whether or not this is true, i thought it was funny and i laughed when i saw the bumper sticker.
there is definitely a little hippie in the two of us….all right, more than a little. and i’m perfectly ok with that. particularly the part about wishing for a world centered on peace, love, social change and harmony. and the part about gender and racial equality. and the part about being a conscious consumer, about focusing on environmental wellness, awareness of the footprint of products and of, well, everything, about being accepting and open-minded. and the part about not being excessively materialistic or terribly mainstream or fixated on massive accumulation of wealth. and the part about believing in kindness.
yes. if those are the descriptors, then, i guess, the shoe fits.
and then i think of the opposite.
those wishing for a world that is dictatorial, with extremist and narrow views, centered on suspicion and hatred, bigotry, patriarchal mores, xenophobia. a world that is cavalier about its nonchalant environmental abuse, apathetic about the future impact from the footprint of its intentions, close-minded and exclusionary. a world that is rigid, isolationist, with self-serving restrictive inhumane tenets, competitively materialistic and skewed to the stratospheric haves. a world that believes in cruelty.
because most of us in this country have deep ancestral roots in other parts of the world, most of us have actual relatives in other parts of the world.
in the social media free-for-all that is the current environment, we are privy to what these folks are doing just as they are – at least superficially – aware of what we all are up to. i shudder every time i think of this.
i wonder what on earth they are thinking – as they watch the pathetic taking place here in these un-united states. i wonder if they are careful to discern what each of their american-soil relatives believe in – individually – rather than generalizing and lumping us all together in one universal stance, distilling us onto one political bandwagon and its associated numbness of morality. i wonder if they notice who is speaking up, who is tacitly – complicitly – silent. i wonder if they are shaking their heads, grateful to not be here, not to be gathered around the “family” table, not to be sitting and visiting in a lazy boy in the middle of the great divide. i wonder if they wonder about what happened to the heart of it all.
no national moral compass. fatal wounds to people’s most basic needs – physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem. nary a nod to the constitution, to the law of the land, to staunch protection of democratic principles and freedoms, to respect of the people…of all the populace.
as we drove north we talked about these blogs. i pretty much know that nothing i might write – or ponder – or rant about – will change what is happening in this country right now. i write anyway.
i am typing this blog post ahead – at the very moment that the u.s. house minority leader is speaking on the floor before a final vote is taken on the big __ bill.
and i truly want to cry.
because even the briefest scroll through social media today reveals a country being led by an administration rife with cruelty and it takes my breath away. i just cannot wrap my head around this – in 2025. i barely know what to say.
we had decided to go on a much-needed get-away-from-all-of-it date with each other and drove to walkers point in milwaukee where there is a spanish bistro that has sangria and tapas for happy hour. it was an early evening, but the tapas are $1, $3 and $5 and, as we ordered three to share, we knew that could fit in the budget we had saved for these moments.
because the moment we were in was overwhelming and last night’s date out – requiring an hour drive to and fro and some time on barstools talking – really talking about real stuff – with a young man bar-and-soul-tending was a reminder to stay in the here and now (at least for here and now).
i’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the bill – with the knee-bending, capitulating, hate-perpetuating, sycophantic incentive not to piss off their madman prez – is going to pass. [which – as an addendum – it did.] and the cruelty and inhumane treatment of real-life people will not only continue, but will escalate exponentially. the absolute cowardice of those who are supposed to be representing the needs and wishes of their constituents – the american people – is beyond appalling. i barely know what to say.
and then – in moments of their glee and gilded-golden-glory – in the sad moments of watching the cheer squad justify and cheer – in the aftermath of hope hobbled by hatred and greed – this beaten-up country will stagger into tomorrow, tears streaming down its face as its e-pluribus-unum heart shatters into a million pieces.
the neverending havoc, the abject cruelty, the malignant narcissism, the discarding of rights, the disrespect of humanity, the dismantling of democracy – it all leaves me nauseated.
the scars will run deep upon the land. profound, weeping scars.
and where do we-the-people go from here?
“every day just gets a little shorter, don’t you think?/take a look around you, and you’ll see just what i mean/people got to come together, not just out of fear…
where do we go/where do we go/where do we go from here?
try to find a better place, but soon it’s all the same/what you thought was a paradise is not just what it seemed/the more i look around i find the more i have to fear
where do we go/where do we go/where do we go from here?
