Protecting the Vote

We have a serious problem ahead.  The voting experience in Georgia and several other states yesterday is an ominous warning as to the prospect of an electoral catastrophe in November.  What we saw were lines, especially in minority precincts, that were 2-5 hours in length.  Election officials rolled out new voting machines purposefully at the last minute and the predictable result was non-functioning machines; shortages of ballots; insufficient personnel support because of the Covid-19 emergency. 

Governor Kemp (formerly Sec. of State Kemp who was responsible for voting in Georgia while he was running for Governor in 2018) has done all he can to frustrate voting, especially in minority districts in Georgia, even going so far as to purge over 500,000 voters from predominantly African American districts from the voting rolls prior to the election in 2018.

In Iowa, last week’s primary was a huge success due mostly to the use of absentee ballots.  The state took the initiative to spearhead an effort to make voting efficient and easy at a time when the Corona virus and the George Floyd demonstrations would have made it incredibly difficult to have in-person balloting. The Secretary of State in Iowa send out applications for absentee ballots to all citizens.  That was the reason they had the best turnout of voters ever in Iowa.  No hitches.   No problems.  

Less than a week later, Republicans in the Iowa legislature had drafted a bill to never permit that kind of voting again.  They apparently believe that making voting easy and efficient is a practice that MUST BE STOPPED!   The Republican Party is intent on making voting as difficult as possible for all Iowans.  So, the Republicans in Iowa, who are afraid that if everyone can vote they will lose elections, decided that they must do everything they can to keep Iowans from voting.  Why else would they agressively oppose a system that made their election smoothly efficient?

The President spends a lot of time decrying mail-in balloting in his tweets and pronouncements.  His Press Secretary, his advisors, AG Barr and others in his administration are coming out aggressively with warnings that mail in balloting doesn’t work, isn’t fair, is prone to fraud, and is just not good.  And, of course, all these people have voted by mail repeatedly without any problems.  

Even worse, Republicans nationwide have allocated over $20M to oppose efforts to make voting easier.  They anticipate recruiting over 50,000 volunteers to ‘monitor’ polling places; create a media campaign to suppress efforts to pass vote by mail initiatives—all supported by the Trump administration.

It is clear to many that only if the Republicans can thwart the democratic process by making it as hard as possible for all to vote will they be able to hold on to power in a free and fair election.

We must do everything we can to stop them.

What can we do?  Well, for starters, every one of us must write or call each of our Congressmen and Senators from our state and demand that they support vote-by-mail initiatives.  Then we need to find out who is our municipal or county Supervisor of Elections and tell them that we will not stand for any suppression of voting rights.  Badger them to make sure that all the voting machines and polling places are ready for voting and are tested and prepared in advance of Election Day.  Make sure that they understand that if they do not support vote-by-mail initiatives that we will do everything in our power to rally citizens to make sure that they are thrown out of office or fired from their jobs.  I think that ultimately this is a local issue.  With pressure on local officials, we can make sure that in our little corner of the world we are doing everything we can to support free and fair elections.

These efforts are actions that we must take NOW!  If we allow those who seek to suppress the vote of a free democratic people to succeed, then we are the ones who will have surrendered our democracy to the forces of autocracy and authoritarianism.

The Camera Doesn't Lie

I-phone camera technology has finally opened our eyes to the reality of what it means to see our first amendment rights disappear.  If you are watching the myriad of moments captured over the past 11 days you can’t help but be horrified by the instances of police brutality and simple cruelty that are on display in the locations where citizens have the courage to record what law enforcement is perpetrating on their fellow citizens.  From Buffalo to Washington to Lousiville to Los Angeles, what we are witnessing are examples of what blacks have been telling us has been happening for decades.  But now it is happening to a mixed crowd of whites, blacks, latinos, Asians, and of all ages, including children!

As each of these recorded instances are rebutted by the authorities, law enforcement agencies and police unions, we see how they have tried to ‘gaslight’ us into believing alternative explanations that they concoct. 

The camera does not lie.

