Thank you Deborah for your wonderfully poetic post.
Wednesday felt like a death in the family the feeling I had at my mother’s passing. Despite being very Methodist I sat shiva that day and slept much better that night than the night before.
My plan is to double down on healthy habits mentally and physically. I’m committed to outlasting this foul man who has had such a corrosive effect on our country’s psyche.
In retirement, I read a lot of history. Britain during Queen Elizabeth I was a Protestant country much weaker than the Catholic behemoths of Spain and France. Patriots in 1776 faced insurmountable odds against that same country which had now become the global hegemon. Blacks have endured the 1860s and the 1960s.
George McGovern lost 49 states to Richard Nixon and yet Democrats have controlled the WH for 24 of the years since then. It’s not a time to give up.
The kids will get tired of the narrow and small and insignificant. Mine did.
This is not just a US problem. This narrow place is worldwide we cannot fix it. Like a birth canal, there is always a path through. The mirror fakery is what the kids see first. Fear makes them silent. I feel like an expert in this, having started when Trump started.
I like your photo. Living in Hawaii I saw this every night, in my nightgown, walking around cockroaches, the treasures of the islands.
The Democrat party chose to die on hills that just did not impact that many voters. Social issues don't always make good politics. Ultimately people will vote for their own self interests as they precive them. For decades the Democrat party pandered to urban coastal voters and ignored "flyover country". Couple that with an ongoing trend in pop culture to mock rural white and working class culture and you get Trump. People who despise him as a person voted for him because he gave the appearance of caring about their values and culture. Additionally we have social media and a news media that has wholly abandoned its duty to report facts and inform the public impartially added to the mix. The media is pretty much split into two camps that are cheerleaders for one or the other party. There is much work to do. The republic will endure.
Well said/written, Doc. The last time I felt this betrayed by my fellow Americans was when I was protesting the unjust Vietnam War while in college and getting tear gassed by San Francisco police. Biden got 81 plus million votes when he fired Trump in 2020. Kamala is missing about 11 million of those voters, where the hell did they go?
Well written good advice and a warm reassuring farewell from the Vice President who ran an outstanding campaign. For me, at least, the immediate task is to figure out, hopefully with their help, why friends and family supported a rapist and convicted felon for the Presidency when there were alternative choices available who espoused the same policies and values. Trump will be gone, likely before his full term is up, and if we're to move ahead, which we must, we'll have to find a way to do that together or we'll forever be divided and a house divided against itself inevitably falls. I am not ready to see the demise of the greatest governing ideal humankind has yet come up with and will use such tools as I have in any way I can to forestall it.
Have a great weekend and rest. We'll all need the energy.
But you and all broken-hearted Americans could move to Canada and continue to fight on here against the disgusting, hate-mongering Donald Trump and his crazy V.P. JD Vance and all their craven sycophants.
I myself feel broken hearted for all Americans, because Trump has promised to punish his enemies, and with his huge ego and huge paranoia he could well see ANYONE as his enemy.
Again, my advice is to come to Canada 🇨🇦 and continue to fight on from here.
We Canadians are not perfect, but we are a peaceful and warm people who would welcome you all.
Stop the hand-wringing. That's the first and best order of business.
If you believe in the promises of your faith, then act like you believe it. (Fake it 'till you make it!)
America is not special. I mean, LOOK! If America is special, DJT or anyone like him would not be prez. Face it. It's a young country. We're teenagers compared to many other countries. And we're acting like it.
Start thinking about Christmas. Garland or tinsel? Lighting? Real candles or Bluetooth? What kind of breads are you going to bake? Make your own Holiday cards. We did it last year and had a blast. Did they look professional? Nope. But we had fun. That was the point.
Life is to be lived. The way to give DJT what he wants is to wring your hands. The way to thwart him is to live. Faithful in a belief system or not, you'll be doing what is best...by living joyfully. Render unto DJT what is DJTs...not much.
The single most important and difficult task left to all who believe that America can be better than this, if for no other reason than it's been so in the past, is simple and straight forward. And that task is: not to give up and quit.
So, while we'll all approach this in our own way if we make the choice not to quit, I will move forward like this...
I will live my life as I did before, with the same values, with the same concerns, always supporting and voting for those seeking office who respect and reflect those things themselves the most closely.
I will not deny someone in need help, if I can be of help, regardless of who they may be.
I will not intentionally provoke confrontation as I go about my daily life, but neither will I run from it if forced on me.
And neither will I temper my response in the face of it as I've done far too many times in the past in the name of comity or for the sake of perhaps preserving a personal relationship of some kind, since I'm basically a temperate man of the live and let live type.
