.

Yes. Quit. Drop your subscription. Turn off the channel. Don’t fall for their clickbait and soundbites dropping into whatever online feed hits your phone. You know they’re not probing false claims. You’ve already seen them report regime propaganda unchallenged, like a North Korean or Russian state news service. What more are you waiting for? The product sucks. Don’t complain. Leave it on the shelf, unwanted and untouched.

Quality news and analysis exists. Just like many other quality things, you have to search for independent sources doing good journalism, who aren’t sending pouty duck-lipped selfies to seduce billionaires and corporations for funds to stay afloat. So, in no particular order and in no way totally comprehensive, here are some sources I’m using and finding informative. Please read and support them.

News and Information Sources

• https://www.propublica.org/ - ProPublica is reader supported, subsisting on the donations of readers and has broken some of the biggest stories over the last few years.

• https://revealnews.org/podcast/ - The Reveal Podcast, hosted by Al Letson, is a series of podcast episodes of various important topics examined in depth by investigative reporters. Their motto is, “there’s always more to the story” and each episode bears that out.

• https://www.theguardian.com/us?INTCMP=CE_US - The Guardian is another reader supported publication I’ve found good quality information in and seen their reporting reshared by others whose judgement I trust.

• Popular Information, found here, provides excellent investigative journalism, especially shining light on corporate claims versus actual expenditures and company actions.

• https://substack.com/@extremearturo? - Arturo Dominguez and his Decolonized Journalism Substack provides exceptional reporting on immigration and US policy effects in Latin America and the Caribbean. It’s specially helpful in cutting through the regime’s chatter about “narco-terrorists.”

• https://substack.com/@jennbudd? - Jenn Budd has necessary historic background to correct many conceptions about US Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS), Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE). As a former agent, she saw the abuse and corruption firsthand as a CBP officer. It’s not new and it’s worse than you’d want to believe. She’s also author of the book, Against the Wall, detailing her experiences as an agent. You can find it here and here.

• The Journeyman newsletter, found here and written by Marlon Weems, focuses primarily on economic and financial news. Marlon has extensive experience in securities trading and financial writing. His analyses of the latest BLS, stock market, merger and acquisition activity and other economic data, are the type of sensible information you need right now. Trade in screeching loons with bugged-out eyes and rolled shirtsleeves, for articles and video discussions from a relaxed, conversational Black man, usually reporting a few paces from a beach.

• Egberto Willies Substack, found here at Egberto Off The Record, provides even more news and analysis on government policy, economic data, political developments and more. His recorded discussion panels are excellent and he’s often a collaborator with Marlon Weems and Arturo Dominguez.

• The financial and economic discussion found here at The Black Dollar Index on Substack is also top notch. Contrast the rhetoric around effectiveness of ad campaigns, impact of minority purchase power and exploration behind the actual effect of instituting or rolling back DEI at companies. Spoiler alert: the claims that DEI hurts company performance are frequently disproved.

Opinion and Perspective

At a time when people are holding their noses and trying to make sense of jackassery scribbled from Ezra Klein and Nate Silver, opinion pieces of quality that aren’t trying to give you a smoke enema seem as rare as hen’s teeth. Not so. Give the following folks a try and expand your world to listen to Black women, an indigenous man and an adept trans professor and community organizer.

• With all the talk coming from pasty racists floating around, yammering on about who belongs in the United States, lend your eyeballs to a man whose people were here before they and their lands were “discovered.” Sean Sherman’s Substack found here at The Sioux Chef, approaches food, drink, community and history from the righteous, and often profane perspective of an Oglala Lakota man.

• Dr. Alison Wiltz explains at her Substack, For Black Women, how policy proposals, changes and existing practices affect Black people, especially Black women. Why is that important if you’re not Black, man or woman? The things that befall minority communities, primarily Black people and most especially Black women, stand as canaries in the coalmine for what will eventually bubble up to overcome society at large. Case in point; the abusive police practices and devastating maternal healthcare cruelty and mortality, showed up in Black communities long before they were respectively rolled out nationwide by ICE and blessed for all women to suffer by SCOTUS.

• Zuri Stevens, on Substack here at We Need A Black Woman In Charge, provides her perspective of current events as she experiences them as a Black woman. She also discusses politics and the deleterious effects of shutting Black women out of leadership positions.

• Dr. Stacey Patton’s Substack found here, provides sharp commentary on current events, explorations on race and gender dynamics and a weekly “sermon” that is equal parts astute and bitingly hilarious.

• For anyone without a weirdo friend, I introduce you to one I’ve recently made. Check out the link here at your weirdo friend to connect to writing and podcasts with original human-drawn cover art, never AI, with tips and information on how to resist this fascist regime. As an openly trans professor and community organizer, weirdo friend is a fount of information on how to resist peacefully, effectively and create community support systems to replace the ones hastily slashed by the fascists who’ve overtaken the levers of government.

As I said earlier, this list is by no means exhaustive or complete. It is a starting point for news, information, analysis and musings that are definitely not being provided by the corporate news services failing to hold truth to power. No shade meant to anyone here I missed. Keep an eye out for my restack notes for more writers I failed to mention here. If this kind of thing is useful, let me know in the comments. I was racing when I wrote this, forgive me if it’s riddled with typos.

Happy Holidays to all and to all, a good night and liberation in 2026.

In a couple of my earliest pieces, I mused over words and language, and their meanings over time. In one, I focused on attaching prefixes like neo, and alt to old words, and presenting them as though they were some new ideas. In actuality, all that happened was a return to the original practices done by younger people in our current time. It was this one:

That complication is enough to muddy language as it is, that we don’t need anything else. Unfortunately, there’s a lot more lately happening that’s mangling language, meaning and how we understand each other. It’s not a mistake or misunderstanding. It’s purposeful, and as far as I see it’s the right-wing perverting the dictionary, subverting the very meaning of the words we use to try to get us to doubt we know what we know.

There are many days I wonder if I’ve awoken in the Bizarro World from the DC Comics; everything is the reverse of normalcy.

I hear and read people who talk about freedom, but they’re chomping at the bit to abduct and imprison anyone who doesn’t look like them. They speak of liberty while siccing rabid, masked thugs to blanket American cities in armed patrols, terrorizing residents under an unannounced martial law. Our residents watched roving gunmen in balaclavas jumping out of trucks with machine guns in other countries and derided it as tyranny. Today, the same people and representatives who would appeal to the nation to dispatch our military to countries abroad whose unidentified gangs roughed up residents, cheer the dispatch of agents doing the same here and call it law and order.

Law and order. There’s another victim of inversion. What law? What order? A Republican party that sanctimoniously lectured liberals and progressives about the preciousness of the Constitution, ignores and micturates on it daily. People are illegally searched and seized, in defiance of the Constitution, the legal foundation for the nation’s existence. People are denied the due process they’re guaranteed under the Constitution, the country’s supreme governing document. State agents are breaking down people’s doors without warrants, abducting people half-dressed or completely naked from their homes without charge or cause.

In Chicago during September, an ICE gang descended on an apartment building in the middle of the night that has mostly Black and Brown residents. In an operation that looked like they were capturing bin Laden, they rappelled down from choppers, broke down doors with battering rams, men streamed through hallways and into units wearing tactical gear and brandishing machine guns. They broke into every unit, zip-tied men, women and children, dragged them all outside barely dressed or naked, ransacked their apartments and did thousands of dollars in damage. No criminal charges were filed against any of them. How lawful or orderly is it to break into people’s homes willy-nilly, rip them and their children from their homes in various states of undress, drag them into the night streets and parade them around outside, zip-tied like criminals on a speculative hunch? It’s neither. It’s a travesty.

On January 6, 2021, a riotous mob was called to the Ellipse by the then outgoing President of the United States. He claimed he was robbed of the election, it was rigged and they needed to go down to the Capitol to “take our country back.” The roused hooligans tromped down the boulevard, clambered onto the Capitol from all directions, beat police officers, broke down its doors, broke windows, climbed inside, chanted to hang the outgoing VP and members of Congress, roamed the halls threatening harm to any congressperson they found and some even smeared their feces on the walls. They wanted to overturn the certified vote of the Electors, expressing the will of the people’s cast ballots.

Over a thousand of the miscreants were found guilty, either by plea or court conviction, for various criminal charges. Republicans called it a gathering, sightseeing and other benign adjectives, in complete denial of the actual shit-smearing disgrace it was. Everyone who was either crestfallen or enraged at the sickening spectacle knew what they just watched. It was an insurrection.

About a week ago, six Democratic congresspeople with a combination of CIA and military experience from various armed forces, cut a video addressing the country’s enlisted. They reminded them of the oath each takes to protect and defend the Constitution of the US, and that the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) they also swear to uphold, demands that they refuse to comply with any order that’s illegal or unconstitutional.

This is a timely reminder, especially as the current regime is engaged in a real-life game of Battleship, but instead of targeting destroyers and frigates, it’s obliterating poor fishermen from Latin America and the Caribbean in boats powered by outboard motors. The White House claims they are drug traffickers, but no one has seen proof. None of the slaughtered have been named, had their faces revealed, been charged in any court proceeding we’re aware of, and no evidence was presented to Americans. A number of legal scholars have written their doubts on the constitutionality of these actions. With such a cavalier deployment of men and materiel lately, this sure seems like servicemembers were given sound advice.

Not according to the orange-tinted maniac burdening the chair behind the Resolute Desk. Encouragement to honor their oaths was met with accusations of “seditious behavior.” Stephen Miller, the angry little presidential adviser whose facial expression always looks like he’s battling diaper rash, also cried foul. He claimed that encouragement for soldiers to follow legal orders, honor their oaths to the Constitution and UCMJ were, “openly calling for insurrection.”

So, let’s review, shall we? This crowd believes a mob of angry protesters breaking into the Capitol, flinging poop like primates, threatening violence and death to elected officials, ignoring the Constitution and demanding overturn of the popular vote isn’t insurrection. What in their view is insurrection? It’s elected officials encouraging our military to obey the law and honor their oaths, say the Bizarro-cans. Left is right and up is down.

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At every turn, these people are twisting meaning inside out and backwards. If they’re not doing that, they’re poisoning other words.

Liberal. Progressive. Socialist. Woke. Trans. You’ve heard the way they say them. The words aren’t spoken, as much as spat like venom, intended to burn like battery acid on contact. They’re not labels or adjectives, as much as they’re hurled with the intent to hang them around your neck like some kind of moral failing or criminal conviction. What do those words mean, though, really? Let’s see what Merriam-Webster has to say.

• Liberal: inclined to be open to ideas and ways of behaving that are not conventional or traditional.

• Progressive: using, involving, or interested in new or modern ideas; characterized by continuous improvement or advancement.

• Socialist: one who advocates or practices socialism.

• Socialism: any of various egalitarian economic and political theories or movements advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.

• Woke: aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).

• Trans: prefix meaning to change or transfer; a shortened form of the word transgender.

• Transgender: a person whose gender identity differs from the sex the person was identified as having at birth

Do any of those things sound evil? Are any of them terrifying? None of them strike me that way, but I’m also not invested in forcing people to see things through a narrow worldview either.

Diversity, equity and inclusion, i.e. DEI, is another “scary” right-wing boogeyman. It’s a go-to slur now for racists accusing anyone who isn’t a white man of being unqualified. The claim is that women, LGBTQ and BIPOC are getting hired or elected based on color or identity, not qualifications.

However, it’s the variety of perspectives and skillsets that come from a broad cross-section of people that enables organizations to cover the most ground and plan to more comprehensively prevent problems. The same people making the accusation of token employment look on as a nearly all white regime (Yeah, Marco, they’ll be honest after your use by date expires) presides over an inherited growing economy driven into contraction, leaks secret war plans over insecure apps, unravels the safety of air travel and medical care and pimps out the White House on every billionaire and autocrat corner it can find.

However, recent congressional review of naval strikes reveals that Admiral Alvin Holsey, the Black man and career Naval officer who retired instead of be party to war crimes, is a diverse voice that should have been included and given equal recognition to ensure compliance with the law. Instead of trying to invent criminal charges to remove Federal Reserve Governor, Lisa Cook because she’s a Black woman, they could have listened to her assessments and insights. Maybe the former Professor of Economics at Michigan State University and member in good standing of the American Economic Association, could have talked sloooooowly and used small words to explain to this klown brigade how tariffs work, including “Ron Vara”, so we continued enjoying economic growth instead of them bringing on a recession.

Yet, this is the resulting incompetence you can expect when people are not only animated by racism, but they disregard or try to overturn the actual meaning of words. A rogue’s gallery of serial adulterers and friends of child rapists, present themselves as defenders of children and champions of stable nuclear families. Self-proclaimed champions of stable nuclear families with both parents, dispatch masked gangs to abduct one or both parents, sometimes leaving their minor children unattended after abducting their parent(s) or guardian(s). The Vice President, changed his identity no less than three times, the final time conveniently separating him from any previous embarrassing associations as he began a career in venture capital. He now attacks transgender people for the single instance they change their identity to reflect who they are, accusing some for using it for advantage applying to Ivy League schools.

Communication succeeds when one person or representative, successfully conveys information to another person or representative. In order for that to occur, both parties need to speak the same language and the words used have to mean the same thing to those on both sides of the conversation.

People ignoring or subverting the established meaning of words make this impossible. When upending word use to create slang and idiom for expression, it’s harmless. When trying to completely erase or pervert the existing meaning of language, it’s nefarious. The imagery we allow words to conjure shapes language, and that language goes on to shape how people perceive their reality. Ceding that portrayal of the world to a crowd of greedy, selfish, lying bigots is not the move, not at all.

That’s why I don’t back down when someone is trying to tell me up is down and left is right. If they want to lie to themselves, that’s one thing. I’ll be damned if I’ll let them lie to me and nod along silently to embolden them to keep spreading foolishness. We’ve seen what leaving half-truths, barely true and completely untrue statements unchallenged does: it allows them to be portrayed as true. The longer they go unchallenged and the bolder the people become in pushing their distortions, the more unimpeachable the nonsense appears. I refuse.

I keep the link of that montage of the J6 rioters wreaking havoc on the Capitol handy, for whenever someone tries to redefine insurrection. I break it out and show them what an actual one looks like. If someone tries to tell me that a recently murdered podcaster debated in good faith, I’ll show them the nastily bigoted positions he staked his arguments on and ask them to explain how those stances display a good faith position. If someone rails on progressives or socialism, I’ll ask them what they have against pushing for continual improvement, or society working together to ensure the safety and security of everyone.

You see, those of us leaning left on the political spectrum have run from the things that are good and make our position worthy. We’ve allowed the other side to subvert and try to turn them into smears, but we don’t have any reason to be ashamed of any terms they try to use as an insult or to demean us. So many of them have been using them as smears for so long, I don’t even think half of them know what the words they’re hurling mean.

So no, we don’t need them grabbing, twisting and ruining language to control thought and perception. We need more education. Those of us who know the math are going to have to get down and take the ignorant to class. We’ll show them where they went wrong solving for “x” in their equations, and display how formulas that arrive at the truth are solved. We won’t win many. At times we won’t successfully inform any, but for every one we do correct, that creates a household with an ember threatening to catch a whole house on fire with knowledge. So, let’s go. Burn baby, burn.

At the beginning of this week, Democrats did one of the things they’ve truly turned into an art form: surrendered to Republicans without gaining anything in the standoff. For the second time this year, they rallied their voters and disgruntled nonvoters to march, protest, call their representatives and get involved to give them needed leverage in negotiations over Republican demands to pass a spending bill. They held out for forty days and forty nights, only to let the gangway of the ark down, waterlog it and drown their supporters.

This was one of the rare times where the stars aligned in favor of Democrats to move the lever for the benefit of poor and working people. Courts ruled that the SNAP funds held in reserve must be released for the purposes they were budgeted, just like in the past. Yes, there was an appeal made by the White House to the Supreme Court, but would SCOPUS Dei truly rule against feeding the hungry, angry and heavily armed MAGAs dependent on food aid at Trump’s bidding in that political climate?

People who aren’t news junkies and policy wonks, realized that their health insurance premiums were set to spike, with many already seeing new rates double and triple what their policies cost before. Most people understood that House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson purposely wasn’t gaveling in the House, preventing negotiation on a spending solution or swearing in the deciding vote to release the Epstein files. Their orange leader’s polling was in a nosedive and the usual firehose of BS wasn’t achieving its previous thick coverage over the truth.

