When Does It Stop?

Every day just seems to make it worse.  How is it that Ivanka Trump is qualified enough to sit at the table with all the leaders at the G20 in place of her father, no less!  Does she have years of experience in government or years of training in macro-economics? 

We are watching our reputation as a country turn to dust.  The entire global community is now opposed most of the positions of the US on climate change, open trade issues, isolationist steel policies, Nato defense to name just a few major sticking points.

Then there was the meeting with Putin.  “It was an honor to meet you!”, says our President to the man who engineered and lead a cyber-attack on our country.  Where are those balls that he is supposed to have to stand up for our democracy?  It seems Vlad keeps them in little steel box in his pocket!

And in the middle of all this, our ‘President’ spends his time tweeting about John Podesta not turning over a server to the CIA, which is ludicrous on several levels.  Meeting with the leaders of the world is apparently less important than incorrectly blasting someone who is completely inconsequential to his current responsibilities. 

All of this is going to end badly.

Just how much of this are today’s Republicans going to stand for before they admit that the damage this man and his family are doing to our country is catastrophic.  When will insulting and denigrating our intelligence services and insulting and denigrating our former President finally precipitate action to save our democracy from its dismantling at the hands of our modern day Nero.

There is so much going wrong here that it is hard to imagine being able to fix it until Patriots finally emerge from the catatonia that currently defines the condition of Congress.  Democrats can’t do it alone.  What is it going to take?  Is there no salvation from this?  I can’t imagine the state of our republic by 2020.

It was only a few short months ago that I couldn’t conceive of Lindsay Graham or John McCain being President---I would welcome them with open arms now!

Independence Day 2

       

Well, I was a bit intense in my last post.  After the MSNBC event, I was even amazed at my own disgust for the man.  However, today is a new day, and an important one at that!

Today is the anniversary of our declaration as a free people.  What does ‘free’ mean, really?

Clearly we all have to follow rules.  A civilized society requires that we be governed by a set of laws that affect everyone equally.  But more than that, what is the essence of the freedom that we have here that is so hard to duplicate or find in the rest of the world?

So, I started thinking about the course of my life….what kind of life have I lived for almost 70 years so far? 

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When I was in grammar school at St. Cloud Elementary in West Orange, New Jersey in the 1950s, the memory I keep coming back to are those classic portraits by Norman Rockwell of the Four Freedoms.  The school had large prints of those four pieces hung in the assembly auditorium where we all would go from time to time for various events and gatherings.  I remember those portraits in great detail.  Those images are still burned into my mind.  They somehow always made our lives here singular and special---Remember them?

Freedom from Want

What bounty!  Every time I sit down with my family and there is a table full of food and smiling people, I see that image of people laughing, smiling and ...not hungry!

        I especially remembered the expressions on those faces….Rockwell was such a master!  My favorite was the Freedom of Speech.  The man who was speaking represented Abe Lincoln for me as a child—he even looked sort of like him.  But the face that I remember most was the man sitting just to the left of ‘Abe’.  He was looking up at the speaker and his face said “You are lucky to have this moment, young man!  Speak wisely!”

        

And what about Worship?  Can you tell what religion is being depicted?  Could be anything, right?

But most meaningful perhaps is the Freedom from Fear.  

Do you remember the headlines in the newspaper the father was holding?....all you can make out is “Bombings and Horror”  Those headlines could be today’s headlines, but still the innocence of the children is amplified by the love and protection provided by the parents.  That made me appreciate the freedom my parents gave to me as a young child.  That was my Mom and Dad.

All through my life as I became witness to all the things that I lived through, I kept those images in my mind’s eye.  I applied them over and over. 

This is what our Freedom means to me.

As we celebrate this 241^st anniversary of our Independence, I urge all of you to remember what these images depict and promise.. to ALL Americans.  Our founding fathers wanted these freedoms for all our citizens.  Have they successfully insured that legacy for all of us?

I think we have a way to go before we can honestly say ‘yes’ to that question, but the ideal of that America is something I cherish and hope for every day…..and so should you!

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Independence Day

It is difficult to watch the slow inexorable disintegration of our democracy.  What we are seeing now is the advancement of what some might call a 'logarithmic progression of disassembly'.  It is an ever-increasing slope to a curve of disaster unless we can figure out how to stop it.

A process that started 30 years ago with the rise of a Republican Party that has morphed into a cruel and heartless vanguard of destruction is now tipped with a leader who is a crude, malicious, anti-intellectual.  On a daily basis we see the piece-by-piece crumbling of the structure of our society at the hands of people who are only concerned about themselves and money.

We need a leader.  We need a man or woman of action who can mobilize all that is good in us to cast out the evil that has found purchase in the United States of America. 

Men of good will and intelligence have been asleep at the wheel.  They have allowed deceit, fabrication, cruelty and disregard to replace honesty, integrity, altruism and humanity in the social fabric of our 'grand experiment'.  The founders of our republic are spinning in their graves.

I can think of a few actions whose moment has arrived. 

First, I would encourage the press, and I mean all the press—cable/broadcast/print journalists to boycott daily press conferences with President Trump and his minions.  Shut them out so the only mode of communication will be his tweets.  Stop answering his daily distractions.  He seems to thrive on distraction when questions get too close to the truth for him to endure.  Report and critique his actions, but stop asking questions of him.  We only get lies anyway. 

Second, accelerate the investigations into his collusion with the Russians and expose his campaign’s coordination with the hacking attack on our nation during its elections.  Reveal in unflinching detail his corrupt business dealings, both past and ongoing. 

Third, raise money from people concerned about resurrecting the dream of the Founders and use those funds to build public support to proceed with impeachment proceedings.  Even though Democrats do not have majorities, they can still introduce resolutions of impeachment in much the same way Republicans repeatedly voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act…..Daily!  We need to provide daily distractions from Trump and Republican initiatives by making all of them deal with what amounts to an 'insurrection of rationality'.  We need to find ways to distract all of them.

Fourth, increase voter registration, and support local campaigns to bring millenials and younger voices into the milieu of government and public service.

Fifth, Create a Citizen's Movement to communicate with foreign powers who increasingly look at what is happening in America and realize that we have abdicated our leadership role in the world.  We need to let them all know that what is happening here is a temporary insanity, that there are forces of intelligent ‘good’ that will rectify this situation over the short term.

And Sixth, be resolute, be aggressive, be righteous, be honest, and be overwhelmingly determined to save the vision of what America is supposed to be for the rest of the world....a place where:

   “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

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