That’s why the demonstrations are only getting larger, not smaller.  We are all seeing the duplicity.  When that 75 year-old man was pushed to the pavement in Buffalo and seriously injured, and we watched the uniformed police simply walk by him and not offer aid, it brought it all home, didn’t it?  The Mayor of Buffalo was on TV the next night to answer to the incident and the best he could do was utter a flaccid response that it was disturbing and unfortunate.  He is clearly under the thumb of the police union.  The net result of that action was that the two officers were suspended without pay.  Really?  They should be fired and charged with criminal action.  And as far as the 57 officers in that unit that resigned in sympathy to the two officers from the unit—they should be summarily fired and their union abolished….good riddance!  Get new humans that have empathy.  What we witnessed there was simply an exercise of naked power with cruelty and without humanity from people who have Napoleonic complexes.

The recorded moments are telling the story of where we have landed as a society being led by an autocrat.  But even more than that we now see how imperative it is for citizens to rise up and change the equation at the local level.  The local law enforcement paradigm needs to shift.  Police unions need to be de-fanged and abolished.  Communities need to come together and restructure their police forces, establishing new training protocols and ridding the departments of any officers that have complaints against them for unlawful use of force or questionable tactics.

To be sure, the police in these demonstration situations are only human, and probably fear the actions of those who criminally assault them, but for the most part those criminals are few while mostly all these demonstrations are peaceful; and the police are the ones that take the initial unprovoked action.  They are the ones swinging the billy clubs and batons; the ones firing tear gas and flash-bang devices; the ones firing rubber bullets at unarmed citizens; the ones pushing old men, women, children out of the way with cruel intent.  It is sickening, and we are seeing it for the first time in a way that could only happen as a result of the ubiquitous presence of the I-phone camera.

But there is something else happening in our country that has not happened before.  The Baby Boomer generation is giving way to the Millenial and Gen-Z generations who will finally perhaps be able to salvage our future.  It is clear that our leaders, who are almost all white men from the Baby Boomer generation, have lost their way.  They have forgotten what the American Experiment is all about.  It is time to purge the Congress of members of their generation who are mute at the rise of autocracy and dictatorship.   It is the younger generations who are the reformers; who are filled with an energy for renewal of our American ideals.  We saw the first wave of that action in the 2018 midterm elections and hopefully we will see a subsequent, more powerful wave this year.

With the increasing public outcry over the dictator-like tactics of the Trump administration and the gathering awareness of just how perilously vulnerable our democracy is becoming, the momentum for change is increasing.  The façade of support provided to Trump by mute Republicans and most especially by our military leaders is slowly cracking apart.  The fracturing of the compact between our apolitical military and American society is the first tell-tale indicator that change is coming.  Our most revered and honorable military leaders want no part of what Trump/Barr et al. are attempting to do to our country.  They see the threat to our democracy and the undermining of our Constitution by these people and are calling them out….finally!  Let’s hope their clarion call comes soon enough to matter.

Before I end this blog, let me just offer a word of thanks to all of you who witnessed and participated in the last blog.  What we saw here over the past several days was an example of the single-minded rejection of evidence and the twisting of events and facts to support something that, frankly, is unsupportable.  Being able to see other’s points of view is essential if we are to find common ground.  But claiming that plainly visible evidence of actions and attitudes by the Trump Administration are ‘lies’ without any substantive proof cannot be tolerated.   Institutional racism is present in America, and it has been here for a long, long time.  Those who want to turn a blind eye to it by blaming the victims are perpetrators of the worst kind.

Last Exit Before the Toll.....

In all my years,  I have never felt as anxious about the future of my country as I do today.  After 3 years and 4 months of Donald Trump as President it is certainly remarkable how deeply our country has become riven with despair, confusion and hate.  Trump has fanned the flames of hate and violence while at the same time maliciously, purposefully deconstructing our democracy.  Yesterday he approached the final step toward dictatorship by warning our governors that he will send in federal troops to ‘dominate’ America’s streets which he and his Defense Secretary called the ‘battlespace’.  He wants to use our military on the American citizenry.

If you have been watching the videos of how some police and national guard troops have responded with cruelty and unnecessary force, it is hard not to compare our America with countries like China, Russia, Turkey, Iran or Syria or other autocracies where the objective is to subdue and dominate the citizens.  We have arrived at the brink of something I never thought I would see in the United States of America.  We are on the edge of descending into civil war, brought about over the past many decades by the white majority subjugating the black and brown members of our society.  The grievances of the protestors, who for the most part are demonstrating peacefully, have been ignored and rejected for the past 100 years.   The proverbial pigeons have come home to roost.  The litany of white supremacist behaviors on the part of police has grown too long.  Trump will try to persuade us that Antifa is behind all of it...we know better.  True enough that there are criminals using these protests as a 'screen' for their incitement to violence, but that is only a symptom and result of where Trump's administration has led us up to this point.