The nation was only a week removed from resounding Democratic Party wins in elections nationwide, held during that very shutdown. Most notable was the race for NYC mayor won by Mayor-elect and declared Democratic Socialist, Zohran Mamdani. His platform of affordability, freezing rent increases, free buses and affordable childcare resonated with voters in the boroughs. He beat disgraced, credibly alleged, sexually harassing booby-grabber, Andrew Cuomo, in the mayoral primary. This is a big deal. Cuomo is a scion of NY political royalty with broad name recognition. NY has closed primaries, so only registered Democrats can vote in theirs. Generally speaking, it’s the really die-hard party faithful who show up for primary votes. So, Mamdani, a child of recent immigrants, practicing Muslim and proud Democratic Socialist winning over the party’s most loyal core, against a well-known prior governor in the primary, is a shockwave to establishment politicians.

Cuomo ignored the rejection, as he’s allegedly ignored other noes, and insisted on running for mayor anyway. He lost by almost ten percentage points. The energetic, young candidate with proposals to address affordability and focus on improving delivery of government services was the message voters liked. A lot. Seattle elected a new mayor running on a similar platform. Apparently, they liked that message there and in many more places.

None of that mattered. After all of the phone calls, marches, protests, appeals to legislators from both parties to fund the ACA policy subsidies that helped people afford insurance through the marketplace, Dems collapsed like a card table underneath two husky Bills fans doing a Suplex.

True, Minority Leader Jefferies kept the Democrats united in the House against Republican aggression against working people. The number of treasonous defectors in the Senate was seven of them, not all. So, yeah, maybe “not all Dems.” However, I’m still no less pissed at this party. I’ll keep saying it; you can’t present yourself as the true opposition to fascism and oligarchic takeover, but get rolled every time your constituents’ benefits and rights are under threat by the white supremacist reactionaries on the other side.

If the other side can fight tooth and nail to get wins for racists and people so rich they couldn’t run out of money if they never earned another dime, Dems can stand firm for minorities, poor and working people until they get a win. Or at least they should be able to. You’re either fighting for your voters or you’re not, and in my opinion true warriors don’t tap out, they win or get knocked out.

The surrender came again from the Senate, whose minority faction is under the control of the bony, feeble hands of NY Senator Chuck Schumer, bleating limply while looking over his readers. There are many things I could say about this man, and nothing that comes to mind is complementary. I’ll leave it at this: at a time where the Senate Minority needed a brutal, bare-knuckled fighter, he’s not the man for this moment. Far from it.

He’s not alone, though. Sure, he cast a no vote this time, after it was known that he had seven Dems and one Independent to be the turncoats to reopen government and squander voters’ efforts. Yes, it was only seven Democrats who conveniently aren’t up for reelection that saved Republicans from themselves, again. I’m still unconvinced that this little charade wasn’t arranged by Chuck himself. Either way, this party as a whole seems incapable of holding firm to do the things their constituents voted them in for, or fulfilling them after emphasis from all of the tools noted above.

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Here is where, in my rage, I would usually say something like, “Throw the whole thing out! Abandon this party of surrender monkeys. These guys all suck and the only solution is a true third party!!” The reality is that this route gets you Nader/Stein-ed, which goes as follows:

Republicans lock up their base with the usual culture war nonsense they seem to be so susceptible to. Left-wingers go for the third-party candidate and the centrists and historically Democratic caucus stay with the Democratic Party. Republicans keep all of their voters; Democrats bleed off some of their voters to the third-party and neither Dems or the third-party have enough votes on their own to win the office. The net effects of all of those actions ultimately give you a Republican win. (See Gore 2000, Harris 2024)

So, I propose a third option. Getting a third party in place in every district and state is a tall order, period. Doing so in time to respond to current threats in time for 2026 is damn near impossible. Instead, hijack the Democratic Party. No, don’t stuff them all in a plane and order it flown to Belize while holding the pilots at gunpoint. I mean infiltrate it and take control like happens in a zombie ant.

The making of a zombie ant is an interesting occurrence. I remembered hearing about it and recently it came to mind again. I hit a wiki page and learned that it’s the result of infection with a fungus. That fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, infects the ant and then drives it to do uncharacteristic things. The usual victims live inside colonies in tree canopies, but once they’re infected, the fungus drives them out of their colonies and to the forest floor. Why? The temperature and humidity there is ideal for the fungus to proliferate. Then, it drives the ant to attach to the major vein on the underside of a leaf by its mandibles and become a host for the fungus. After a period of days, fruiting bodies grow from the ant’s head, they eventually release spores and after this reproduction process is over, it leaves a dad ant carcass stuck to a leaf with an exploded head.

The Democratic Party as it stands, is no use to the minorities, poor and working people it claims to represent. Left in its current state, it will continue to do the same things and let voters down in the same ways ad infinitum. What if we could make it leave its usual colony and hit the forest floor? I think we can and I make the following proposal.

As seen above, the Democratic Socialist agenda registers with voters. I think it appeals to right-leaning voters too, but the word socialist scares them away almost as quickly as diversity. In those districts, run candidates on a progressive agenda but don’t use the usual labels. Call it working people’s government or something else that sounds even more grassroots, folksy and pairs well with a rural twang. The playbook is there and Bernie Sanders, AOC and now Mamdani showed that it wins. The first two people listed showed it gets a response in blood-red states too. So, rebrand it for Murricah and go.

Flood every congressional district in the nation with candidates running on a progressive working people’s platform and have them challenge in Democratic primaries. If the incumbent Democrat, possibly under the control of corporate interests wins the primary, concede, do what you can to push their campaign to the left and then try again next race. If the progressive wins the Democratic primary, as they did in NYC and Seattle for mayor, they become the official Democratic candidate. Schumer and Jefferies misplayed this at their peril, so from here on out the party has to back the candidate or risk cannibalizing itself. If someone thinks they can try this in their district on the Republican ticket without the racism and religious platitudes, by all means have at it.

I won’t dictate how to direct fundraising efforts but I do think that independent, small donors is the way. That, supplemented by the kind of in-person outreach done by Mamdani and AOC before him, has proven to connect to voters and drive winning results.

This is a grassroots effort so these upstarts shouldn’t look for Democratic Party blessing, approval or endorsement before starting. Go forth and do. Frankly, I’m not sure the DNC’s kind of “help” that way is worth much to candidates lately anyway. Their proposals are Republican-ish, they don’t recognize the urgency of the moment and the slow-and-steady-wins-the-race attitude is turning the usually reliable voting blocs off and away. Enlisting their involvement at inception risks being influenced to “moderate”, which leaves you no different than the incumbent you’re challenging. If someone progressive in a district is interested in wresting government out of corporate hands and back to the people, they should put their names in the mix and challenge.

After the dust settles, some of those primary challengers will win their contests and become the official Democratic Party nominee. It is my view that this offers two advantages. First, the person is the official nominee for one of two major parties in the nation. That prevents them from needing to start a party, explain what it is, its stances, get the party registered to appear on the ballot and get awareness of their candidacy out there. Second, even if it’s a begrudging welcome, they become a member of one of the two largest parties in the nation. They’ll have access to all of the resources a party member is due to help their election prospects after locking nomination, while not being personally indebted to any wealthy donors to get them.

They’ve gone on to the general election and the progressive candidate has won their district. Congratulations!! Enjoy the confetti, accolades and the desiccating flat cake celebrating the win. They’re representing their district, elected on progressive principles, not beholden to some backer of Francis Underwood and can give or withhold support and votes on bills, motions and other actions that provide for and protect working people.

Given how slim the margins of control are in the legislature, even a small sliver of a progressive voting bloc that moves together can force the Democratic party left. It would be a vocal and visible subgroup for Dems, like the Tea Party and House Freedom Caucus are on the right, including the constant media blitzes to sell their points, but without the antisemitic, racist and xenophobic animus those right-wing groups converge around.

Think of how differently proposals in the House would look if “centrist” Dems needed to entice fifteen or twenty true progressives to join their cause. How would that change the calculus in the Senate if three or four Democrats were true progressives? Do those seven members in the Senate still tuck tail and give Republicans a win, if those vocal progressives poison the ground and declare immediately in the media that any Dem who concedes is abandoning the needs of their constituents and every American?

Does this proposal have holes? I’m sure of it. I’m one guy banging away on a keyboard in the middle of the night, not an entire think tank. Are there seeds in this that could sprout the weeds of a Democratic Party takeover, away from big money donors and back to everyday people? I’m confident there are. People adding, tweaking or customizing for whatever corner of the country they’re in can’t do anything but give it the chance to work better and presenting solutions are the aim. We’ve seen what the status quo is getting us and it’s unsatisfactory. It’s nothing at all.

Prepare for a miniature post that is more PSA than lengthy rant.

Last month, the same United States Congress in which Democrats are currently incapable of convincing Republicans to agree to fund support to keep government open, and working people's health insurance affordable, did find enough bipartisan votes for something else: a national day of remembrance for Charlie Kirk.

Kirk, cofounder of Turning Point USA, provacatuer and podcaster, was shot and killed a month ago at one of his Prove Me Wrong events, held outdoors at a Utah college campus. I and all others agree that no one should be shot dead, much less killed publicly in front of an audience that includes their children. People of varying political, personal, religious and irreligious beliefs agree that murder is unacceptable, and have said so about Kirk's killing.

In lifetime, Kirk promoted white male superiority, while insulting and discounting the value of racial and gender minorities, the disabled and immigrants from countries having majority populations with dark complexions. He was also sure to loudly espouse a proud Christian faith while doing so.

He made derogatory comments about Black, Brown Asian and Indigenous men and women, women in general, LGBTQ folks, and replied to a little Black boy that the civil rights act that gave him equality was a mistake. He promoted racist conspiracy theories, like “the great replacement”, which amplified unfounded racialized panic and hatred. Some subscribers to those views have occasionally been motivated to commit deadly violence.

Kirk held events for people to debate him and have the opportunity to “prove him wrong.” As he took stances rooted in villainizing and dehumanization of others, he claimed to promote dialogue in good faith, giving the targets of his vitriol the floor to defuse his claims and present their case to establish theirs and other minorities’ innate humanity, deservedness of equality, dignity and respect. This tilted pinball machine of a debate arena, mixed with his frequent platitudes to loving and living for Jesus, were given as the basis for him being awarded a day of remembrance. They are pointed to as evidence of his love for Jesus, despite showing very little love for neighbors darker than milk, and his openness to dialogue based on so-called debates framed in inhumanity from the outset.

Kirk did not promote or represent universal access to rights and opportunities for all. He did not show dignity, respect or see equal humanity in all. The nation's Congress, despite those facts, still decided on a national day of remembrance for a person who cheered the decimation of rights for many of the constituents they represent.

Those who presented and promoted this dedication are encouraging people to wear red to honor Kirk. I will not commit any of my time or energy to remembering Charlie Kirk.

I will definitely NOT be wearing red. If you disagree with the racist, misogynistic and non-affirming views he espoused, feel free to join me and leave anything red in your closet, inside your dresser and on your shoe and hat racks for another day.

Those of us with conscience and a belief in the equallity of all humankind, couldn't get Congress to reject this bad idea. We can control what we do and what we wear.

On Tuesday October 14, let your blues, yellows, browns, blacks, grays, whites and any other clothing colors that are NOT RED, show you didn't subscribe to the vitriol Kirk spewed. Let it also show your love for all humanity and belief in the equal worth of all human beings.

About a month ago, I saw a note from immigration activist, advocate, former Border Patrol agent, and Substacker . In it, a clip showed a couple men driving out to a detention facility built way out in the California desert by CoreCivic, the for-profit prison company.

The complex was massive; a small city dropped from midair into the middle of dunes. I commented that the prison was likely going to be used as a 13th Amendment answer to cheap labor. For the unfamiliar, that amendment leaves enslavement as an option for the imprisoned, and some of the most familiar companies out there have taken advantage of it to save on human resource needs. Another Substack user replied to me with this note:

I encourage anyone reading this post to check out the YouTube clip in the link above. It’s chilling. The presenters were at this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF), and continued to push the idea we’re threatened by a human population “collapse.” Population collapse, in a world with eight billion people walking around and draining the planet at an escalating rate, is akin to deforestation in the Canadian Rockies by collecting just the fallen twigs and branches. In a world where many refer to people and companies having only a few billion dollars in assets, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.

To prepare you for what you’ll watch, the first presenter says near the beginning of the talk, “Elon Musk has been right about quite a few things, from electric cars to reusable rockets.” Hoo boy! Elon Musk provided funding, and eventually bought outright, an existing electric car company named Tesla. It was started by two inventors named Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarppening. He came to agree with them after they thought it was a good idea and founded it. As for reusable rockets, history books I’ve read tell me that NASA may have liked and deployed reusable rocketry before SpaceX. For our bonus round, Musk also believes it’s more sensible to take resources from a working Earth, to terraform, settle and populate a completely barren Mars that lacks atmosphere or water. Musk isn’t an idiot, but he isn’t the source of all good ideas either, nor are all of his ideas absolutely wonderful.

Why did the presenters believe a human population decline is a threat? They pose it as a danger to economic growth, especially the nagging little problem of not enough working young people to fund the social safety net for seniors. Those seniors, you see, show increases in dementia, which one of his slides calls “particularly burdensome.” It’s not sad that your loved one is losing their memories of achievements, failures, first loves, heartbreaks, children, grandchildren, travel and ancestors, then eventually losing physical abilities and their independence. No, it’s particularly burdensome because their lifespans aren’t necessarily shortened, and they require intensive resources for care as they age. Don’t come for me, it’s in their slides. I’m telling you, you’ve got to watch the video!

As they said that population will collapse, they noted that industrial nations have already turned to automation and immigrants to address their own domestic birthrate declines. It’s also mentioned that a rising proportion of the world’s population will come from sub-Saharan Africa, as well as a rising share of migrants to more developed nations. Hmmm. Remind me to come back to this. Oh right, you can’t. I’ll make an effort to follow up on this farther down.

So, what is at the root of this feared collapse? There were quite a few causes shouldering responsibility for this stingy rate of seminal broadcast to waiting eggs.

Part of the blame lay in young people from wealthier nations, refusing to procreate at the same rate as manual subsistence farmers lacking access to medical care and drugs that reduce infant mortality. People abandoning the religions that tell them to “git yurself a quiver fulla them kids” was also at fault.

Last, but not least, was those damned women! Women are not marrying enough. Some of them even dare to refuse to date or even have sex with men! Oh, my stars, how could they? The horror! Don’t they know how abnormal this is?! He even relied on an incredibly slanted and inaccurate representation of the 4B movement to make his case. Humanity could’ve gotten away with more births, if it wasn’t for that darned birth control. How can we save the existence of the human race and prevent it from falling to, I don’t know *GASP!*, six billion people, when allowing women to plan when they have children? How can we crank out enough kids if women can decide, instead of being pushed into motherhood whenever they have sex during marriage, from a hookup, or much worse, surviving incest and rape?

Their cure, of course, was for people in developed nations to start pumping out kids as fast as they can. It would ensure there are enough workers to keep their economies growing, building corporate profitability and supplying taxpaying workers to fund the programs that support retirees.

There were graphs, charts, econobabble and all of it predicated on the assumption that there is an endless well of natural world to keep exploiting, for an ever-swelling human population. It brought this passionate address to mind from Greta Thunberg at the 2019 WEF.

At the risk of sounding like the cultists in the movie Death Note: L Change the World, what if an eventual human population decline is actually just what the planet’s doctor ordered? Would a world that doesn’t have fifteen billion people teeming on it, devouring its plants, animals, fish, polluting it with trash, feces and toxins be the worst thing?

You see, the whole premise of their presentation is that the world as it currently works, is the best way it can work. Countries and their economies are presented as already performing in an ideal way, only needing more fresh bodies to repower. Yet, I see too many companies offering products and services that don’t deliver what consumers want or are asking for. Clothes don’t last, and maybe thankfully so, because they don’t always fit well. Touchless fixtures don’t work until you’re practically touching the sensor that activates them. Electronic devices that do work, see companies end support and force you to buy new ones. I look around and don’t observe companies addressing these and other problems. I see money, made artificially cheap by central banks, chasing lots of bad ideas. Call me against progress if you want, but there’s too much created for sale that no one wants, doing things no one asked for.