But no longer will I live with the idea that I owe anyone anything at all in the way of personal respect or deference who today supports what Donald Trump and the GOP represent or what they will attempt to now do to this country. Again.
There is no longer any rationalization of their choice they could make that could change my mind about that, no matter who they may be nor how *nice* they may seem as individual people. For there's now clearly just too large a gap between their fundamental values as Americans (and in some instances even simply as human beings) and my own to be bridged by polite conversation and earnest good will.
Whether they will say it to my face or not, they've declared me as an enemy to my country and to themselves, at least by proxy in their voting for Trump, and by so doing just as surely as if they'd shouted it in the town square through a bull horn.
And while I must and do respect... no, respect is the wrong word here... while I must tolerate and accept their right to choose as they wish in the voting booth, I do not recognize any right on their part - beyond that which is theirs simply by default through our Constitution and its1st Amendment - to vilify me as unpatriotic with no evidence in hand, or as an enemy of my country or even worse, simply because I choose differently than they do in that same voting booth, exercising that very same right.
And this they have done now - and done in the most egregious and disingenuous of fashions - for nearly a decade, with the rhetoric of this just-ended campaign cycle having reached new levels of vitriol, hate, deception and barefaced lying, and which they personally affirm by casting their votes and therefore their lots with the purveyors of hatred and untruth.
I'm sorry, Doc. I do respect what you wrote here today. And I get what you've said about "judging" people in the past and don't necessarily disagree with that. But everyone must draw lines in their lives about certain things under certain conditions, and here I draw mine. I suppose with malice toward none and charity for all is just a bit out of my reach at the moment.
But what's not out of my reach at the moment is the resolve to let anyone foolish enough to provoke me about any and all things concerning Trump and the now well-known tenets and intentions of Trumpism - perhaps thinking in some pathetic way that they're going to "own me" by doing so (yes, this has happened to me in the past) ... I resolve that what they will get in return is a response they won't be expecting.
To wit: Your man has won. Enjoy it while it lasts. And revel in the fact that people like you have beaten people like me for now, and that you or they may at some point beat me right down to the ground both figuratively or even literally, because whether you'll admit it to yourself or not, that's what many of you would really like to do.
But fair warning: while you might succeed at that in the end, I'll not be stopping on the way down to take a knee.
Thank you Deborah for your wonderfully poetic post.
Wednesday felt like a death in the family the feeling I had at my mother’s passing. Despite being very Methodist I sat shiva that day and slept much better that night than the night before.
My plan is to double down on healthy habits mentally and physically. I’m committed to outlasting this foul man who has had such a corrosive effect on our country’s psyche.
In retirement, I read a lot of history. Britain during Queen Elizabeth I was a Protestant country much weaker than the Catholic behemoths of Spain and France. Patriots in 1776 faced insurmountable odds against that same country which had now become the global hegemon. Blacks have endured the 1860s and the 1960s.
George McGovern lost 49 states to Richard Nixon and yet Democrats have controlled the WH for 24 of the years since then. It’s not a time to give up.
The kids will get tired of the narrow and small and insignificant. Mine did.
This is not just a US problem. This narrow place is worldwide we cannot fix it. Like a birth canal, there is always a path through. The mirror fakery is what the kids see first. Fear makes them silent. I feel like an expert in this, having started when Trump started.
I like your photo. Living in Hawaii I saw this every night, in my nightgown, walking around cockroaches, the treasures of the islands.
Good advice!
The Democrat party chose to die on hills that just did not impact that many voters. Social issues don't always make good politics. Ultimately people will vote for their own self interests as they precive them. For decades the Democrat party pandered to urban coastal voters and ignored "flyover country". Couple that with an ongoing trend in pop culture to mock rural white and working class culture and you get Trump. People who despise him as a person voted for him because he gave the appearance of caring about their values and culture. Additionally we have social media and a news media that has wholly abandoned its duty to report facts and inform the public impartially added to the mix. The media is pretty much split into two camps that are cheerleaders for one or the other party. There is much work to do. The republic will endure.
Well said/written, Doc. The last time I felt this betrayed by my fellow Americans was when I was protesting the unjust Vietnam War while in college and getting tear gassed by San Francisco police. Biden got 81 plus million votes when he fired Trump in 2020. Kamala is missing about 11 million of those voters, where the hell did they go?
Perhaps they never existed?
Well written good advice and a warm reassuring farewell from the Vice President who ran an outstanding campaign. For me, at least, the immediate task is to figure out, hopefully with their help, why friends and family supported a rapist and convicted felon for the Presidency when there were alternative choices available who espoused the same policies and values. Trump will be gone, likely before his full term is up, and if we're to move ahead, which we must, we'll have to find a way to do that together or we'll forever be divided and a house divided against itself inevitably falls. I am not ready to see the demise of the greatest governing ideal humankind has yet come up with and will use such tools as I have in any way I can to forestall it.