When you mix this brew of hateful behavior with economic injustice and inequality, and stir in a pandemic that has left hundreds of thousands of citizens (especially the black, latino and minority communities) sick, dead and unemployed, you have conditions that are ripe for riots, violence and national instability.  This toxic mélange has been fertile ground for the hateful rise of the kind of leadership epitomized by Donald Trump.  But he is not the root cause of all that we are suffering from.

The conscious and willful subjugation of the rule of law and our founding principles of government by the Republican party over the past several decades is perhaps the root cause of where we find ourselves today.  This is actually surprising since the Republican Party used to be associated with conservative government and strict Constitutional adherence.  Somehow, they all lost their way because of their greed and hunger for power.  Now we have a Republican Party that is lost; that remains mute at the bastardization of the system they used to so vocally support.  It’s breathtaking actually!

And Trump marches on…..swinging the bludgeon of our military at the citizens he is supposed to care for.  He is the ‘strongman’ we always said was the antithesis of what we believed in; what we have fought world wars to bring down; what we have left our blood and treasure in the sands of foreign countries to avoid having here in our homeland.  If you think I am an alarmist, how do you reconcile the image of Donald Trump holding up a bible as a prop in front of a church he expropriated for his photo op by scattering peaceful demonstrators with tear gas, armed troops shooting rubber bullets and ‘flash- bangs’ while helicopters, at his direction, hovered at rooftop level over the crowd to frighten and intimidate them so he could walk across LaFayette Park to get his photo.  There is a similar picture of Hitler doing the same thing.

Events are getting away from us, my friends.  There is precious little time remaining before we pass the point of no return.  I am not sure what any of us can do individually, but collectively we must use the only thing remaining in our arsenal: the vote.  Protect it as best you can.  Support all efforts to insure the vote to ALL citizens.  The last exit before the toll is ahead in November….Turn on your blinker!!

Musings at 2am.....

I just watched a horrible movie by M. Night Shaymalan called “The Happening”.  It seems there is some sort of natural biological phenomena that suddenly descends on the Northeast as a wind blowing through the cities and towns, stopping everyone in their tracks and making them simply commit suicide.  It is completely ridiculous and the dialog is even worse!  When it was over, however, it dawned on me that I was experiencing the same thing, only it was called Covid-19!

Maybe it’s just that I am beginning to go stir crazy, just marking time day after day, each day seeming the same with no end in sight.  I am unsettled because while I am trying to make sense out of each day and be rational about what our chances are of not catching the virus, the madness of the rest of the world is swirling around me!  Just watch the news!  See all the stupid things that people are doing: unhinged behavior where no one wears a mask and social distancing is a joke.  ‘Leaders’ seem unfazed by the danger, ignoring the science and simply

telling everyone that they’ll be fine.  “We have to open up”, they say! “No worries, we’ll all be fine—
and of course we are going to be saved by all the testing we are doing, which is more testing than has ever been done before in the history of the world!”  And the lemmings of America say, “OK!  I believe you-- science is a hoax and this virus stuff is not going to happen to me!”, they bray to each other!

The TV is filled with conflicting messages from those who know what is really happening and those who think they have all the answers-- and are fools!  And I sit here day after day listening to the endless blabber of opposing experts, trying to convince myself that I am not going mad!  I change the channel and I am listening to mini profiles of selected examples of the 100,000 dead ones, or first person accounts from the front line heroes.  The number of dead is hard to get my head wrapped around.  Each name is a mountain of grief for the individuals who agonize over their loss.  Multiply that circle of mourners by 100,000 and it boggles the mind!

Trump refers to them as ‘numbers’ of dead without any scintilla of empathy and it just amplifies the sense of disorientation that I feel.  I am living in a relative cocoon of safety while the world is spinning out of control around me with no one able to tame the chaos.   