Take artificial intelligence (AI) for example. As a kid that grew up when the Terminator movies first dropped, I don’t like AI on principle. I’ll be damned if I volunteer to help whatever real life Cyberdyne Systems is working to put Skynet online. Someone else can fill in as Miles Dyson, setting the final pieces in place for machine sentience that vaporizes most of us, and leaves the rest to resist with John Connor, preserving the remaining humanity that robots didn’t wipe out. I digress.

Artificial intelligence, for all of the hype and promises, is artificial but not that intelligent. It hallucinates, i.e. makes shit up that never happened. It’s built on stealing the intellectual property and ingenuity of human minds and feeding it into those systems like paper into a shredder. Some of its data centers pollute neighborhoods and are likely contributing to worsening residents’ health. Potable water sources, and groundwater in particular, are under stress. By some estimates AI is already using 2 to 3 percent of public water. Keep that in mind the next time your municipality enforces water restrictions during a summer drought, while people are asking AI to suggest recipes for chicken breast.

AI sucks up power as though homes still had refrigerators with the efficiency of those built in the early sixties, left all their lights on, and turned an iron on in every room for good measure. Coal power plants slated for closure are being kept open, and decommissioned coal plants are being proposed for natural gas conversion, to be restarted to power AI data centers. All of this comes at a time every scientist is just shy of televised self-immolation, trying to get people to pay attention to the climate change crisis.

So, why does it seem that every company is making, investing, incorporating and deploying AI in consumer products? Because companies no longer meet consumer needs. They do things that don’t satisfy anything unmet, make markets for them, manufacture demand and then advertise you to death, trying to convince you to mindlessly buy their stuff. As I see it, this is the root of the problem: companies aren’t asked to meet people’s needs, people are asked to meet the demands of companies.

Companies used to pop up to address an unmet need for goods or services made to improve life quality or ease. Now, they exist to sell more and more of whatever they make or do year over year, regardless of demand. Growth in their worth depends on them selling you more of everything, over and over again, and firms that don’t are punished. Investment analysts forecast expected growth that ignores past purchases, market saturation, improvement of competitor offerings and changing tastes. Publicly traded businesses that don’t beat these growth metrics see their stock values crater. That pressure makes some resort to dirty business, financial and environmental tricks, to beat those metrics and stay in the good graces of “the street.” How else do you explain online retailers asking if you’d like to reorder an item, sometimes with a discount code sweetener, mere days after receiving the one you just bought?

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This flawed business cycle, a farce that Thunberg called a fairytale of eternal economic growth, is at the root of accepting this woefully flawed economic model. I remember established figures, mostly right-wing pundits and politicians but some on the left too, who dismissed her as an impassioned but naive and brainwashed little girl who didn’t understand how the world works. Maybe she just didn’t accept the way those in the establishment insist it must work. They joked that she needed to get her driver’s license, go to parties, dress frilly, kiss boys, date, lighten up, and leave the serious stuff for the grownups. I think the truth is this; she’s a young person who consciously donned the sunglasses, saw that many of our trusted figures are really disguised lizards, and everything on the surface is just hiding bold, plain text underneath telling you to numb out, buy more and procreate. Yes, that’s the plot of They Live. Rewatch it, it still stands up after decades.

However, she’s seen the result of this. After all, that’s what the generations before her, mine included, have been doing to cause all of this mess. We’ve gone from disposable plates and utensils made with forever chemicals, to disposable clothes, printers, cellphones, laptops, small appliances and vehicles. Worse yet, many of those things all come with proprietary cords, accessories and software that isn’t compatible with anything else. This compounds the problem of piling landfills and exhausts the natural world, forcing us to replace all of that all over again with whatever the successor is.

If our economy worked as we’re told, we would see it creating a combination of public and private solutions that addressed real problems. Instead of watching billions piled into pursuits of dubious value, we’d see investment, corporate strategies and government choices to address what people actually need.

This brings me back to the premise of the WEF symposium. Is the problem truly that the population of humanity is feared to be in collapse, or is the real fear that countries that have historically had white majorities will find an increasing number of swarthier residents to answer their countries economic, tax and labor force needs? After all, the presenters themselves noted a forecast for an increasing proportion of the world’s population coming from sub-Saharan Africa. That means that the fertility of the people in that region is forecast to be quite healthy, thank you very much.

If a region or three on earth has above replacement birth rates, where is the foundation for the fear of population collapse? One statement made towards the midpoint of the presentation was, “These foreign-born shares of the (Western) population are exceptionally high by historical standards. …. This will mean continued very rapid social and cultural change.” Ahhhh. Sometimes they do say the quiet part out loud.

You see, the global population isn’t at risk of collapse. No, what the presenter and Elon Musk fear, is that the birthrates that will preserve historic majorities in the countries he’s cited no longer apply, and those nations will be compelled to accept very rapid social and cultural change. They’ll need to, to stay globally competitive and boast populations sizable enough to hold international sway. The problem isn’t that the immigration currently being used to offset the declining birthrates of white identifying people is insufficient, it’s that it's too sufficient. More than sufficient.

How do you keep historic majorities in developed nations, continue to limit developing nations to being mere resource wells, cheap offshore labor sources and export dumps, if a growing number of people immigrate to your country from the ones you usually exploit from across the miles? When you’re accustomed to conquering other places, installing your language, beliefs, practices and customs on the people that already live there, the prospect of having to adopt and adapt to someone else’s in your country apparently tastes bitter and unpalatable.

If industrial nations did heed this call and ramped up their birth rates to stave off an imagined extinction, as life expectancies continue to lengthen worldwide and other regions maintain plentiful fecundity, it worsens the fraught scramble for earth’s finite resources already happening. The pattern of constant growth that maturely developed industrial nations require to maintain their historic demographics, also requires their lifestyle’s adoption by developing nations. Developed nations use resources at a disproportionately exhaustive rate per capita. How does a world of eight, nine or ten billion people, rapidly adopting a Western consumption mindset, meet that kind of demand? It can’t.

In the full remarks that Thunberg clip was excerpted from, she mentions that the globe is on fire, and mass extinction events are happening on a massive and growing scale. Both observations are true. Our oceans are awash in literal islands of plastic waste; at the same time rising temperatures make them more acidic and deadly to marine life. Fish, avian and mammalian wildlife populations continue to dwindle, some from overconsumption by an explosive demand for protein coming from eight billion humans. Others are lost from habitat destruction, whether clearcutting coniferous forests and rainforests to graze cattle, obtain building lumber, mine lithium for batteries or other pursuits. Municipalities are paving over meadows to build McMansions, a new wholesale club or put up a parking lot.

The way we’ve been doing things no longer works for the reality we’re in. It’s insufficient; a failure. At the end of the population symposium, two questions that challenged the presentation’s assumption that curative effects come from a big baby blowout, came from women.

The first, from a Japanese woman, noted that some women in Japan prefer not to become mothers and want to choose careers or a childless lifestyle. How do you use the presenters proposed fix of more babies, while allowing women to exercise choice? The reply was that many people actually really want kids, or to have more kids than they did have, but put it off for later and then find it’s too late when they decide they’re ready. Though that may be true in some cases, he didn’t explore why that is, which is generally a combination of the high cost of living, cost to raise children and lack of parental support in Western nations. It also didn’t address her question, which asked about the reality of women deciding being a mom isn’t for them.

Another woman suggested that, instead of panicking about a potential decline in population disrupting the status quo, shouldn’t we look at what we’re doing and propose solutions to do them differently? The reply to this was more verbal legerdemain, with one presenter who rambled about misguided projections of overpopulation made by some governments, leading to interventions that led to too little population growth. Again, not an answer to the question asked.

As I see it, both women were on the right track. If more women get opportunities for education, career, healthcare and the autonomy to control timing of childbirth, if they decide to do so at all, how would one propose altering their established preferences? What incentive(s) can a government truly offer to change a woman’s mind? In the USA, reactionaries are denying women birth control and erasing legal protections for bodily autonomy, to force them to carry children, whether or not they want or feel ready to do it at that time. Denial of choice isn’t a sustainable or winning strategy, and it usually results in horrific unintended consequences its authors never dreamed.

What if we did what the second woman asked, did things differently to address the needs at hand? Exploring this prospect is where the answer lies, and I think that the parts already exist to solve this puzzle, at least as far as the USA goes. Other nations have different social safety net funding levels, tax rates, tax bases and levels of supports, so I can’t say for sure that the following could address their challenges.

In the US example, the population is aging, birthrates are stagnant or declining, depending on the region, and a growing number of elderly need younger people to provide care. The country also needs to grow the tax base of workers contributing to safety net budgets. Immigrants have higher birthrates and their countries of origin skew younger. Increased immigration of working aged people from those higher birthrate countries, is the logical solution. Is it the solution if you want to maintain a white majority? No. Is it the solution if you want to address the labor force and demographic need in real time? Yes.

Looking at immigration as a means to prop up a white majority, especially in a nation where that majority was manufactured through oppression and targeted legislation, is a losing proposition. Nagging the domestic population to have more babies, will get as much positive response as any other nagging. Increasing the number of legal immigrants admitted to the country, establishing high volume processing methods to vet potential immigrants for approval, and streamlining the immigration process overall addresses the shortage. It also reduces the number of undocumented people, if you raise the artificially low quotas and increase the processing rate for legal entrants. People circumvent when official systems are slow, onerous and hopeless. Efficiency gains can markedly improve compliance.

Next, raise taxes on rich people. They used to pay more, until President Ray-gun slashed taxes, cut social spending support, gave tax breaks and spent money on missiles and laser-shooting satellites in space. A dwindling tax base is only true if every variable in the equation but workers is fixed. Tax rates and the tax basis for senior programs aren’t carved in stone and can be changed. Instead of forcing a false choice between immigration and forcing women unprepared or disinterested in motherhood into childbearing and rearing, you can widen the net to capture more payers contributing to the social net and for senior citizens. The bootlickers shedding tears for billionaires paying more taxes can spare me. There isn’t a divining rod that could guide me to dig up sympathy for people who buy their own islands and mega yachts, while whining about paying too much in taxes. If working people’s taxes can buy subsidies for companies we don’t own or run, rich people can pay more taxes into programs that support working people.

Finally, the methodology for measuring value in this world is broken. A company that makes laptops and cellphones, another that makes gaming and AI chips, an electric vehicle company and a software company are each currently valued around $1Trillion USD. At the same time, a growing number of seniors need care and that need remains unmet. Congress recently passed legislation to use taxpayer funds to build chip fabrication facilities in the US for publicly traded companies, at the same time it cut support for the homeless, veterans, single mothers, children, the hungry and elderly.

None of the above companies is solving a tangible and pressing need, yet stock markets and investors drive their valuations up on expectations they’ll convert more of the earth’s substance into greater quantities of sold baubles, beads and gadgets predestined for landfills. Companies pay millions, your television takes more frequent commercial breaks to sing to your wallet, break it against the rocks and shipwreck your savings on crap you don’t want. As that money gets wasted to convince you to want something, actual wants and the wage rates to attract the labor force to fill them languishes.

The scale is broken. It measures the inconsequential and flighty as the densest mass, and the weightiest things as chaff. Broken things need not stay so. Gauges get measured against a standard, recalibrated and corrected and the way we value people, markets, laborers and companies can and must be corrected.

Economy is the efficient management and use of material resources, and economic systems are supposed to be the method by which this happens. All observations make it clear that our current economic system is insufficient, inefficient and is managing resource allocation extremely poorly. Key needs remain unmet, the irreplaceable is exhausted and we create too much of what is ephemeral, temporary and unnecessary. We live in real life, not a legend or myth. Fairytales are for children, to make them ignore the present and lull them to sleep. Fairytales of eternal economic growth without consequence told to adults are no different. Wake up.

At long last, Rant to Atmosphere finally has artwork. I’ve also done a few things around the house here to try and freshen it up.

Fewer things are more frustrating than to have an idea in your mind that you know you don’t have the talent or ability to sketch out yourself. I’m so devoid of art skill, I didn’t even bother trying to put pen or pencil to paper to scratch out the image floating in my head. I resorted to writing it down, in painstaking detail that must have been excruciating for the artist to slog through. They took it, somehow turned my crazed ravings into the picture I imagined and voila!

So, the short of it is the look is new, the writer is still old and getting older, cranking out the pissy kvetching pitched to that crotchety tonality you’ve come to expect, as inspiration hits.

More pieces lie ahead, so thank you for your subscriptions and continued engagement with my work. I also appreciate the occasional comments that let me know you like me. You really, really like me.

Thanks again to all of you for riding with Rant.

Yesterday transpired for me just like any other day. I creaked to life after my usual semi-restful slumber and multiple snooze button smashes. Then, I trundled through my usual grooming routine, got dressed and headed out. I wound my way through local streets, merged and joined the rest of highway traffic and went along my way. It was sunny, the sky clear and I hemmed and hawed between using A/C or cracking the windows. My hot weather tolerance is better than many I know, but for the improved fuel efficiency promised by uninterrupted aerodynamics of closed windows, I chose air conditioning. To quote Petty, the sun beat down like anything was possible, I turned the radio on and I was driving.

In various places elsewhere, maybe only a town away, someone else was getting stopped. A band of masked and unidentified men, bullied them, harassed them for multiple forms of ID to prove they belong here, demanded they justify their presence on American soil and use of American roads. If they were lucky, after a collection of minutes that felt like eternity, they were let go. The lot of the unlucky concluding entirely differently.

I reached my destination, booted up my computer, fielded the usual daily requests, and some unusual ones. I cruised along until lunchtime and took a break for sustenance. Afterwards, I resumed and finished out the day.

In cities and towns across America, bands of armed and masked men descended on workplaces like locusts with machine guns. They grabbed anyone who “looked illegal”, screamed commands at them, zip-tied their hands behind their backs and threw them into a vehicle. No defenses of legal status were heard. No proffering of documentation deemed good enough. No notification sent to their families, who would fall into panic as soon as the kidnapped didn’t return home at their usual time.

At the end of the day, I shut down, packed up and let my wife know I was heading home. I checked to see if she needed me to stop anywhere for anything on the way home. Then, I summoned my chariot’s horses to life, and pulled away. The first few miles of return drive are two lane roads. I lowered the windows and let in the puffs of air from outside. Initially the outside air was merely agitating the hot air built up in the car’s cabin as it sat parked, but eventually it cleared that out for cooler fresh airflow from the early evening.

I rowed through the gears, apex clipping with as much gusto as is allowed within local speed limits, eventually joining the highway to complete the return trip. My mind wandered over the day’s events and noted a concert announcement on the radio. I made a few mental notes about some things I hoped to tackle outside at home before the sun went down, then I began thinking about dinner.

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All day, including that very moment, thousands were overcrowded inside of a detention center with others snatched up in government sanctioned abductions. Most haven’t had a meal, shower, private use of a bathroom or contact with their families. They’re denied legal counsel; agents snarl at them like attack dogs and mock their plight. Endless threats of deportation to inhumane conditions in nations they’ve never lived are made. In far too many cases, those threats are made reality.

A friend, survivor of the same cult my wife and I left, and a fellow writer on Substack posted recently about the movie Jojo Rabbit. She’s watched it before but rewatched and noted the similarities of it with our time. You can find that piece here:

I’ve never seen the film but I hope to remedy that soon. It’s in my to-watch queue. I did look into it on her recommendation and explored it more, where else but IMDB. I’m a bit of an unevenly informed film geek. I love movies. Always have. It’s one of the things I was constantly at odds with myself about when part of the fundie cult, with its strict edicts against entertainment, especially TV and movies.

I loved watching DVD’s and right behind watching the movie itself, the extras and behind the scenes stuff lit me up. I ravenously devoured how they would go from planning a movie on a storyboard to turning it into cinematic magic. I would lean in and listen intently to actors describing how they turned words of a script into the character they’d depict onscreen. Special effects, casting, choosing filming locations, editing, watching removed scenes or the entire films again with director voiceovers explaining the reasons they cut scenes, their choices for lighting and camera angles all interest me.