“you have the right to be yourself.” (aclu wisconsin)
there are few places with more evidence of this than PRIDE festivals. the wholehearted acceptance of one person to another is a theme on loop. it is a gift to attend such a celebration of people loving people.
and isn’t that the way it should be?
and yet, persons in this country, in some warped and perverted place in their brains and hearts – have decided that erasing the right to be oneself is their calling – leading with hate, placing the LGBTQ community under siege – people all complicit in the marginalization, disenfranchisement and endangering of this community with their hurrahing of rolling back protections of freedoms, mandating discrimination, and weaponizing federal law against transgender people.
when there is precious little time to start with in our mortal existence, how is it that so many people have so much time to spend on reviling of and cruelty to other people?
the american civil liberties union fights to protect, defend and expand civil rights and liberties.
because everyone has a right to be themselves.
the aclu of wisconsin “envisions a just society in which the dignity of every person is respected and our collective liberation is realized.”
imagine. a place where we simply love one another, support one another – as best we can.
to take every moment and maximize your time in it. to have compassion. to exercise kindness. to extend goodness. to embrace each other. to push back against oppression.
to generously allow each and every person to be true, to be authentic, to be themselves in every respectful and loving way.
“be yourself. everyone else is already taken.” (oscar wilde)
if the milwaukee, denver and reno airports are any indication, there is a heck of a lot of diversity in our country.
diversity: the state of being diverse; variety. / involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds and of different genders, sexual orientations, etc.
you wouldn’t expect this beautiful country to look the same from sea to shining sea or you would not travel. you wouldn’t wish to see the beaches, the inland lakes, the mountains and canyonlands, the deserts and deep forests, the farmland and rich meadows. you would merely stay at home, knowing that it looked exactly the same in every other place. you would, of course, be delusional, but you would live in your little bubble, safe from the diversity of the land.
if that is how you felt, then you also wouldn’t expect to travel the country and see anyone who did not look like you, act like you, dress like you, speak like you. and, because you do not wish to accept anyone different than you, you would merely stay at home, believing that because you want it this way – the way of sameness – that it should be that way, that it is that way. you would, of course, be delusional, but you would sit tidily – and smugly – in your bubble of delusion and prejudice and you would ignore the vast lessons you might learn from people who are different than you, safe and sound from the diversity of the people.
there was a person at the denver airport who was most definitely different than me. i had put on a mask to head into a shuttle train that would take us to a different terminal. the man headed directly toward me and, as he passed by right next to me, turned his head and coughed multiple times loudly into my face. i was stunned. yes, this person was most definitely different than me. this person – as opposed to all the other thousands of people i encountered in two days of traveling – the only person who i would consider different. every other person – regardless of race or ethnicity or size or shape or gender or freaking anything – was kind.
because – really – it isn’t that hard to be kind. it isn’t that hard to make kind decisions about kind behavior toward other equally kind people in what could be a kind world.
but instead, the new administration of hideousness has ostensibly raised the bar on meanness – no, not just meanness…let’s make that downright malicious cruelty – and has made it perfectly ok to be an asshole whenever you wish, wherever you wish, and to whomever you wish. wowza. what a legacy that will be.
if you are one of the people who actually think that is ok, i would – in my sweetest voice – suggest staying home in your righteous, pretentious bubble steeped in denialism. because this world needs more kindness and if you agree with this destructive and venomous agenda, i don’t think kindness is something of which you are truly capable.
keep your homogeneously-bigoted, unkind self out of the mainstream of society. there are a lot of children out there. and children need better examples than you.
we were not the only ones to end the week with an entire bag of cape cod chips and a bottle of wine. it’s somehow reassuring to know we were not alone.
i know exhaustion is dangerous. it’s also the truth. one cannot help but be bone-and-heart-weary in the wake of the scripted chaos that has been this very week in american history.
and then i wonder what THEY see happening….those who intentionally voted for this wreaking-of-havoc.
yesterday we watched a jordan klepper video where he interviewed the new administration’s supporters outside at the national mall in dc, people who had expected to actually view the inauguration in real life. he showed photographs of the insurrection to these diehards and asked if they agreed with the pardons that these insurrectionists had just received. they did – they agreed – these same people who were thrilled – giddy, even – to hear that the garbage truck their redeemer sat in was literally in town. priorities and perspective – and the rule of law – are – apparently – not a real thing here.
but there was one man who jordan interviewed who stated that he had not seen the images he was being shown – images of cruel and absolute violence at the capitol. when pressed about that, he responded that he guessed that the media he watched had not shown those images. when asked if he watched the January 6 hearings, he replied no and then – drumroll, please – he said these words, “that’s on me.”
and so – for those people who are merely foxing it through life – with side jaunts to their facebook flat-friends – i wonder what you are seeing. because it sure doesn’t seem like you are seeing the sh*t that is really happening.
and – because you didn’t take the time to read anything about the agenda of project 2025 or fact-check the clearly-twisted “clean-slate” of your new president or even bother to check in with any sense of moral compass in your own heart (or do you really feel this much hatred??!!!) – you have contributed to the demolition of decency that has already taken place, you are complicit in all that is to come, you have installed a cadre of authoritarianism that the generation before us fought valiantly against.