What I always imagined was our organized and capable government turns out to be a myth!  I listen day after day as the evidence of our government’s impotence to organize and control this sickness relentlessly washes over us.  No one seems to be able to come up with a plan!  Lots of people talk about what we SHOULD be doing, but no one is doing it!  Our President is openly de-legitimizing the agencies that are supposed to create the solutions and offer guidance and advice.  He is using the sledgehammer of his apparently unstoppable powers to crumble our institutions day after day, while madly telling us what an incredible job he is doing, and no one seems to have a way to stop him.  His acolytes, the Republicans, are part of the swirl of madness that somehow keeps him in power.

Have I made YOU dizzy yet??

I wonder how many people sense this churning chaos that seems unstoppable.  I am embarrassed at

my agita when I realize that I am one of the lucky ones who is well off!  How many millions have no job; not enough food; can’t pay the rent or mortgage; are dealing with impending bankruptcy; are facing eviction; can’t get unemployment—and on and on?

On some level I know the end game is a vaccine if we can all make it to that seemingly unattainable day when we can get an injection and tame this beast.  But the distance between now and then seems to be a chasm of sickness and sorrow that I fear we all are going to have to face….and I know that until that time I must find a way to endure this feeling of helpless disorientation that makes me want to constantly pop a Xanax!

Maybe tomorrow I will watch a Doris Day or a Pee Wee Herman movie!

Deception, Stupidity, or Worse.....

We are dealing with a pandemic that has no cure, no treatment other than palliative treatment, and no vaccine.  Common sense tells all rational people that the only way to try to control it is to stay away from each other, constantly wash our hands, and take all physical precautions that minimize the risk of contact and transmission.  That is simply common sense!

And yet our reality is filled with people who are ignorant of the simple science involved here and are egged on by a cynical national government that is willing to sacrifice lives; personified by a President who openly encourages people to ‘open everything up’ in clear opposition to guidelines he himself presented to us just a few weeks ago for controlling the  pandemic.….a President who has marginalized the CDC, OSHA, law enforcement and the regulations that offered us clean water and air. 

Covid-19 is an airborne virus.  Masks make sense for whatever protection they afford.  And what does our President do?—He tells all of us that he doesn’t want to wear one; he doesn’t need it.  If you or I told someone that, we might affect 2-6 people who listen to us.  When he does it, he affects millions of people with bad advice.  Just another effort to marginalize scientific reason.....

Now he wants to use his ‘authority’ to open up all the churches of America.  If you look at the stats, most infectious hotspots started with congregant gatherings—in churches and other places of worship.  The numbers don’t lie.  Common sense would tell most rational people that encouraging this kind of behavior is counter intuitive and dangerous.   Makes no matter; for Trump it is all about misleading in the service of his own selfish gains—in this case mollifying his Evangelical supporters.  The thousands that will die as a result are not important.

Studies are confirming the facts that hydroxychloroquine is a dangerous therapy for this disease and there is not even anecdotal evidence that it has any prophylactic value at all.  And yet with no scientific basis at all, Trump has been recommending people take it.  Why?  The most logical and cynical reason is that “the use of the drug has become a benchmark in the political culture wars, with Trump allies echoing his calls for the drug as a sign of their confidence in his instincts and as a way of promoting what they see as an optimistic view of the pandemic. The president is probably also promoting the drug because it offers a big political upside — getting to say he was right and the experts were wrong — with a small downside.”, says the New York Times.  Forget that he has no experience as a researcher or any kind of authority to make these recommendations.

So why is he doing all this?  First of all, telling lies is like breathing for him.  His life is a lie.  He has no moral compass at all, so if lying furthers whatever his objectives are, then fine.  We have also affirmed that he is consummately stupid.  He doesn’t read and makes all decisions from his ‘gut’.  Facts and truth are fungible for Trump.  That is not to say that he is not brilliantly manipulating!  Look at the legions of his supporters who reject fact and truth to follow his cultish direction.  As to his motivation for all this counter-intuitive behavior, it should come as no surprise that it is in the service of his own re-election and self-aggrandizement.

Face it—we have the most horrible government we could have at one of the most perilous time we have had in the history of the Republic.  We must all rely on ourselves to weather this nightmare.