So, naturally I gravitate to the “trivia” section of IMDB listings that give more background about the film and its actors. Jojo Rabbit director, Taiki Waititi, is quoted a few times in this section. One entry that caught my eye in particular was about his choice of colors in the film. The listing says the following:

Taika Waititi discovered in his research that WWII Germany was very vibrant and fashionable and was interested in shying away from traditional war films that presented it as dark and dreary. He opted, instead, to present the city as a celebratory place on the surface and dressed the characters as stylishly as possible. He liked the idea that everything seems happy, but just underneath the surface "the third Reich is crumbling, and, you know, the dream is over."

As I go about my days lately, I can’t help but think about this. My neighborhood looks like it always did. Stores hum along and ring up sales, restaurants continue to book reservations and serve diners, cars are bought and sold, people pile into and out of movie theaters. Cars topped with external cargo storage on their roof racks go on summer adventures with their families. Days begin and end, sunrises and sunsets happening with their usual regularity.

While my life and others go on with normalcy, others in our nation are terrorized. They’re being rounded up in sudden raids at their homes, jobs, in parks or on walks. As many of us continue unaffected, our neighbors live in fear, bracing for the moment a collection of unmarked pickups and SUVs group suddenly to drag them off to holding pens, or the death camp gleefully and hastily constructed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, funded with allocated FEMA funds and heartlessly nicknamed by right-wing xenophobes as “Alligator Alcatraz.”

Many areas in America are celebratory and stylish on the surface, while some of its residents are being terrified by a state-sanctioned gestapo. Unmasked armed bandits are empowered to detain and abduct anyone they suspect is “illegal”, a broad, arbitrary and racist term meant to encompass anyone who doesn’t look like Dick van Dyke or Mary Tyler Moore. No explanations are acceptable. No legal status protective enough. No item of documentation, or combination thereof a reliable deterrent from state sanctioned violence. Even attending court mandated appointments to advance your permanent stay are in play for federal government kidnapping.

One of the things about the holocaust that amazes people is how so much brutal, vile, torturous, bloody, depraved, industrial-scale, murderous violence happened at facilities located just outside of towns. Many of the Nazi camps hired local people to man their mechanized death factories fueled by hate. People donned their uniforms, kissed their spouses, headed off and worked their shifts. Some casually unloaded people by the cattle carload off of trains in one area, while others nonchalantly gassed, collected and burned their lifeless bodies on the other. This is after government officers hounded people for identification papers, rounded them up, abducted them from the towns they called home and loaded them onto the train cars directed to those camps in the first place.

How does that happen? Exactly the way it’s happening now. I began, experienced and concluded a whole workday while others were being snatched off the streets without cause and jammed into pens so crowded the FDA doesn’t allow it for livestock. While most of us shopped ‘til we dropped, enjoyed sumptuous meals, three-day weekends or took in the latest Superman film, many of our neighbors tried to free themselves from the grips of four or five armed, masked and unidentified men who hauled and pulled them into captivity, indefensibly and unprovoked.

A quote says that evil prevails while good people do nothing. I rant here (oh cute, a play on his publication’s name), bitch and moan but has that changed anything? As I recline to read another writer’s Substack, take in some F1 or a little baseball, ICE agents are swarming workplaces, courthouses, stores, playgrounds, schools, sidewalks, breaking in front doors of homes and apartment buildings and stealing away fellow residents. As I mark off another day in the calendar of life with an “X”, thousands of residents, many of them documented with permanent residency status or citizens, are seized from their friends and family with increasing regularity.

Evil is prevailing.

I’m not doing anything particularly effective. Most of us aren’t doing anything at all. The Schutzstaffel, better known by most of us as the SS, are in full swing in version 2.0 here in America. They are funded, armed and hiring to swell their ranks at an astonishing clip. As many of us ponder what and who are in the Epstein files AG Bondi refused to release, as newsworthy as that is, detention centers continue to fill with people cramped into spaces with no beds, bathrooms, showers, food, clean water or relief from blinding lights 24/7.

Calm and dread. Barbarity and banality. Joy and misery. Two different realities are occurring side by side, and the longer it continues, the more likely it becomes a new baseline of normalcy. Death camps didn’t always exist in Dachau, Auschwitz and Treblinka, but at some point, residents accepted them as part of the normal fabric of their existence. How long before that becomes the reality in the United States for our brothers and sisters stolen away in government raids? Do we have long to wait before folks suit up, kiss their spouses and head off to man nearby “Alligator Alcatraz” or the many proposed corporate run death camps without giving it a second thought?

Don’t be lulled to sleep. Resist getting distracted or complacent. Refuse to get comfortable with the fact that our brothers and sisters, fellow humans with hopes, dreams, families and friends are not only uncomfortable, they’re being treated cruelly and inhumanely.

Jews that survived the holocaust and their descendants made a vow after World War II. Never again. They said they would never again accept or allow being placed in concentration camps and targeted for mass murder.

Now, it is our turn and overdue for those of us in the world at large to adopt this mantra but for all human beings, regardless of their place of origin, appearance or religion. Human beings, regardless of their provenance, are deserving of dignity, care and respect.

America has already embarked on pogroms against our fellow citizens and residents. The current regime in power believes that, like its orange-tinted figurehead’s torrent of lies and crass behavior, we’ll become inured to it and it will become normal. It already feels like we’re on our way to that.

Don’t accept it. It is not normal. it is unjust. It is immoral. It is inhumane. It is criminal. We cannot allow this to happen in our name and funded by our tax dollars.

Never again.

Dear God (or Allah, YHWH or however a monotheistic god is known),

I used to be sure of the existence of you as such a “One”; a divine and sentient presence concerned about all of the intricacies of humankind and the natural world. I was taught to know you as a Christian. I learned of you as the God of Jesus, Abraham and Jacob, and that Jesus is your son by whose crucifixion all believers are saved. I was taught that you created everything I see, you’re completely good, your nature is love, you love righteousness and justice, defend the weak and downtrodden, hate evil, have power to do anything and all things come about from your existence.

The book of Genesis says you made the earth and you saw that it was good. It further says you gave humans dominion over the earth, but it also says you told them to dress and keep it. According to Merriam-Webster, one meaning of the word dress is, “to cultivate or tend.” That makes me read that to mean that humans were to use this earth responsibly, get what they needed but take care of it and respect it.

However, the people in power for some time now have abused their dominion. They’re not dressing the planet. As a matter of fact, they’re undressing it. It’s being denuded at an increasing and alarming rate, but those doing it cite you. They’re doing your will, they say. They tell us you gave them dominion over earth to do as they please, which includes abusing and befouling it with pollution and causing collapses in the populations of plants and animals the holy books say you so carefully made. Those who try to slow, stop or to reverse the damage wherever possible are thwarted at every turn. Supposedly, you can do anything, including moving power in the direction of the people doing what your holy book says you wanted them to do. If you’re there, you either don’t care or decide you just won’t.

To Muslim friends I made along the way, you’re known as Allah, likely the same god but favoring Ishmael instead of Isaac in the rivalry of Abrahamic brothers. Jewish people, as I understand it, know you as YHWH, pronounced as the drawing in and releasing of breath.

However you’re known, one commonality exists among this grouping of adherents: for each religion, they’re your favorite and to get your favor and theirs, everyone else needs to agree to believe in and follow you exactly the way they do. Failure or refusal to do so is justification for all manner of punishment, retribution and mistreatment, including torture and death. You see, especially for the most extreme believers, you’re so exacting about obedience to their particular interpretation of belief, there’s no punishment too grave for noncompliance.

Unfortunately for many, some paths of faith are virtually impossible regardless of the desires of the aspirant. For Jews, I understand that someone must already be in the bloodline of their brotherhood to be fully embraced as believing brethren, and being outside of that makes everyone else an “other.” As a matter of fact, someone born into Judaism who doesn’t practice and abandons the tenets, is still seen as fully Jewish, where someone coming to it from outside is not. Even if the outsider chooses to fervently adopt the beliefs, customs, observance of holy days and the like, they’ll never be completely equal believers. That other may not mean less than, but I imagine that in some contexts it could. Many of us watching the wholesale destruction of apartments, schools, hospitals and neighborhoods in Gaza can’t help but see that as viewing others as lesser and inferior to a people declared your favorite.

Muslims and Christians welcome people who didn’t practice before as fully practicing members, but they must adhere to whatever the demonstration of faith the sect, splinter or school of belief says is required. The declared hope or intention is that their dedicated practice yields transcendently divine qualities in their lives, but that is dependent on conforming to the demands of the faith community. It’s usually the conformity that shows the love and respect of you, the deity by the adherent, even if the holy transcendence barely manifests or oscillates wildly, waxing and waning.

For many factions, I’d argue nearly all within these groups, some people can’t ever be full members if they embrace their whole selves. Apparently, even though you’ve made everything, those attracted to the same sex or who express their gender in ways society decides are nontraditional, exactly the way they’re naturally made to do, aren’t welcome. At least they’re unwelcome if they live the way they’re naturally made. The books that stand as your holy texts have parts of them that many believers understand to say LGBTQ+ people are immoral, sinful, undesirable and fallen to unsavory lust. If they pretend to be someone they aren’t, act against their own natural inclinations and force themselves to believe lies about how they really feel, though, you’ll welcome them.

Why would you do that? If you made everything, you’ve made them too, exactly how they are. Why would you give them attractions, just to proclaim them wrong and acting on them is against you? If you don’t agree, why allow others to claim this on your behalf? Why would you make some among humankind, a creature it says in Genesis you realized is worse off alone, in a way you forbid to truly have full companionship, romance, love, and a committed partnership like those who love in heterosexual couples? That doesn’t sound loving. That sounds like a prank; a cruel, mean and sadistic prank.

In other instances, gender makes the adherent unequal. Again, my background to understand you is Christian, so I come from that angle. Genesis says that you made woman to be a help to man. How can she be helpful but limited in the ways she helps? Was the only way you proposed her being helpful to cook, clean, be a homemaker, sex outlet and baby incubator? Why would you make man to have no ceiling on his ambitions, then create woman, who could only truly help him if she’s his equal, only to squash her into the tightest possible space to live out her purpose? Is all of that really over eating a piece of fruit to gain knowledge? If so, why would you put a tree they shouldn’t eat in their garden in the first place? That doesn’t sound loving. It also sounds like a cruel, sadistic prank.

There is an especially large and vocal group of your believers who say you made them better than the rest because of their comparatively fairer complexions and fine strands of straight hair. Although you supposedly made everything and everyone, they say you love them the best because of these physical attributes. They’re the best representatives of believing in you, because you’ve given them this combination of physical traits. Everyone else who looks differently can only be so-so followers, even if the undesirable’s demonstration of your holy book’s tenets is impeccable.

Because you love these fair-skinned, straight-haired people better than any other people you made, they deserve better treatment, accommodations, guaranteed freedom, and to find universal acceptance wherever they go. They, on the other hand, can begrudgingly grant spare dispensations of welcome and access to those unlike them when it’s their turn. They can move onto any landmass they find, and anyone they find there is worthy of complete genocidal annihilation to allow them to settle in. They can help themselves to all the natural spoils they find, plunder nature to its detriment, treat the earth itself as both their piggy bank and toilet. Anyone who was there when they arrived isn’t as good, because if they were, they’d have won the battles to control the land. Anyone who comes there afterwards, is always an outsider, undeserving, unwanted, an invader, interloper and only their dirt-cheap labor can offset their undesirability. That exception for cheap labor can still be withdrawn at any time it’s seen as inconvenient.

If their view is true, once again you’ve made variations of all human beings, in different colors, shapes and shades, only for those without this combination of fine, straight hair and paler skin to suffer. If you only liked this fair skin/straight hair combo, why make all of the other variations of human beings you apparently don’t like? Did you make them just to be put upon, constant refugees, targets of hatred constantly defending their humanity? Why? Who makes many different kinds of people, only for one kind to enjoy life, while all the rest are made to suffer and constantly beg to be seen as fellow humans?

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Many of these sufferers believe in you, despite constant historically abusive mistreatment from other proclaimed believers. They cry to you constantly in their distress. They beg you to keep them safe. They ask for protection from wrongful arrests. They implore you not to let their families be split, or any of their friends or relatives kidnapped by government agents and disappeared because of their appearance. If you’re omnipotent and exist to defend the helpless and downtrodden, why don’t you ever step in when those very people are begging you for help. Why are you nowhere to be found when vulnerable people are being targeted for rape, torture and savagery?

This is worse than a prank. It’s malicious, cold, sadistic and dare I say, evil. Yes, you’re supposed to be good, filled with love and incapable of wrong, but the prospect above doesn’t sound good or loving. It’s the stuff of nightmares. It’s the intentions of little boys who find joy ripping wings off of flies and torturing neighbors’ cats, only to become serial killers as adults.

Why create beings with unlimited potential, only to wall them in from all directions? Why claim to love all those who love you, but generally speaking, only straight men with a particular set of physical traits ever get to enjoy lives without limit, fear, explanation, justification, deportation, or decades of pleading to be seen as an equal?

Oh yes, many of your Christian defenders say it’s because this earth is going to pass away for you to roll out a perfect new world for your believers, like a sexy concept car finally hitting showrooms. So, as the good, kind, tender-hearted being we’re supposed to believe you are, how is it you’re content to listen to an entire planet burn, and smell the plants and animals incinerate like a perverse sacrifice until then? Why do the cries to you from the innocent believers sheltering in place from war, bombing, raids, sexual violence as a weapon, climate catastrophes, domestic violence and more deadly destruction go unheard?

Others may say that the things I’ve pointed out are the results of people following their god improperly. How can this be? All parties claim to be praying to you, and all parties claim to be hearing directions from you. Are you telling some people to do evil things, and telling others to do good things? If so, how can you be one that “is light, and in him is no darkness at all?”

If those who are doing evil are doing it on their own, but claim you told them to do it, aren’t they lying? In the case of the Christian god, isn’t it blasphemy to attribute evil things to you that you didn’t do or request? Isn’t blasphemy the one thing you say you won’t forgive? Furthermore, if you really are against the wicked people who claim to be working on your behalf, why are the plans they claim you blessed successful so often?

People prayed to you to help them deport hardworking people, and they’re doing it. They prayed openly to you in the government’s capital to take healthcare, food aid, housing support and more from the people Jesus said you want us to look after, only to give grossly wealthy people even more money. From all counts, it seems like you didn’t tell them no. They prayed to have your help in imprisoning hardworking people in Nazi-inspired death camps, here and abroad, and they’re building them with the full funding, faith and credit of the government. They prayed for your help to dismantle the data collection of weather patterns that bolster the findings of climate change, and they’ve gotten their wish too, to devastating effect and loss of more innocent lives.

On the other side of it, people prayed that you would protect them to keep working, supporting their families and sending money home to needy relatives in their countries of origin. Others prayed that women’s healthcare would be maintained so that doctors wouldn’t be terrorized into letting them get near death, or die, in order to provide them medical care. More prayed to you that you would protect the voting and civil rights they worked so hard to obtain. Still more begged you to let the full self they’ve only recently been able to express remain safe to show. Some prayed for key support services, some that many people don’t realize they use and depend on, to continue on intact. They all got zip.

Why do so many desperate prayers for good things and basic safety, to a god all three major religions claim is good go ignored, while the prayers of the most hateful people I’ve ever seen seem to get fulfilled with swiftness?

I know others have their own reasoning but when I weighed all that I saw, only one thing made sense: you’re not there. I can’t say with certainty that there is no one, only that I’ve concluded the conception of you I was told exists doesn’t bear up under scrutiny.

Too many good, kind, loving, helpful underdogs, who swear by you and on your holy books, remain constantly victimized despite their devoted worship and dedication to living out the good that the holy books say you want. Too many who live to emulate the good behaviors you say you want are brutalized and silenced, while those doing things holy writs say you abhor, continue to frictionlessly succeed. Not only do they succeed, they crush those caring for others and the planet, the good things the holy books say you want.

If a “One” exists, you now look more to me like a disinvested tinkerer. Someone who built a grand experiment, put life in a self-contained regenerative ecosystem and then sat back dispassionately observing all that the creatures inside decided to do. Like a child watching an ant farm, or people spying a wildlife preserve from the safety of a hardened Land Rover, you watch the unscripted chaos unfold and dispassionately let it resolve however it may.