if i were to write a children’s book about clouds, this cloud would have an arrogant name – something aggressive, threatening. this is the cloud that covers the sun, dark, assailing. this cloud would be the cloud that rides the bumper of the others, that drives on the shoulder, that flips you off as it passes. it would be the screaming banshee of clouds with its hulk of stone cold water droplets. it is the cloud that makes a mockery of the other clouds, dominating their practiced and important jobs of precipitation, reflection, insulation. it is ominous and likely indicative of a storm coming. this cloud is emboldened.
we are in the earliest days of fallout from the election. the emboldened are obvious. they are the arrogant ones, the aggressive, threatening ones. they are dark; they are assailing. they are the ones riding your bumper, driving on the shoulder, flipping you off. they are screaming banshees of propaganda, hulking masses of disturbingly evil what-we-are-going-to-do-to-this-country-what-we-are-going-to-do-to-people. they are mocking and they are stone cold, gleefully ominous, dominating, militant. there is a storm coming.
the animals in the forest watch this cloud intently, intuitively knowing that their forest could be destroyed in its wake.
we watch the emboldened insanity intently, intuitively knowing that that our country could be destroyed in its wake.
the monday-morning-armchair-quarterbacking is over the top. there is no one excuse for these election results. to be real, there cannot be enough reasons for the despicable – what the majority of voters voted for.
in the aftermath – afforded from even little to no doom-scrolling that highlights the absolute tsunami of finger-pointing, blaming, history-touting, policy-pummeling, we now see that the maga-voters voting for all the maga-sh*t did not quite understand what the maga-candidate’s maga-agenda really meant.
many of them had tuned into fox news where they learned – and clearly believed – things like people were eating other people’s dogs and cats and you could send your child to school and they would arrive home the opposite sex.
and, worst of all, they poo-pooed any talk of the abject cruelties of project 2025, jumping on the he-doesn’t-really-mean-that-he-wouldn’t-really-do-that bandwagon.
weren’t they surprised when – post-election – all the maga-cronies paused very few milliseconds and posted what would amount to a naa-naa-nah-naa-naa, stating that it was the actual agenda all along.
adding fuel to the what-the-hell fire, “…catherine rampell and youyou zhou (washington post) showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred harris’s policies to trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them.” (heather cox richardson – american historian, professor of history – boston college, previously MIT, university of massachusetts amherst )
if you don’t fact-check, if you don’t ask questions, if you don’t care about any potential work in the aisle or if the country’s democracy could be decimated, if you don’t worry your little head about character or details of a candidate’s experience or qualifications or with whom they choose to surround themselves, you have chosen to be a voter voting on whatever your rage is, you have voted to follow the lemmings off the cliff.
amanda marcotte (senior politics writer – salon) opined, “a lot of voters are profoundly ignorant. more so than in the past.” ya think??
so, yeah. now what?
i’m going to clean out my closet, take a hike, hydrate and try to breathe.
there has been little air in me these last days. like many of you – but clearly, not all of you – i feel gutted.
i, too, watched as this nation elected what it elected. and, like you, we all know what that means, voting in cruelty, burying compassion, damning moving forward and any what-could-have-been’s.
someone dear to me texted me on election day, writing: “and the thing is, people will never not know who they [others] voted for and supported.”
exactly. we cannot un-know what you voted for.
as I quoted yesterday, you are who you elect. (michael ramirez – the washington post)
i woke up yesterday, my eyes still swollen – like yours – feeling strangled by the results of this election. it was as if color had escaped, as if texture had been jackhammered away, as if air was only to be found in shallow hyperventilated gulps. my children, i kept thinking, pondering their future, my daughter, my son.
there is much to do. and I don’t even know what that means right now.
we took a walk in the woods.
there was the simplicity of our footsteps – one foot in front of another – step, step, step. boiling it down. movement.
it was quiet but for rustling squirrels, blissfully unaware of the election, merely gathering for the fallow that will soon befall the forest.
there was beauty. inevitably. and, for a bit of time on our hike – the time when we weren’t spilling our grief on the path – i got just the tiniest bit lost in it.
i fear that things, that living – for the rest of my life – will never be the same again. that the darkness – darkness which people we all know have chosen – will engulf everything.
so i know that there is much to do, despite the utter grief and despair i feel right now. there is much to do to bring back the light.
this morning i woke when the sun was just coming up. dogga jumped on the bed as soon as he knew we were the slightest bit awake. we were quiet as the light began to stream into our room. we sipped coffee.
we will clean the house. we will go take a hike. we will attempt to breathe. we will be aware of beauty. we will study it – its astonishingness – and i will try to figure out how to bring it to this aching world any way i can.
and all the air will circulate ’round – the wind of next days and next days – filling our tired lungs, drying our eyes, helping us take one step after another, so that we can do the much that needs to be done.
reverse threading 