I was sitting at the breakfast table with my 30 year-old daughter this morning talking about the possibility of seeing Trump win the election in November.  She said simply that she would move out of the country.  I looked at her and said, “But sweetheart, you are the only hope for this country…you and your generation are the only ones who can save it.”  She looked at me and said, “But Dad, why would I try to save something that won’t offer me healthcare, that pays lip service to democracy, that does everything possible to prevent me from voting; that with his re-election raises the possibility of martial law, corruption of the courts, and disintegration of the foundations of the democracy?”

I couldn’t really answer her…..

Bizarro America

Do you remember the old Superman series of comics?  I loved them and never missed a new edition.  Then one day they introduced a new character—Bizarro Man.  He was spawned by a scientist that was demonstrating his new ‘duplicating ray’ to Superboy and inadvertently created a crude, angular mirror-image of Superboy.  This creation’s speech was flawed, as was his behavior.  He was the negative version of Superboy.  Lex Luthor in later years recreated the ‘duplicating ray’ and tried to use it on Superman in the hopes he could control the creation he made.The Bizarro man that resulted, however, was confused, stating: "Me not human... me not creature... me not even animal! Me unhappy! Me don't belong in world of living people! Me don't know difference between right and wrong — good and evil!"

Why do I bring this up?  I feel like I am now living in that reality, where my America has been transformed into a Bizarro America, where Donald Trump is the Bizarro President and everything that was good about America has been transformed by the ‘duplicating ray’ of the 2016 election.  Up is down, left is right and good is suddenly evil.  The certainty of the rule of law and the security of rational thought has been corrupted into a universe where facts don’t matter and people’s perception of what is right and wrong no longer exists.

Consider the current state of affairs concerning the pandemic.  Rational thought would suggest that the science of how the virus is transmitted is obvious to an educated and aware public.  What we see instead is the wholesale acceptance of Bizarro President’s premise that the pandemic is ‘over’.   “We’re back!”, he exclaims as he foments rejection of the very guidance his administration created on how to stop the spread of the virus two weeks ago! 

And now we find that his administration has been purposefully hiding that guidance and not making it available as he pushes for ‘opening up America’.   He claims testing is overrated and not necessary because “When you test, you find evidence of cases and so if you don’t test, you don’t have any cases!”  That is a statement from Bizarro America!

The CDC has been the envy of the world for its ability to analyze, strategize and manage outbreaks of new diseases around the globe.   Bizarro President does all he can to gaslight the world by denigrating the efforts of research scientists and their decades of advancement in fighting disease.  Bizarro President tells all of us that the scientists’ advice is ‘unacceptable’.  Rather, Covid-19 will just disappear, especially if you try injecting Clorox into your body.  He wants us to believe that if we just resume normal life as it was before the virus, we’ll be fine.  And in Bizarro America, apparently millions believe him.  During this past week in Bizarro Texas and Bizarro Wisconsin, the bars, restaurants and beaches were jammed.  And the rest of our states are following in lockstep, throwing caution to the wind.  Where do you think that will bring us?

The evidence of rapid spread of the virus in nursing homes, meat packing plants, and prisons is simply ignored by many governors who are fans of Bizarro President.  The management in these institutions want to abide by Bizarro President’s mantra that if you don’t test, you won’t see any cases of disease, so they hide their statistics from us to make us believe that we are ‘flattening the curve’.  In fact the governor of Georgia had his public health department create a graph showing the curve of disease and death flattening nicely over the past two weeks---until you look closely at the graph and see that the dates along the X axis that show progression of time are completely out of order, placed purposefully to create the image of a flattening curve when in fact the opposite is actually true!  Governor Kemp in Georgia has been replaced by Bizarro Governor Kemp!

Then there is the evolution of the United States Department of Justice which has become the US Bizarro Department of Justice headed up by Bizarro Attorney General Barr.  In Bizarro America, criminals who are friends of Bizarro President Trump are released from jail (Manafort) or their prosecutions are aborted even though they pleaded guilty to crimes (Flynn).  Just like Bizarro Superman, Bizarro AG Barr and Bizarro President can’t discriminate right from wrong; good from evil.  In Bizarro America now, the rule of law does not apply.

I don’t know what to do about this.  I don’t want to live in Bizarro America….neither do a majority of Americans!  But somehow we are trapped in this place without an apparent escape route.