There can be long periods of relative calm. There may be protracted periods of upheaval and unrest. Sometimes it’s contentious but bloodless. Other times it’s violent and filled with death. Some of those latter instances involve plants, animals and the most dangerous animal of all, humankind, dying in counts of millions.

Like a teacher letting two schoolkids wear themselves out in a fistfight at recess, you wait for one side or the other to claim victory and then let it sort out however the winner decides. They may decide to rebuild the conquered and put guardrails around them to prevent future conflicts. They may decide that total decimation of the opponent’s remnant is justified. Without intervention by some other amassed force of humans to affect the outcome, the victor decides and that’s that.

Some of we creatures wrote books that said you’re interested in good versus bad, right versus wrong, protecting the weak from the strong. Much in those same books declares your willingness to intervene on behalf of the believers in need who cry to you desperately but history doesn’t bear that out. It’s all a crapshoot and dependent on which side’s luck persists and which side’s luck runs out. Caring and hateful take turns winning and losing, and only the whims of whichever side has more leverage determines the outcome.

I know others still believe in you and I’m happy if doing so helps them. I really did try to believe in the version of you I was taught. I truly hoped you were real and that I and others could depend on you for protection and assistance. I kept trying to stoke a faith that may have always been weak in hopes you’d come through, finally put my doubts to rest and confirm that what I learned and read was true. In the end, it’s just me, those I know, and whatever tactics we determine among ourselves to survive. We’re here, you’re not and no one else is coming.

After all of the crawlers at the bottom of TV screens, corporate news readers jawing for days with “reporting and analysis”, and some congresspeople playing “will they or won’t they” footsie with a worried American public, the deed is done. A budget bill that is both the most draconian cut to social net spending and the most lavish giveaway to super-wealthy people is passed. It’s now poised to receive the signature that most resembles someone failing a lie detector test to set it in stone.

Call your legislators, they said. People did. They inundated phone lines in a sustained way I’ve never seen for as long as I’ve lived.

Write your congresspeople! Loads wrote emails, physical letters, op-eds and more to appeal to their representatives.

Protest! Take to the streets!! People responded by the millions, with even small towns of a few thousand people getting proportionately large turnouts.

Use social media! Forward information to friends and foes alike! Maybe they’re not aware of what’s happening, and that connection could sway more of them to get out and make their voices heard to convince their legislators to vote against the regime’s billionaire giveaway. People tried that too.

Now, what do we have here? Did all of that work pan out and make a difference? No. Am I telling everyone who tried that they wasted their time and everyone should have rolled over, stayed home and saved their time and energy? No.

What I am saying is this: if you were against this bill, whether from the start or came around to hate it with others, you don’t have a voice in government and the decision was already made. Don’t believe me? Look at the results.

You clogged phone lines, mobbed town halls, hit the streets en masse, wrote letters to make Jefferson envious and more. In the face of confronting angry voters and enduring their withering barbs, insults, and threats to vote them out of office, legislators absorbed all that and still ignored you.

Who did they listen to? The Heritage Foundation, Walmart, Target, Musk, Bezos, Pichai, Ellison, Cook, Zuckerberg, Koch, Wall Street, energy companies, telecoms and other deep pockets who bought them. This scene with Kevin Spacey playing Frank Underwood in House of Cards sums up the whole thing:

The only part of this dialogue I disagree with is that nobody can hear you. You see, it’s not that they don’t hear you. It’s that they just don’t care.

Oh sure, they’ll give you expertly perfected puppy eyes to show they’re empathetic. They’ll tilt their heads angled down towards you, creating the effect of honing in on your pain, hearing no one else’s concerns but yours and committing it to memory for later legislation. They may even give you an anecdote about how the thing you’re making an appeal for saved their lives. If not for (fill-in-the-blank-concern), they couldn’t have survived as a kid, gotten nutrition, seen a doctor, gone to college, gotten a high-paying white-collar job or ascended to their seat without it.

The truth? It’s all bullshit. A ruse. A con. You’re a mark and you’re getting played. All that performance does is give the illusion they’re your champion, just to get your vote next cycle and keep them in place. As far as the things you and yours are worried about, they couldn’t care less. You’re necessary fuel to reach a destination and once you’re consumed, who needs you?

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Republicans make this the clearest. They essentially fist-bump, high-five and jump in the air to chest bump whenever they pass legislation to make people hungrier, sicker, poorer and more miserable. Their glee is indescribable. I’d call it orgasmic, except I’m sure they look forward to hurting everyday working people with more passion and desire than even the most pleasurable, soul-shaking and spine-tingling intercourse imaginable.

They lie through their teeth about proposals not hurting constituents, but even when the jig is up, they don’t change course. Look at all of their recent town halls. Instead of facing the music or changing their vote, they shouted down voters, gaslit them, condescended to and ignored them. When push came to shove, they were pleasing the guy at the head of their party and all of the other rich people like him, come Hell or high water.

Democrats don’t escape my keyboard either. As a matter of fact, I placed hope for and in them, so my anger is hotter for them. Their policy positions align with working people, they say the right things about fairness, equality and the necessity to preserve people’s rights. I’ve voted for them for those reasons. However, with the exception of about fifteen or twenty of them combined between both houses, as soon as they get into that chair you can forget it. I’ll give Republicans this much: when they get in, they’ve got an urgency to get their plans done that Democrats don’t ever match. It’s like comparing the heat output of a toaster oven to being baked between two blue stars.

Immigration reform is so extremely important…that we need to not rush it and we’ll eventually get there, so give us time. Women’s healthcare is paramount…but these are difficult issues with strong feelings on both sides and we want to take time to get it right. Voting is a right not a privilege, and we will shore up voting rights for the traditionally disenfranchised…someday in the future when we can get our whole party to agree to support it. Wealth inequality is hurting too many Americans, and that’s why we’ll pass a higher minimum wage…eventually.

Yes, they’ve been undone by procedural slow-walks by the opposition when they’ve held slim majorities but they’ve also played a lot of grab-ass when they’ve had larger ones. Remember how long they played patty cake to get the ACA done, needing the “Cornhusker kickback” to get some conman rep to sign off? So much has been done in the name of comity and decorum, that they’ve Miss Manners-ed themselves out of getting the job done for constituents, over and over and over again.

They’re too good to go low. Too lofty to get down in the mud, pull hair, rake eyes, kidney punch and give kicks to the balls to win. Their opponents aren’t, however, and they’ve continued to outwork, connive, cheat, lie, steal and loot to get their agenda passed, including now. All of the above comes at the expense of constituents of both parties but is usually drafted to hit Democrats first. Hey, Dems can at least look in the mirror and be proud they didn’t fight dirty. They can comfort women bleeding out in parking lots without necessary healthcare, people of color being kidnapped and sent to death camps, seniors losing healthcare and life preserving stipends, and hungry low-income children in their districts, and tell them that their suffering was earned honorably. That should be a worthy salve.

They also vote yes for things they should all lockstep say no to. They voted to confirm people who they knew weren’t qualified and dangerous to the nation. They voted for funding to keep running DOGE and continue the assault against communities of color by ICE, now bolstered with local cops, national guard and marines. They’ve helped pass legislation to drag suspected undocumented people away, without cause, charge or due process of law.

Some voted to censure fellow Democratic Rep. Al Green for challenging the regime leader’s claim that he won a mandate in his State of the Union address. Many more refused to join him when he filed articles of impeachment against this regime’s head, voting against it. We know the likelihood was low that those articles would pass, but at least Dems could have shown a united front in agreeing this man rightly deserves to face impeachment for his disobedience to the Constitution. At least an actual motion has more substance than talking forever to hold up votes. We already know this party can talk without action; it’s what they’ve done best. Why do they vote this way? Many of them are twerking for the same corporate wallets as Republicans to make it rain campaign money.

People should be able to depend on the judicial system, topped by the Supreme Court, to interpret the Constitution fairly and consistently. Every grade school taught that SCOTUS has the nation’s most serious legal scholars, hewing to carefully established methods of applying law. Nope. It’s also bought. Its reactionary majority continues to weave a convoluted legal framework out of thin air, often without precedent, lots of assumptions and in some cases, quoting the medically deficient thinking of misogynists from the 17th century to determine current healthcare needs. Wealthy men like Harlan Crow, Leonard Leo and others reportedly bought this court and their money appears to keep reaping excellent ROI.

I keep hearing and reading more appeals to keep fighting, contacting the legislature and planning for elections in 2026 and 2028. That tactic is debatable. Look, I’m still going to vote given the chance, but right now I’m not convinced the nation will hold elections again. It sounds nuts, but if I told you that ICE and cops would be dragging innocent people away two years ago, many of them citizens and legal residents, and deporting them to death camps abroad, you’d say it would never happen. Is that scenario not currently our reality?

The facts are these: the current regime head has an iron grip on the party he leads. That party has clear majorities in both houses, and the nation’s highest court is composed with a two-thirds majority of right-wing justices to rule in his and his party’s favor. They’ve already done so many times, with each ruling removing more of the firewall holding back an all-powerful presidential god-king. If he decides that those pesky elections shouldn’t happen, his lapdog party will dutifully follow and the court will give him cover.

This country is over. It’s a dictatorship and a nuclear armed failed state. There is nothing protecting the citizens of this country from the mercurial and temperamental whims of the man sitting in the Oval Office. He is doing the bidding of wealthy and privileged people like himself, and to Hell with anyone else. Nobody is listening to you and nobody cares.

The deep pockets have total control of the nation. While kids starve and granny dies without nursing home care and meds, they’ll take our tax money and bundle it with the money we’re all reflexively spending without thought with Amazon, Target, Walmart, Apple, Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Capital One, JP Morgan Chase, Meta, Exxon, Shell and others, tightening their already suffocating grip on our government, income, health and privacy.

The nation began in slavery and has almost completed a full revolution back to it, except this time the enslaved aren’t only Black. They’re Brown, White, Asian, South Asian, and all with working people’s incomes. The illusion of choice and freedom are almost gone, and soon you’ll grow accustomed to the undisguised normalization of constantly growing debt, longer workdays, worse health, poorer nutrition and fewer days off.

You’ll keep spending more for basic needs, while hungrily swallowing the messaging that you need more of all the gadgets, trinkets, baubles and beads the companies sell to you. The volume of their messaging will increase and the repetition more frequent, telling you their product, that trip, this car, that hotel are worth it, even if you can only afford it by charging it, to make your crushing existence feel worthwhile. The reality is that it won’t. Nothing will taste as good and as sweet as civil liberties, rights, freedom of speech and dissent, the ability to criticize political leaders and pursue happiness as long as it isn’t harming someone else. Unfortunately, in the words of Talib Kweli, you’ll be, “too early to mourn, too late to ride.”

Happy Fourth, America. You had a good run and now it’s over. Downer? Maybe. Or maybe this is the realest splash of cold water you’re ever gonna get, and you’re the smartest man sitting on the cinder.

By the rivers of Babylon where we sat down
And there we wept when we remembered Zion

For the wicked carried us away in captivity
Required from us a song
How can we sing King Alpha's song in a strange land

The Melodians

I live in an area some distance away from the village where I grew up. I was born and raised there after my parents immigrated to the US from Jamaica. My wife and I now have a house, our dog, a couple of cars and made a life where we live now. Yet, when people ask me where I’m from, my initial reaction is to go back to the beginning.

If I’m out of town and people ask where I’m from, I’ll tell them where I currently live, almost immediately followed with an explanation that it’s not where I’ve always lived. That is, I do that if I haven’t already gone on autopilot and given them the name of my original hometown. I didn’t fit in there in some ways, but it’s where I was forged. Its ways and habits are more familiar to me, even though both places are in the same state and I’ve lived a longer part of my life where we are now. My hometown wasn’t perfect but it’s what I knew, and its rhythms are woven into the fabric of my essence.

It’s made me wonder: where is home, really? Is it where you grew up? Is it wherever you live now? Is it the place you enjoyed most, the place you were most comfortable or some combination of all of the above, plus a few more characteristics?

My parents acclimated and scratched out a life here in America. They made friends, got their citizenship and stood in as established residents for aspiring immigrating family members who applied for visas to come here. They’re part of their local community and have strong bonds with members of the religious sect (I say cult, tomayto, tomahto) from years of worship services together. Yet, whenever they mentioned their country of origin, I noticed they’d refer to it as “back home.”

As a kid whose only home was here, it stood out. You’d hear them on the phone with a friend or relative from the same country, that person usually also in the States and they’d say, “Yes. I heard so-and-so is headed back home next month.” Or, “Have you heard from anybody back home?”

Depending on my age at the time, both parents were here for about a decade or sometimes longer when I heard that phrase. No matter. Whenever the subject of their birthplace came up, it wasn’t referred to as its name. It was back home. It made me wonder, when would America be their home? It was my home, and they made me here. How could I be of them and, quite literally, the Springsteen chorus, born in the USA and my home wasn’t their home?

I noticed that sometimes the cause was food. Ok, almost all the time the thing that they lamented missing was food. The freshly caught fish, seasoned and fried to perfection, the juicy mangos, jerked chicken or pork, ackee and saltfish, bumpy bananas, bammy and many other things. You’ve not heard true homesickness, until you’ve heard a crowd of Jamaican expats groaning in passionate longing over some food item or dish, because you can’t get anything where they are that does justice to the genuine article.

Other times, it was weather. There’s nothing like a sub-zero winter’s day to make you long for the clime of a tropical country you used to take for granted. My poor mom would look outside in December to see the bright sunshine and clear blue skies, that normally meant a comfortably warm day where she was from, and she’d be continually disappointed when the stark arctic reality would hit as soon as you walked outside. She reliably lamented how a day could be so brutally cold where the sun shone with such promise of warmth.

Or was it that? Was it a lack of warmth that wasn’t limited to just weather?

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Mom got her citizenship pretty quickly after arriving. She dove headfirst into America; learning its governance, history, culture, picking up its lingo and breathing it back out with her own lightly accented flair. She was ready to embrace America, and I honestly believe that she mostly has done so. I also look back and think of stories she’d tell where you’re reminded that, “you’re not from around here, are you?”

When she arrived, she was sponsored by a local family, which is how we landed in the small village we lived and not in a major city like many other immigrants. The family was kind and she lived in an apartment above their garage while she worked as a housekeeper for a while but left that job before I was born. She’s told a few times about one night where they all went out for ice cream at a local stand.

Each person chose their flavor and then it was Mom’s turn. Without scanning the menu board, she promptly asked for one of her favorites from back home: grape nut. Now, dear reader, your local stand or store may currently carry it, or you’ve traveled abroad and had it, but at this time that flavor of ice cream was nowhere to be found in the entire state, and probably not in any surrounding states either. However, if you’re from a small island and coming to what is advertised as THE GREATEST COUNTRY ON EARTH (*reverb* earth-earth-earth-earth…) you’re absolutely sure they’re going to have at least as many offerings as the place you’re from.

The server and the majority of patrons within earshot laughed her to scorn. As the server gathered themselves, they explained to Mom between sporadic chortles, and in the pedantic tone many in our nation can be so adept at, that she was confused because that’s cereal. Mom insisted, no it’s an ice cream flavor, to which the group of untraveled hyenas laughed harder again, as though she’d escaped from an asylum and said she was looking for the spaceship to take her home.

I wasn’t there but I know my mother. I’ve seen her facial expressions in the retelling. At this point of the story, I can see her back then, seething, quietly composed and eyes narrowing into slits. If Mom were from Krypton, the server’s last moments would have ended in a flash of bright red light before total vaporization. She’s not from there, though. As a classy daughter of the land of wood and water, she held herself with calm control and waited for the laughter of the gastronomically sheltered to die down. After breaking their serve, she held court and proceeded to nonchalantly order one of the serviceable flavors from the board and salvage the rest of the night.

There were the times where both parents’ Queen’s English pronunciation induced claims that they were hard to understand. When it wasn’t that, it came from the other direction, with compliments marveling at their British-inflected speech and how well they spoke, as though they’d done something akin to watching the family dog do an appendectomy.

American culture is a jambalaya served with an anglicized demi-glaze, but its longtime residents don’t seem to understand that. For good or ill, anything that doesn’t fit into the homogenized norm is noted. Constantly. Sometimes the notice of differences in new arrivals is menacing. Other times it’s innocent curiosity. Nevertheless, both can serve to have the same effect; letting you know that even if you’re not unwelcome, you don’t quite fit in.