Have a great weekend and rest. We'll all need the energy.
Deborah, I agree with your advice to Never Quit.
But you and all broken-hearted Americans could move to Canada and continue to fight on here against the disgusting, hate-mongering Donald Trump and his crazy V.P. JD Vance and all their craven sycophants.
I myself feel broken hearted for all Americans, because Trump has promised to punish his enemies, and with his huge ego and huge paranoia he could well see ANYONE as his enemy.
Again, my advice is to come to Canada 🇨🇦 and continue to fight on from here.
We Canadians are not perfect, but we are a peaceful and warm people who would welcome you all.
Stop the hand-wringing. That's the first and best order of business.
If you believe in the promises of your faith, then act like you believe it. (Fake it 'till you make it!)
America is not special. I mean, LOOK! If America is special, DJT or anyone like him would not be prez. Face it. It's a young country. We're teenagers compared to many other countries. And we're acting like it.
Start thinking about Christmas. Garland or tinsel? Lighting? Real candles or Bluetooth? What kind of breads are you going to bake? Make your own Holiday cards. We did it last year and had a blast. Did they look professional? Nope. But we had fun. That was the point.
Life is to be lived. The way to give DJT what he wants is to wring your hands. The way to thwart him is to live. Faithful in a belief system or not, you'll be doing what is best...by living joyfully. Render unto DJT what is DJTs...not much.
Note: Hand-wringing is bad for your skin.
The single most important and difficult task left to all who believe that America can be better than this, if for no other reason than it's been so in the past, is simple and straight forward. And that task is: not to give up and quit.
So, while we'll all approach this in our own way if we make the choice not to quit, I will move forward like this...
I will live my life as I did before, with the same values, with the same concerns, always supporting and voting for those seeking office who respect and reflect those things themselves the most closely.
I will not deny someone in need help, if I can be of help, regardless of who they may be.
I will not intentionally provoke confrontation as I go about my daily life, but neither will I run from it if forced on me.
And neither will I temper my response in the face of it as I've done far too many times in the past in the name of comity or for the sake of perhaps preserving a personal relationship of some kind, since I'm basically a temperate man of the live and let live type.
But no longer will I live with the idea that I owe anyone anything at all in the way of personal respect or deference who today supports what Donald Trump and the GOP represent or what they will attempt to now do to this country. Again.
There is no longer any rationalization of their choice they could make that could change my mind about that, no matter who they may be nor how *nice* they may seem as individual people. For there's now clearly just too large a gap between their fundamental values as Americans (and in some instances even simply as human beings) and my own to be bridged by polite conversation and earnest good will.
Whether they will say it to my face or not, they've declared me as an enemy to my country and to themselves, at least by proxy in their voting for Trump, and by so doing just as surely as if they'd shouted it in the town square through a bull horn.
And while I must and do respect... no, respect is the wrong word here... while I must tolerate and accept their right to choose as they wish in the voting booth, I do not recognize any right on their part - beyond that which is theirs simply by default through our Constitution and its1st Amendment - to vilify me as unpatriotic with no evidence in hand, or as an enemy of my country or even worse, simply because I choose differently than they do in that same voting booth, exercising that very same right.
And this they have done now - and done in the most egregious and disingenuous of fashions - for nearly a decade, with the rhetoric of this just-ended campaign cycle having reached new levels of vitriol, hate, deception and barefaced lying, and which they personally affirm by casting their votes and therefore their lots with the purveyors of hatred and untruth.
I'm sorry, Doc. I do respect what you wrote here today. And I get what you've said about "judging" people in the past and don't necessarily disagree with that. But everyone must draw lines in their lives about certain things under certain conditions, and here I draw mine. I suppose with malice toward none and charity for all is just a bit out of my reach at the moment.
But what's not out of my reach at the moment is the resolve to let anyone foolish enough to provoke me about any and all things concerning Trump and the now well-known tenets and intentions of Trumpism - perhaps thinking in some pathetic way that they're going to "own me" by doing so (yes, this has happened to me in the past) ... I resolve that what they will get in return is a response they won't be expecting.
To wit: Your man has won. Enjoy it while it lasts. And revel in the fact that people like you have beaten people like me for now, and that you or they may at some point beat me right down to the ground both figuratively or even literally, because whether you'll admit it to yourself or not, that's what many of you would really like to do.
But fair warning: while you might succeed at that in the end, I'll not be stopping on the way down to take a knee.