Now, Bizarro President Trump wants to jail his predecessor President Obama; his last political opponent Hillary Clinton; and his next political opponent Joe Biden.  He claims there is irrefutable evidence that they are all part of the ‘Deep State’ and have been nefariously working for years to undermine and discredit him.  They are guilty of disgraceful crimes (for which he can’t even articulate what the crime is, or present any evidence to support his claims) and therefore members of the Bizarro Senate should haul them all before investigating committees to ‘expose their crimes’ and then Bizarro AG Barr will send them off to prison for at least 50 years!

In answer to all this rubbish, Obama tweets, “Vote!”  True, that is the antidote to Bizarro America, but what are the odds that somehow Bizarro President and Bizarro AG will find a way to turn our federal election into a Bizarro Election?

I guess I will have to wait for the next comic book edition of the “New Adventures in Bizarro Land!”

  

                                                                    God help us.

Darkness in America

With the release of the new Covid-19 projections for the number of cases and the number of deaths from the CDC, we are faced with the realization that what many had hoped was a return to ‘normal’ is not going to happen.  We are now living the new normal.  What is so inconceivable is that so many in our country cannot understand the inverse relationship between reduced reliance on social distancing and the increased spread of the corona virus.  This pandemic is not fake news!  The science is clear, and yet all those who scream for ‘freedom’ in fomented demonstrations simply don’t get it.

If there were even the most minimal coherent leadership in America, we might stand a chance of reducing the effects of this pandemic.  But the people in charge have rejected the science of this public health emergency.  Yesterday we learned that the Trump administration has muzzled Anthony Fauci and will not permit him to testify before the House sub-committee investigating the corona virus outbreak and response.  Why not?  It seems that the President and his administration reject scientific facts and reject transparency.

Hey Dr. Fauci!  This is America!  You have your own voice, don’t you??  Get off your ass and tell us what happened and testify.  Don’t be cowed by people who reject you as a scientific authority!  We must understand where we went wrong so we can be prepared for the next similar threat.  In the words of Donald Trump, “What do you (and we) have to lose?”  Certainly it wouldn’t be your credibility!

Our immediate future is completely reliant on each of us assessing what is best for us individually.  We cannot rely on our government mobilizing to combat this threat.  We each must evaluate our own character values and do what is right.  For me, that means remaining as tightly insulated from others as possible.  There is no one to protect me and my family from the darkness that surrounds us.

I heard a quote from former Governor Chris Christie this morning that gave me chills.  His view is that opening up the country is just so important because we can’t sacrifice our ‘American way of life’.  Oh well, if that means that we should accept the deaths of 3000 people a week because it is important to go to the park or the beach, or eat out at a restaurant, or go to the gym, or buy clothes at the mall, I guess that is ok with him.  That kind of quote is symptomatic of Republican thought that espouses the view that the economy is more important than life.  That is why I called the Republican party the ‘party of death’ in my blogpost a few weeks ago.

What is so hard to integrate into my concept of reality is that a huge number of my fellow citizens either are too ignorant to see the relationship between an ‘opening up’ of America and the prospect of increasing sickness and death all around them, or they simply don’t care.  I guess it will only become real to them about a month from now when scientific projections that they have ignored appear to come true.  And even then, they will reject the clear scientific truth as well as the fact that they might have been wrong.  After all, Donald Trump said it wouldn’t happen, so maybe it really hasn’t happened.  Undoubtedly he will call it fake news.

Our economy will not get better.  In fact, it will get worse.  As the sickness rises again in about three weeks, no one will want to go anywhere.  Stores will have no customers.  Fear again will stalk the land as our health systems get crushed with desperately sick people.   More small businesses will fail and more unemployed will tax the state systems for unemployment insurance.  We are entering a period of prolonged economic suffering and social upheaval.  The lines of cars stretched out to receive food at the local food banks will echo the bread lines of the 1930s.

There is no federal plan for how to deal with any of this.  The Trump plan is to simply ignore it and give up.  “Let the states figure it out for themselves!”, says our President.  “But, haven't we done a magnificent job of recognizing our own shortcomings and persuading all of you citizens that it isn’t my fault?”, he says.  “Don’t worry, it will eventually go away.  We will only lose 250,000 people, which isn’t so bad, is it?  They were all old or infirm anyway….and besides, we don’t want to sacrifice our American way of life!”

                                                       There is darkness in America.