Now, we come back full circle. How can a place become home, when it constantly reminds you that you’re from somewhere else? My dad didn’t get his citizenship for many years. Whenever we’d ask, he’d say that at some point he thought he’d go back home. No, not the heavenly home promised to Bible believers after your carcass takes its final residence under six feet of dirt. The country of his birth. I’ve had other relatives that came and took residence here for a long time, who decided to go back to live out their old age, and not just for the slower pace and warmer temperatures. When asked, they say they wanted to spend their last days back home.

I thought it funny and strange as a kid that so many relatives could live here for so long but call somewhere else home. Now, I do it too referring to places in the same state but I don’t think it’s for the same reasons they do. Like others with a conscience, I’ve been angrily observing the state-sanctioned terrorizing of anyone with a complexion darker than milk whom ICE agents suspect is not murrican. Any look, last name, accented speech, style of dress, tattoo or anything else that some agent thinks looks “foreign”, is grounds for being snatched up by armed, masked and unidentified men, dressed like cartel members pouring out of some unmarked truck.

The resistance to call America home doesn’t look so funny to me now. It looks prescient. I used to ponder how they held onto a place they sometimes didn’t see more than once or twice a year in visits as home. Now, I think that, just like wild animals can feel the slightest tremors and flee to safety long before human beings feel a full-blown quake, my family members and their immigrant fellows could feel the underlying tension of tenuous acceptance here. It’s as if they knew that behind the smiles of many faces hid a sword of Damocles. The thin cord holding it threatened to snap at any moment, with the razor-sharp blade falling to sever them from whatever lives they worked so hard to build here.

Meanwhile, the news fills with stories of parents dragged from their children, children dragged from their parents, kids kidnapped from schools and patients receiving lifesaving care all being abducted for deportation without processing. Those old heads that referred to their places of origin as “back home” seem to have done the best calculations all along.

Yet, I’m from here. I am American. I’m a citizen born and raised here. My parents are citizens too. Jamaica doesn’t allow dual citizenship, so they had to renounce the citizenship of their home country to make this one theirs. The White supremacist caucus running the government says that doesn’t matter, and their naturalized citizenship shouldn’t afford them any protection. Hell, this crowd is arguing that my birthright citizenship is apparently up for dismissal. Let’s assume they don’t pursue that after they realize the can of worms it is for a prominent family with children from three different wives, and only two of those women coming from the US.

If this country isn’t home for mine, can it be home for me? Those running the government my parents paid income taxes to for decades, are working overtime to find ways to ship them and others out of here forcibly and without cause. My parents funded this government out of the humble earnings they made as legal residents the entirety of their time here, both as resident aliens and citizens. Having established that, anyone reading the aforementioned who initially thought to formulate some “but thuh ulleeguls” argument against their presence can STFU and GTFO.

Even if people are undocumented, this mad dash of raids to remove immigrants is stupid. Farming, meat packing, construction and other industries are all reeling from raids that are disappearing workforces like a David Copperfield special. Even more importantly than economics, it’s inhumane and evil. The leader of this band of Nazis was documented in the past saying he wanted people from Nordic countries to immigrate here, instead of the Asian, Brown and Black people he’s attacking.

I wonder what aspect of this country he’d believe was tantalizing for his desired quarry now?

Is it the high likelihood that the women in their family could die in desperate search of reproductive healthcare that’s readily available where they already are? Is it that if they got the same healthcare in one of the few remaining states offering it, it wouldn’t be covered by insurance and could bankrupt their family after they got it? Is it the nutjob lawyer running the national health department, who got the job because he has the same name as his more accomplished father, pushing nonsensical and unsubstantiated conspiracies, pathologizing autistic people and relying on the germ and vaccine understanding of a kook from the 1740’s?

Or is it the destruction of national education, led by a woman whose claim to fame is producing “wrestling entertainment”, with an energetic assist by people who want the Bible taught as objective fact? Maybe its nightly images of streets teeming with armed soldiers to respond to peaceful protests, like the banana republics this country used to mock? Could it be possible they’re excited about being abducted by one of the teams of government-sanctioned armed bandits, kidnapping and disappearing people to overseas torture prisons? Oooh-ooh-oooh, I’ve got it! It’s got to be the endless trade war flare-ups making everything more expensive across the board.

See, my folks and others came here because this country was a shining beacon of opportunity, freedom and a place they hoped to make home. What they found wasn’t the mythological paradise spun from legends and American TV shows, but they made lives here just the same. They gave this country their best years, some achieving more career acclaim than others but all doing their best to integrate into the communities they landed in. All enriched their destinations with insights and innovations inspired from experiences and ideas they brought with them from “back home.” Many of them even dedicated their bodies to defend this nation, with some of them giving the ultimate sacrifice.

All of those who held out hope of full acceptance, while still holding their hearts at a distance just in case, may have been bracing for the eventual arrival of what we’re witnessing. Some are self-deporting. Some are being forcibly removed to nations they’ve never been to. Now, the America of past imagination is beginning to look like an abandoned mall or a forgotten rust belt town. Even settled citizens are thinking its better days are in the past, and you don’t want to be the last one left to shut the lights off.

Like most migrations from developed countries, those who weigh options and choose to leave are skilled, credentialed and can afford it. Don’t believe me? Read this account:

Under the White Coat

Leaving Las Vegas

Like many of you lately, I have a lot to say and I’m also speechless. Being an American doctor at the intersection of women’s health, human sexuality and parenting has become politically coded in a way I never signed up for. It feels dangerous. (Last week’s essay on Domestic Violence alluded to that…

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a year ago · 123 likes · 66 comments · Dr. Amber Hull

We’ve chatted with friends who are considering making the same decision Dr. Hull made in the article above. We know a few people, but our circle of people is comparatively small compared to others. How many more from this country are thinking the same thing and planning like Snake Plissken for their Escape from America? How many more from abroad with abundant promise, who used to aspire to come here, have now stricken it from their list?

If you make the country unwelcome to whomever the regime in power determines is undesirable, the rules can change at any minute to widen that net. One minute you’re preferred. The next minute, you’re being pummeled, cuffed and dragged to a waiting plane, disappeared in some black site without any of your family being told where you went.

We’re still committed to staying and hopeful that Mayday beats back the Commanders. It’s looking dire. America is ejecting a growing list of “undesirables”, scaring off talented prospective immigrants and bleeding away educated minds into waiting arms overseas. I doubt this country ever got to become home to my parents, and given their advanced ages and its current condition, it probably never will. It is my home and it increasingly feels like I don’t belong here. Where do you go if you don’t belong where you’ve always been from? Maybe you find another way to get “back home.”

As the start of a new work week begins, I present you the reader with questions I’ve often pondered about business activity. Who powers a capitalist economy? Is it a small collection of executive titans atop large corporations in different industries? Is it the regular Joe’s and Jane’s punching a clock? How much more does one group provide than the other, and which group is it?

For some time now, a significant portion of American legislators, pundits, news services, and in some cases laborers themselves, have promoted the view that it’s executives. I’ve had conversations with fellow working people who subscribe to the idea that companies are more important than workers. With that understanding, they value executives running companies more importantly than the people working to provide the services or manufacture the goods these companies offer.

This perspective of companies and execs as always more valuable than workers is one regularly pushed by Republicans, and it’s been droning on nearly unchallenged since at least Ronald “Star Wars, deficit spending” Ray-gun was the party’s standard bearer. Many of the Substack writers I subscribe to who analyze daily news, quote Republicans using the term they’ve coined for it when making this case: “job creators.” Their speeches, press conferences and election ads frequently use this phrase to present company owners and executives as the main source of America's economic growth. They are depicted powering the economic might and GDP of the United States forward like the engine of a cargo ship.

According to this argument, companies deserve maximum profits, and their founders and executives warrant the highest pay imaginable. Working people at ground level? Meh. Let them scrape by, barely able to make ends meet or save with a full-time job, regardless of how the company does. Keep pressure on politicians to make laws that keep workers grateful just to have a job, as they risk losing everything if their body or anything they own breaks. Break unions and fight minimum wage raises, so that workers struggle, even with futile attempts to supplement their main job with gig work. At the same time, press to defund social safety net programs that working people use to theoretically cover tax cuts for the wealthy and big businesses, and supposedly keep government from preventing them from creating jobs.

Where did this mentality come from, and why do so many in America believe it? In a word: slavery.

Yeah, I can hear many of you thinking now, “What’s with this guy and slavery? He was banging on about it in that other piece too. Yeesh!”

1. Yes, it’s true I wrote about slavery as a large contributor to an American societal ill.

2. I made a good point though, didn’t I?

So, here we are again; back at the beginning. The beginning because the “new world” Europeans found needed conversion into fungible, tradeable commerce, and they didn’t want to pay anyone from the start.

Back in 1492,

Columbus sailed the ocean blue,

and when “discovered” settled lands,

coerced natives enrich his hands.

After Christopher Columbus convinced King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain to fund and outfit him with three ships and a group of sailors, they embarked on a voyage into their unknown. They landed on an island in the Atlantic that he named San Salvador, and promptly began to shake down the indigenous for the gold and jewels he promised the king and queen of Spain he would find abroad.

There was not much in the way of riches, and he took stock of what other valuables could justify his expedition. As one is wont to do, reaching land after sailing for months with dwindling supplies of food and water, he showed his hosts gratitude by promptly calculating how easily they could be pressed into service. He noted that their apparent docility made them good candidates for capture and force them to work. Oh yeah, it might make them eager recipients of the good news to accept Jesus as their lord and savior too.

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Columbus captured some of the native people they found, and brought them back to Spain to parade before his sovereign funders to support further exploration. He enslaved indigenous people on the islands he came to later and claimed for the Spanish crown throughout his voyages. He forced them to mine for precious metals and jewelry to send back to Spain, or to serve he and his men. Their compliance was enforced with barbaric maiming, murders, decapitations, rapes and the like.

Notice, Columbus made no attempt to establish mutually beneficial trade. He could have proposed bringing goods from Spain that the indigenous wanted, and barter for their labor to mine precious metals and gems on their lands. He didn’t even consider that he and his crew would negotiate terms to employ the natives. Domestic tasks weren’t worthy of a wage either. Nope. See, want, calculate cost of goods or services, then choose enslavement to enrich yourself for the low, low labor price of zero. The guy at the head of the ship decided that he and his backers deserved a huge take, but anyone putting their hands to work moving the soil to find treasure didn’t deserve a red cent.

Chrissy was not alone in this dash for slave labor, and the gold rush was on. Slave traders from other European nations landed in the New World too looking for indigenous people to sell into the bonds of generational servitude. In one of the many cruel ironies in the history of mankind, slave traders, slave ship owners, slave buyers and recipients of the materials they mined all made money. The only people who didn’t were the people in bondage doing the actual work. The exploitation of the indigenous continued for at least a couple hundred years, eventually declining as a new unpaid labor force was exploited: Africans.

I mentioned in another piece I referred to earlier, that before the reliance on African slavery, indentured servants were used for a time in the United States. They were taken advantage of and unvalued too, although they wouldn’t stay trapped under the thumb of their sponsors forever. American chattel slavery, however, was the great grandaddy of all labor exploitation schemes in this country. The general assumption is that the tasks of the enslaved were essentially agriculture and domestic work, but captured Africans were forced to do a lot more than that. They did whatever task was demanded of them, for as many hours demanded per day and for as many days, every day of their lives, unpaid. The only way they would stop serving their current master, was to escape, be sold to a different one or die.

In the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, he writes of being hired out by the plantation owner to do other jobs off the plantation site. In one instance, he recounted being sent to work in a shipyard. He arrived there without even passing knowledge of how to construct a ship. The White shipbuilders were unrelenting in their verbal abuse, rushing him around and not even bothering to learn his name. They hailed him by simply yelling; ‘Halloo, n-word! Over here, n-word! Bring that hammer, n-word! Move it, n-word, I’ve been waiting for you all day!!’

After a long day of verbal abuse, enduring a constant stream of racial epithets, harassment and barely evading a hammer flung at him suddenly by a White man, they paid him. Except, they didn’t pay him, they handed him money for that day’s work that wouldn’t become his. Frederick was rented out the same way Home Depot rents a tamper or brad nailer, and every penny of that money was to be turned in to the plantation owner.

Attempts to pocket any of it would incur wrath and the bullwhip in response. On rare occasions, when the master was in a particularly magnanimous mood, he gave Douglass a few cents of the money but never a majority of it, and certainly not all of it. Part of the rationale, of course, was that he saw Frederick Douglass the same way you’d look at a chicken, bull, plow horse or wagon; his property, used as he saw fit to make him money. As such, the plantation master wouldn’t think anything of denying Douglass the money his body earned. The owner saw himself as the brains behind the whole outfit, and his industrious genius deserved all of the proceeds, regardless of how little physical labor he contributed.

It’s that last point that feels like the common thread throughout all of these examples, and it’s stitched through the construction of the railroads, industrial revolution, the days of exploitative child labor, the era of union busting and right on through to today. Labor in this country has traditionally been seen as not only ripe for exploitation, but paying little to no money for it was the correct way for an economy to work. From the earliest settlements and very beginnings of this nation, those at the head of any enterprise looked at their workers as something disposable and unvalued. If you couldn’t enslave them to work for free, they should be paid the lowest wage allowed before people decided to just starve instead.

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Wages for many people nowadays don’t pay enough to house, clothe, feed and maintain their health without incurring debt or seeking public assistance. Should companies be told that worker pay is too low and unfair, they reply that their margins are too tight to raise pay rates. Passing higher worker pay to customers more will make their prices uncompetitive, and they won’t make a profit if they pay workers more and hold their prices firm. Some of these firms are employing and exploiting undocumented laborers for a pittance, while charging customers as though they’re paying a prevailing wage to documented workers. Not even the federal minimum wage, stuck for over 15 years at $7.25, can rise without hearing those same complaints about profits.

The prices businesses charge still generally rise year over year. Their sales guidance, more often than not, usually points to increased sales of their goods or services in each successive year too. While their prices and sales forecasts climb rapidly, most working people’s pay does not. If their pay does grow, it lags the rate of inflation and unaffordability of basic needs grows.

Some businesses employ people just shy of full-time employment to avoid paying benefits. When employees request more hours to get to full-time status and benefits, they’re denied. Workers are often urged to use the social programs that companies don’t want to support with their taxes to obtain those benefits.

When the financial stress of affordability is pointed out, including how it will endanger consumers ability to buy things in the future, those complaints are waved off. Why? The story is that it’s not the American consumer but the “job creators” who propel the economy.

However, if that was true, why is consumer stimulus needed every time this nation finds itself in economic turmoil? After the 2008 financial crisis hit, stimulus came by way of the Federal Reserve opening every monetary tap. Then Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, lowered interest rates to the point that working people were punished for trying to save money. Retirees on fixed incomes, some of which came from interest earnings on savings, were among the stricken.

Sure, there was the usual lip service about low interest rates promoting business investment in capital projects, but does a business invest in retooling, presumably to increase its production capacity, when people are tightening their belts and buying less? The reality is that those lowered rates were to boost consumer spending. Credit card spending, financed car purchases, and closings on home mortgages are usually the main targets. Apple or Facebook having a profitable quarter helps their employees and investors. A broad swath of working people going to restaurants, buying cars, taking vacations, buying homes that later need furniture, appliances and improvements, broadly increases economic activity nationwide.

The same thing happened again during the pandemic, which induced an economic slowdown, further crippled by the incompetent response of the 45th presidential administration in late 2019 and most of 2020. Online businesses that delivered goods and services with little in person interaction thrived. Many of these companies and their executives saw their wealth swell. I saw estimates of wealth growing among this group by $1T during this timeframe.

As the country locked down for in person businesses, many other companies laid off or furloughed workers and economic activity and GDP growth slowed. This road to contraction terrified the sitting president, who sought reelection primarily on the performance of the economy. What followed, between his administration and the next, was expanded unemployment payment support, expansion of the child tax credit and freezes on evictions, to prevent mass homelessness from compounding the effects of job loss and furloughs. There were also stimulus payments, three different rounds of stimulus payments to be exact.

How much was paid in each of the three rounds?

Round 1, March 2020: $1,200 per income tax filer, $500 per child (CARES Act)

Round 2, December 2020: $600 per income tax filer, $600 per child (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021)

Round 3, March 2021: $1,400 per income tax filer, $1,400 per child (American Rescue Plan Act)

If businesses and their executives hiring people is the engine driving the economy, why was so much cash pushed to working people to boost spending? Shouldn’t our corporate saviors have swooped in, some of whom reportedly saw their wealth swell by $1T, to start hiring people left and right out of fiscal benevolence, saving the economy? Isn’t that why they get the tax breaks they demand, so that they can spur growth as “job creators?”

Yet, when it was their time to rise and shine, in many cases they shrank. Instead of coming to the rescue and pushing the money they saved from low taxes to “create jobs” like they claim, they joined the bread line along with working people. In 2008-2009, it was bailouts for the banking, airline and auto industries, along with the federal government backstopping risky loans. In 2020, the Congress and White House doled out the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which provided loans to businesses from the government to keep their staffs employed during the shutdowns. This program was abused and, in my opinion, ineffective but I won’t explore that further.

Businesses say they need low taxes, “competitive”, i.e. low wages and less governmental safety net programs in order to drive the economy. Then, they get all three. Not only do they not save faltering economies after getting what they want, they ask for money from the same government they’ve fought tooth and nail not to pay taxes to, helping keep them afloat during lean times. Lots of that tax money is collected from the people they don’t want to pay higher wages.

Companies and their leaders push a worldview that everything their businesses use is a low-value input, but what they provide are highly valuable needs. From that perch land, plants, energy, animals, including human beings, are all inputs to be chewed up and consumed for the good of an enterprise’s existence. When everything needed for a final good or service is seen as some cost to reduce and achieve the highest profit possible, all of those things must be obtained in the greatest desirable quantity at the lowest possible price, including workers.

They only value workers in pursuit of the final good or service. Workers can be useful for reaching that objective, but controlling the cost is as bloodlessly chased as cheaper energy, wood or metal for products. It’s such a universal understanding, that stock markets react exuberantly to news of a company shedding workforce as a show of commitment to cost cutting. Even the way workers are referred to is cold and impersonal. They are no longer called personnel but human resources; just another input whose cost must be minimized as much as practicable.

The truth is that businesses exist to provide goods and services to consumers. People don’t procreate to ensure demand exists for businesses. If consumers can’t buy, or do not want what they’re selling, businesses don’t have a reason to exist. Yes, their hiring people pays wages that get pumped back into the economy. Having said that, if workers barely earn, or don’t make enough to afford what keeps them alive, there’s nothing to spend elsewhere. That’s good news for grocery stores, utilities and landlords, but bad news for every other industry looking to stay in business.

The following is heretical to current business orthodoxy, but I’m going to throw it out there anyway. Our economic model is unsustainable and it no longer works for the world we live in. There was a time where businesses selling ever rising amounts of goods and services, and analyst expectations to blast earnings targets with constantly improving efficiency and profitability was a reasonable goal. I don’t think we exist in that time any longer.

It feels like that kind of thinking is obsolete and we’re measuring growth all wrong. It seems like we are overdue to abandon measuring improvement by more, higher, faster and constantly cheaper production always chasing higher revenues and margins. The way we look at business activity is exclusively extractive; of the natural world, of people’s time and of people themselves. However, the benefits of this unquenchable exploitation in pursuit of profits, are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, while warming, stripping and driving extinctions in areas spreading across the planet.

The time has come, or maybe returned, to making lasting, quality items that cost more, are designed to perform a long time, and capable of being serviced to extend their lifetimes. Those goods should be produced by well-paid workers trained as attentive craftspeople making or servicing products they’re proud of. We should strive for that, instead of workers barely paid subsistence wages, pumping out streams of disposable junk to pile up in landfills. Instead of services done in slapdash, careless fashion, often with respect to the wages paid, we should aim for work performed with professionalism, care and the attention to detail of an artisan. These jobs should also pay workers at a scale that shows their effort and contributions are valued, promoting continued high-performance work.

For far too much of this nation’s history, labor has been viewed as a necessary evil; an unfortunate cost ideally avoided but paid as little as possible until ridding your company of staff is attainable. Too many companies and their executives begrudgingly pay employees as if they’re a parasitic drain on the organization. They should instead see them as potential brand ambassadors encouraged to be a proud partner and source of valuable feedback, both from customers and workers themselves. This would help to better cater to customers and deliver what buyers want.

We’ve gone from a world where very few people have any creature comforts to one where many people have most of what they need in that regard. Let’s acknowledge and accept that a business that had record sales the last two years, probably has fewer customers left to reach. Businesses should be allowed regroup years, where they’re not punished if they don’t exceed prior high sales numbers or profit margins. Don’t punish those companies for not setting a third straight record year, if they’re within 90% of their last two years of sales. There are only so many devices, clothes, furniture pieces, trips and restaurant dinners people will want or can use. Assuming that people will just keep gobbling up more of everything endlessly each year is unrealistic and unsustainable. Punishing companies when that reality hits is nonsensical.

Executives may steer companies, but they’re usually not the source of innovation. Many of the best concepts and ideas enriching companies came from their workers. Sure, fire low performing and lackadaisical employees, but don’t approach all employees with that assumption, paying them just enough to keep coming back to work and do nothing else. Workers with fulfilling jobs, meeting consumer needs with high quality output they are proud of, continue doing good work. Paying those workers wages that allow them to live with dignity, save, and forge a life that isn’t a subsistence living, or worse, makes for a better workforce overall. Allowing those wage increases to reflect in consumer prices governs the pace of purchases, giving our natural world off-peak years to take a breather and recover wherever possible.

An economy that delivers goods and services while paying wages so that most people can’t afford them is broken, regardless of how many newly minted billionaires it makes. If people keep getting paid so low that they can’t afford rent, medical care or something to eat, they’ll reach a point where they’re so desperate that they’ll look for any relief. Some may get so hungry that they resort to taking literally an oft-graffitied mantra that I keep seeing: eat the rich.

I originally wrote this piece two years ago. I went back and reread it. Other than a few minor formatting and wording changes, it’s essentially as it was. I think it still holds up. I hope you agree.

Today is Memorial Day. Originally known as Decoration Day, this day of remembrance began as an observation held for the soldiers that died in the Civil War. According to the sources* I read, there are various places in the nation that lay claim to initiating the practice of honoring war dead that became the holiday we now know as Memorial Day.

There are references to people in both the north and south honoring fallen soldiers. In one instance, a woman reportedly decorated the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers alike in Jackson, MS in April of 1865. Another account mentions observances and graveside memorials in Gettysburg and Boalsburg, PA, in 1863 and 1865 respectively. Still more accounts lay claim to remembrances in 1866 in locations in the north and south. Another account, one I find especially poignant, is of the observance held by newly freed African Americans in Charleston, SC in 1865 after the Civil War ended. They reportedly exhumed Union soldiers who were buried in a local mass grave prior to the war’s end, properly interred them, decorated their graves with flowers and held a large parade to honor those lost in the war.

Ultimately, it is Waterloo, NY that is granted the honor of being the birthplace of Memorial Day, née Decoration Day, in May of 1866. They are credited with being the first to institute an annual day of observance, with decorations placed on the graves of the fallen, the entire community marking the day and all local businesses closing in recognition of the somber occasion. What began as an observance of Civil War dead in various places, grew to be a national holiday that now recognizes soldiers lost in combat in WWI, WWII, The Korean War, Vietnam, the Gulf War conflicts and actions in Afghanistan. Regardless of who receives the credit for it, this holiday is important and unfortunately, in my opinion, regrettably overlooked and unappreciated.

Can it be a great day to fire up the grill, hit the pool, or head to the beach on what is generally seen as the kickoff to summer? Weather providing, and if the rain holds off, it usually is. Can you score a great deal on tools, electronics, clothes or any of the numerous retail items receiving deep discounts timed to coincide with the holiday? Well, you sure can! You may even get some of (in a booming, reverb-filled TV voiceover) ‘the best prices of the year!’ on a shiny new vehicle if you decide to take a trip down to your local dealership and see what they’re offering.

Are any of the above activities wrong or evil? No, they aren’t. It just seems that as a nation most of us are going about the day and just seizing a desirable day off for some leisure. Some years ago, Chris Rock made a joke about 9/11 as guest host on SNL. Some in the crowd grew uptight, or groaned in disapproval but I honestly think he nailed an uncomfortable truth about the psyche of a good portion of our nation. After a while, the meaning for somber occasions and days marked for reflection gets lost and often becomes commercialized. I don’t believe that everyone has forgotten Memorial Day’s purpose, especially not the families with enlisted members who could be called to risk their lives, or those who have lost family in action. It does feel like a lot of us have, though.

Look, I’m not faultless here. I am one of the guilty who has not given this day the proper honor, somber reflection and recognition it deserves. I’ve had many years where I’ve thoughtlessly planned for the time off, checked the sale prices to grab a steal, stocked up on an assortment of meats to grill and then stuffed myself like it’s Thanksgiving in May.

Yet, as I’ve grown older, the solemnity of a total stranger signing up, becoming “property of the US Armed forces”, enduring grueling training to become a deadly weapon for our nation’s offense and defense, and then losing their lives in the bargain for others, including me, weighs a lot more. Is it the passage of time, knowing I’m closer to death myself and realizing that those men and women met their end much earlier than I have, or will, because of their willingness to serve? Is it a tinge of guilt for being unwilling to enlist and serve our nation, while someone else did and died? Yeah, I think that is a large part of it. Maybe that’s most of it. Maybe there’s more. Maybe that’s all of it.

As a nation, it seems that a much smaller pocket of us serve, or are connected to those that do, or did. That appears to breed a dismissal of military service in general, and the loss of our soldiers’ lives in particular. So many of us casually paint military service as an undesirable last chance for those not equipped for college, instead of the brave choice to serve the nation that it is. That low valuation of our enlisted folks seems to breed an air of disposability in some of us civvies.

I remember having conversations years ago when President George W. Bush, aka Dubya, aka Bush 43, sent ground forces into Iraq under false pretenses. I was immediately suspicious of his claims to invade Iraq, despite the cavalcade of people vouching for it; Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, and his sneering VP Dick Cheney. After it became clear that the pretext for war was, at the very least insubstantial and more likely a willfully mendacious obfuscation, I was alarmed that men and women who enlisted were needlessly placed in harm’s way.

I had discussions about this with others, noting that young people in the prime of their lives, people who trusted their President and Commander in Chief, were being killed and the reasons that put them there were trumped up. In a number of those conversations, I remember people remarking, “Well, that’s what they signed up for.” That’s what they signed up for?! To be placed in danger when the circumstances didn’t warrant it, get injured or killed on the foreign policy equivalent of, “oops?” No, I disagree. Vehemently. They signed up to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and the collection of States that document governs.

I didn’t grow up with family in the military. We had one family friend who served in Vietnam. I later married into a family with a legacy of military service. Then, a few years after that, I had a cousin join a branch of our military. Maybe that makes it more personal, or quite possibly age and maturity could have shaped my thinking to where it is now, even without those life changes.

Having said all of that, those family members are dear to me and other people’s family members are dear to them. They have other roles, in addition to being soldiers, whether as parents, children, guardians or mentors. Their lives are valuable and they are worth more than fodder to be chewed up and consumed whenever old men who can no longer serve, never served or who used their privileged connections and ducked service entirely, decide they want to look brave and tough.

Memorial Day is for the fallen and it is too late now to tell those who gave the ultimate sacrifice for our nation thank you. However, we can reflect, consider and be honestly circumspect and thankful, not just give a thoughtless and robotic utterance of what is now becoming a perfunctory statement; “Thank you for your service.” By all means, grill, shop deals if you must but let’s at least take some portion of the day to reflect, pause and consider what has been given to us who still live, by other people that died, many of them total strangers.

There are different ways to observe today; decorating a service member’s gravesite with flowers, attending a parade, making a donation to an organization that benefits veterans, etc. There is something else that we all can do, regardless of bandwidth, physical or financial ability. There is a moment of silence at 3:00PM today to mark a nationwide moment of remembrance. Conceivably, whole sections of this country could fall silent for a long moment at the top of four straight hours, to remember our war dead. Let’s do what we can to remember at that time to pause, consider and reflect with our other fellow citizens, on the lives lost to ensure that we have life, liberty and the ability to pursue of happiness.

*Wikipedia reference

*History reference

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A few weeks ago, the nation learned that the current regime in the White House abducted, chained and deported hundreds of Latino men to a death-camp prison in El Salvador, all without getting their right to due process through the nation’s legal system. This prison, CECOT, is noted for its brutality and human rights abuses of prisoners held there, in some cases ending in death. Almost all of the men taken there had no criminal record. Many of them were in varying stages of applying for permanent status in the United States.

The men were flown there by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency under the Department of Homeland Security, itself a part of the nation’s Executive Branch. The flights happened in defiance of a federal judge’s order not to transport any of the prisoners. One of the men taken, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, was sent there despite mortal danger from a gang based in El Salvador. Endangerment from them forced him to flee that country and seek asylum in the United States in the first place.

As most now know, ICE was gravely mistaken. The Federal judge presiding over Garcia’s case ordered his immediate return, and that ruling was ignored by ICE and the President. The case went on to the Supreme Court, which ruled 9-0 in favor of the lower court’s decision. All of the above rulings continue to be ignored by a rogue Executive Branch. Instead, the current regime has taken to smearing Garcia, crafting a fictitious gang affiliation and crimes that never occurred.

All of the above shenanigans are an affront to due process, create a Constitutional crisis, and worst of all for Garcia, a humanitarian crisis with his own life hanging in the balance. Others have discussed the above at length, and I don’t have much more to add here, other than frustration and anger over the gnawing feeling of impotence. I’m personally unable to do anything quickly to help Garcia or anyone else taken there without their right to due process.

Those prison cells. The pictures of men crowded into and atop prison cells, and those responsible for stuffing them there gleefully celebrating about it keep haunting me. Look at this photo from an article from France 24.

People have already compared it to the death camps of the Holocaust, and I don’t deny the eerie similarities. For me, the CECOT photos brought to mind the illustrations of packed slave ships, like the one at the beginning of this article. Before the laws targeting Jews in Germany, were Jim Crow laws and the racism of the United States that inspired them. Before Jim Crow was the enslavement of Africans stolen from their lands to toil under torture and brutal oppression. They endured beating and maiming, were denied freedom, education, say over their children, exclusive paired intimacy, knowledge of their own history and lineage and much more.

However, one doesn’t get to the destinations of people stuffed in holding pens like socks in a drawer, then slavery and oppressive laws, without another earlier stop: dehumanization.

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In an Africana Studies class I took in college, the professor was a Black South African. He was a member of the ANC who eventually fled to the United States some years before the apartheid regime fell. He told us something I always meant to look into more.

The first ship of stolen and enslaved Africans to arrive in the Americas was piloted by the Portuguese, carrying stolen human beings to Brazil for sale to work its plantations. He said that the Portuguese enslavers referred to those they stole and took to Brazil as nigrum, Latin for black. He noted that nigrum doesn’t equate to feminine or masculine; its closest approximation is thing. If this was so, the dehumanization began immediately, from the first shipload of Africans stolen away to begin the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Not seen as men or women but ‘black things. ‘

He claimed that at some point, buyers from another country misheard the Portuguese saying nigrum as “the word now known as the n-word.” The derivation stuck and proliferated. This word would be in common use by the time the American colonies that would eventually become the United States participated in this evil and depraved market for human flesh. As we all know, from every MAGA-emboldened racist, roving with a pack of their fellows or brashly posting under pseudonyms online, the n-word became the default choice of those looking to belittle, demean, insult and demoralize Black people.

Let’s suppose the professor’s account of the word’s provenance needs more academic support, or other accounts conflict with his. There’s no denying the hurt of this word spat into existence. It wounds. Even in spite of attempts to defuse it through hip-hop and other cultural reclamation, the reality is that, unless correctly deployed within the Black community, it still has a default setting of demeaning insult.

Some will say, it’s a rude and nasty word. So what? It’s more than just a word. It’s an expression of value. If you see someone as a man or a woman, for anyone other than the most depraved psychopaths, hurting, torturing, overworking, beating, maiming, raping and killing them without remorse is very difficult to do. Othering and dehumanizing military opponents enabled soldiers to pull the trigger with less remorse. What is the effect of devaluing a group of people at every opportunity, and structuring your society in such a way that they have no recourse in defending themselves to prevent it? You will see them as less of a person, if you see them as human at all. Someone less than you eventually becomes some thing that’s beneath you in every way.

A person devalued until they are seen as no more than a dumb thing, becomes an acceptable target of ire, ridicule, debasement and assault. The empowered won’t think twice about using that person’s body as an available mindless apparatus for their own sexual pleasure or subjecting them to a death penalty for arbitrarily perceived infractions.

If someone is seen so contemptibly that they garner no respect or recognition of humanity, no consideration of their treatment is made. No attempts at civility are endeavored. Their comfort or discomfort doesn’t even rise as a passing thought. Once your mindset reaches this point, you can do anything with them; including packing them together so tightly in a ship’s hold for a journey lasting anywhere from one to two months, that they can barely move and routinely foul each other with excretions in those confines.

Look at the ship’s hold illustration again and ask yourself, is that how you treat someone you see as a fellow human being?

Black people battled the connotations and stereotypes rooted in this dehumanization throughout America’s history. To this day the fight continues. Each small bit of progress was immediately challenged, and those attacks persisted until that progress was weakened, or completely undone by those fully invested in maintaining the established racist order.

Enslavers captured, packed tightly in transport and abused those they abducted. Pampered plantation owners later pressed Africans into agonizing unpaid labor, working them to death while speaking to and about them with disdain. Nazis in Germany kidnapped Jewish people, crammed them into train cars, overworked, tortured and killed them in deadly prison camps, while speaking to and about them with disdain. So too is the current regime’s attitude towards the Latino men it abducts and ships away, chained together and packed tight on airplanes, to later be piled into holding pens in Louisiana, Texas and now a deadly prison in El Salvador.

I’m not saying the suffering in each case is the same or comparing one group’s suffering against any other group. I’m focused on the mentality of the oppressors in all three scenarios, and as far as I can see, it is the same. Dehumanizing, devaluing, cruel and dismissive of the feelings, safety or life quality of those they focused their infernal hatred on.

It seems America hasn’t had an iteration of its existence where there wasn’t some group designated as an underclass. This country seems incapable of operating without one. That need is a continual obstacle and holds back a nation allegedly predicated on, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, as well as “liberty and justice for all.”

Before African enslavement, Christian settlers from Europe accepted the welcome from the indigenous who met them after arrival. They gladly soaked up their seasonal, agricultural, fish and game knowledge. After they got the hang of the place, more pious and arrogant tendencies grew, seeing native people as a savage, godless nuisance that got in the way of “possessing the land.” Settlers went from uninvited religious refugees, to thinking they were some brand of neo-Israelites sent by God with a deed for promised land. From then on, the approach became genocidal eradication, and the weight of a new government constantly falling on native people.

If European settlers weren’t looking down on the indigenous, they sometimes looked down on other Europeans. Indentured servants essentially worked off the cost their sponsor’s paid for their journey from Europe to America over a contracted number of years. At the end of the contract, they earned their freedom and sometimes a parcel of land, or a sum of money, to begin getting settled on their own. Many were overworked and exploited. Some of the women working off their contracts were sexually assaulted and raped. All participants in this program had few rights while under contract and found unreliable defense of the rights they did have.

Chinese. Irish. Italians. Polish. The United States at one time or another held all of those communities as a despised, “less-than”, deserving of fewer rights and less respect than the celebrated people holding power. The villainization continues today. Muslims and Latinos join African Americans as people to hold down, restrict opportunities, underestimate, pose as boogeymen, constantly surveil and over-police. In each one’s turn of disfavor, they suffered disrespect, denial of Constitutional rights and the accepted understanding that their subjugation was completely reasonable.

Many will blanch reading this, but this country began with an oppressive streak from its very founding. From my observation, it needs a scapegoat group, or groups, to exploit and demonize in order to function. At no point in this nation’s history has it been without one. This demand for a round robin of othered and disenfranchised people is woven into the nation’s fabric, coded in its very DNA. It’s why the majority of its citizens have such a high tolerance for observing cruel treatment of others who are different. Only the most outrageous acts, or those that hit too close to home, rouse many of us from the sunken depths of our couches watching reality TV, to hit the streets in protest, vote differently or call our representatives.

To be sure, other countries have villainized and treated immigrants as an “other”, but they have a shared national identity, culture, history and traditions built over centuries that nation clings to and unites around. They have endemic culture. India has endemic culture. So does China. Russia, England, Ireland, Japan, Morocco and many others. America is a young country, and the first major nation whose population is almost entirely comprised of immigrant heritages from somewhere else.

Our nation prides itself on its melting pot. It theoretically boils down into one big tasty stew, and all of the contributors spoon out and enjoy tasting the savory blend. When it works, people from different backgrounds discover and experiment with another’s cultural experiences. They try each other’s cuisine, join another culture’s traditional celebrations, learn about their religions and spiritual beliefs and maybe pick up some of the steps from their dances. It all works best when all of the cultures in question are held with equal weight and value.

So, what happens when each one’s value differs? I posit that you get what we see keep happening to this country in recurring episodes. Sanitized versions of cultures seen as “lesser” are disseminated throughout the nation, passed off as “authentic” and incorporated. Their music, food, fashion and celebrations are neutered and repackaged for broad consumption, but the people and cultures those things are taken from aren’t respected or honored at all. They’re simply containers for something desirable to be sucked out, exploited and subsumed into the “major” culture. Once whatever they can offer is consumed, they’re expendable. Disposable.

What is “major” culture? I’ll define it as a culture, or romanticized vision of a culture, elevated as superior to all others. In America it is a mythical imagined combination that is part Victorian England, part all-White Wild West frontier town, part idealized 1950’s sitcom nuclear family, and covered with a light frosting of fashionably scruffy, lone-wolf survivalist. Despite the fact that this is a contrived fiction, it is the vision put forth as the true culture of the United States. Real America.

Anyone or anything that doesn’t look like it has its roots in Real America, is optional and its value can wax and wane like any other commodity. As cultural commodities go through their bullish phases, the nation can’t get enough, and Real America praises them and demands more. After the honeymoon is over, or if some prominent person or group within that culture does something to disenchant Real America, its stock falls in a nosedive. After that, you can’t give away any part of it.

A country of immigrants declaring that all its people are created equal, will struggle to live up to that credo when some culture(s) in the mix are always valuable and the value of others can vary wildly. People and cultures whose fluctuating worth is seen as an acceptable feature, are the ones who remain at risk of abuse, mistreatment, targeting and villainizing. They’re the ones scapegoated for falling wages, job losses and crime. It’s their communities that go from being a welcome spice of diversity, to fighting accusations of plotting to overtake and eradicate the culture of Real America.

The common thread between the “lesser” communities, those never quite adopted into the core of majority culture and pushed to the edges, is that they are always at risk of suddenly becoming unwanted. They can go from novel friend to villainous thing in an eyeblink.

After that happens, it becomes acceptable for masked gangs claiming government credentials to grab them off the street, without warrant or grounds for an arrest. It’s fine to smash their car windows, drag them out of the vehicle and abduct them into custody. People in Real America will cheer lustily for you, if you threaten to drop a dragnet and indiscriminately sweep up millions of them to imprison and deport. Ignoring their rights and sending them to a prison in a country they’ve never lived becomes completely reasonable. Once they’re seen as others, villains, some thing, you can do anything with them without consequence.

I’m as appalled as anyone else about the things I’m seeing, reading and watching happen in this country. The unbridled glee as officials declare they’re openly targeting certain groups to be ostracized by the government is disgusting and sickening. In many ways it is shocking, but at the same time I’m also not entirely surprised. As a nation, most of us generally see ourselves as good, right and just. We like to believe we’re a country of equality, fairness, democracy and principles. At times we are. Yet, throughout this nation’s history, it’s been none of those things to certain groups. In the case of some groups, it’s been none of those things for the majority of its history.

Our nation has an image it presents to itself and the world, and many of us bought into it. Lots of us still do. The daily outrageous things done by the current regime are met with outrage from detractors, often accompanied with pronouncements that those actions aren’t who we are. For many communities in this country, this country has been exactly what it is right now. Maybe the scope of action hasn’t been as coordinated or as nakedly racist as this band of operators, but lots of this has been done here before.

America has lofty stated creeds, aims and goals. It prides itself on being the freest, having the most opportunities and offering liberty and justice for all. While it’s claimed that, it also was been largely unperturbed when some communities within it weren’t free. Its majority was unbothered when certain communities routinely had their rights stripped, lived under constant police watch, were mistreated by the state, wrongly accused or imprisoned.

Many who assumed they belonged to Real America didn’t realize they were not truly seen as full-fledged members, and now they’re in danger too. That realization puts them in a panic over scenarios that other communities complained about, saw them ignored, and ultimately learned to live through for years as a matter of course. Those abusive practices now overflow into communities that thought they would never be threatened. Even some in Real America are beginning to see that they too may be endangered if they cross the current regime and fall on their list.

I’ll try to wrap up with what is, for me anyway, mild optimism. The hope for many is that this nation steers into the skid, navigates a near miss and comes out the other side with slight fender damage, or by some miracle none at all. When this nation narrowly evades danger and staggers towards recovery, there will be much to do.

People without any knowledge or understanding of how things work, were allowed to pull wires and unscrew things they don’t understand. Then, they hastily cobbled it back together and closed up the case when they realized they were clueless. The entire government will need an overhaul to get running correctly. The Constitution will need amendments to reinstall and solidify the separation of powers the Roberts Court foolishly removed in their rulings, allowing the fascist overreach we’re witnessing. Laws will need passing that enshrine people’s rights in the Constitution to prevent threat from theocratic zealots.

All of the above and more operational repairs will be needed. However, I hope that while we’re doing this that President Obama’s right, and we can walk and chew gum at the same time. As we rebuild a nation, we’ll need to agree to prioritize respecting each one of the cultures that contributes to it as an equal partner. No more erroneous claims that the nation’s founders imagined a mythical European Christo-fascist state. No more scaremongering about being “replaced” by immigrants, when everyone here but the indigenous is an immigrant. No more elevation of “this culture” over “that culture.” E Pluribus Unum: out of many, one.

Yesterday Senator Cory Booker from New Jersey set a record in the United States Senate. He gave a speech for over 25 hours in Congress in an appeal to his colleagues to listen to their constituents.

He outlined the harm of policies the current Executive Branch regime slams through at breakneck speed. Booker pointed out that many of the regime’s pursuits go against precedent at best, while many more of them are illegal or unconstitutional at worst. Many news services and writers pointed out that, unlike predecessors who filibustered, including the previous record holder, Booker took no breaks and brooked no foolishness. While others before him engaged in gimmicks like reading phone and children’s books to burn time, Booker spoke passionately about this nation, its people, common goals people shared regardless of party affiliation and a reminder of the duty that body has to do the business their voters sent them to do. I congratulate him too.

Having said all of that and with no hate intended, I believe many of those accolades should be falling elsewhere and arrived there earlier. Although he accomplished an incredibly challenging feat of determination and physical endurance, other Democrats have been calling out names, speaking truth to power and rallying their voters and colleagues to fight back against tyranny before him. Representative Al Green of Texas definitely comes to mind, but I’m thinking of some other voices: Representatives Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Jasmine Crockett, and Melanie Stansbury to name a few.

While former political strategist James Carville advised Cajun-flavored surrender and told Democrats to geaux roll over and play dead, these women have been taking this administration and its lackeys to task. When minority leaders Senator Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jefferies were either silent or telling Democratic voters to chill out because God’s on the throne, these women were speaking up and speaking out, and they didn’t need Signalgate to give them cover to get started.

Representative Stansbury of New Mexico is someone who’s only recently shown up on my radar. However, when she did it was clear that she’s a fast-moving bogey and armed with debate “lethality”, as an allegedly oft-drunk Secretary of Defense would say. Don’t believe me? Check out this clip of her challenging the DOGEbags and their Republican supplicants. Or this one of her shredding the ridiculous villainizing of sanctuary city mayors as supporters of crime. These happened a full month before Senator Booker’s feat.

We all know about the firebrand out of Texas, Representative Jasmine Crockett. She’s on the news so regularly that I don’t need to present much of a case. She’s challenged MAGA, DOGE, their sycophants and all of the mindless Borg supporting the current White House occupant nearly immediately after November’s election results. While other heads were calling for comity, some of them even extolling the virtues of Biden possibly pardoning Trump and the insurrectionists (I’m looking at you, Rep. Clyburn), she was steadfastly against any and all nonsense.

Crockett catapulted into national awareness for calling out MTG’s, “bleach-blond, bad-built butch body.” She’s continued using her bootstrapped bully pulpit to defend her constituents, and vulnerable people everywhere, savaged by the onslaught of Executive Orders and agency destruction since the inauguration. Longer tenured Democrats were trying to establish normalized relations with an administration openly supportive of groups embracing Nazi views. She didn’t mince words about the composition of this regime, including the man on top of it. Her criticisms are based in legal and constitutional frameworks, pointing out where the Executive Branch is noncompliant, overreaching or blatantly disregarding what is legal and appropriate. Detractors may try to discredit her because they think she’s too sassy, but if you’re sassy and correct, any leg they have to stand on is severed at the hip.

Finally, I’ll end with AOC, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. AOC burst on the scene as a barnstorming, scrappy neophyte that successfully primaried a somnolent incumbent and then won her district’s House seat. College educated, she worked as a bartender and waitress before she was elected to office. Her opponents try to belittle her about those jobs, but she’s stayed proud and unbowed of honest work, no matter how humble. It’s that recent lived working person’s experience hustling to make ends meet, that keeps her grounded and invested in policies that help people not being chauffeured in a Maybach. This impassioned takedown of the evaporated Republican support for a bill because of pressure from Elon Musk showcases that.

There are numerous examples on the internet of her roasting inaccurate or unsubstantiated Republican talking points in session, interviews and on Twitx throughout her career. That continues. After the elections, much of the Democratic party’s legislators were apparently cowering in a closet, clutching a blanket and thumb-sucking for comfort. She instead kept placing a lit match to the paper-thin ideas and stances presented by this White House. Last month, AOC joined federal workers on the picket lines protesting their job cuts. She encouraged them not to leave and do the DOGEbags bidding for them, but stand strong and resist, forcing illegal firings that could be challenged. Over the last month, she and Bernie Sanders have held “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies with massive turnout by people from all over the political spectrum in cities around the country. Her speeches and proposals got rousing receptions at those events.

There are more examples of bold, intrepid leadership from each of these women, but I just listed a few. They’ve been at the forefront of a vocal and continually pugilistic spirit, challenging an increasingly fascist and unconstitutional Executive regime. Booker did indeed make a valiant address over 25 hours appealing to his colleagues to reset their moral compass and work for everyday people. These women have been lodging their challenges for months, contesting constantly, whether in Congress, in interviews or using their social media platforms. Now, current Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow and her fiery moxie could join them. She announced her entrance in the race for its US Senate seat in 2026, and would be one of the youngest Senators joining the few women in the Senate.

Women sounded the alarm before the vandals threw Molotov cocktails. Women challenged abuse of civil and labor rights, before others in their party felt polling supported such a move. Women boldly called out the opposition’s lies, mistakes, distortions and frequent incompetence in plain language, not waiting for a critical mass shift of public opinion from Social Security raids, or the illegal Signalgate scandal that endangered military personnel by sharing battle plans over insecure comms.

I looked up the meaning of leader online, and there are a surprising number of definitions. The one I like best I found in an article by Tech Target. It says:

Leaders are seen as people who make sound and sometimes difficult decisions. They articulate a clear vision, establish achievable goals and provide followers with the knowledge and tools necessary to achieve those goals.

All of those listed above made sound and difficult decisions, when others in their party were paralyzed by polling and/or a bellicose opponent. They’ve communicated in clear terms the dangers posed by the current Executive branch. All three explained what should be done to stop its assault on the Constitution and the American public, providing instructions to use the tools available to their colleagues and voters to address the existential threat. There’s been a saying that the future is female. I’d argue that these women already demonstrated that the future is now.