Lately, I fully admit, I feel as though we are all being pulled in so many directions that it is difficult to know where to look, or even what I want to say about any of the divisive politics in the U.S. Yet, fear not,  I have no intention of giving in to that confusion, that sense of hopelessness.

No way, not going to happen. You know, yesterday was this blog’s official start anniversary, the day I published my first post was 6 years ago. This blog was supposed to just really be a way to pass my time after Tim died, with really no real higher purpose but more or less writing therapy, and given that I was stranded basically 3 hours away from my home, and had a lot of time to kill till the spring, seemed like just the thing.

Well, 6 years later, some things have certainly changed, the design for one, like over and over and over and over again and only because I love the design part as much as the writing part, truth be told. However, in fact, I don’t really think my purpose has changed that much,  really hasn’t changed that much at all. 

Just like back then, I post pics from my life, prose bits and bobs, more poems, probably now far more opinion than back in the beginning, and I will never completely turn away from expressing those opinions, I go with the flow here, and if I feel it, if I want to write it, it will be so.

There really is very little that would persuade me to do otherwise as I’m a hardcore idealist, once described as like a knight in shining armour, steadfast and determined, and always loyal to my own values first and foremost. When I was young I even wanted to join the French Foreign Legion, you know, go out and change the world, fight for the underdog, the forgotten, fight against the evil doers. Yah, that kind of idealist. 

Curse or gift, it is why I sometimes have to turn away from the destruction I see to our natural world, the damage this man is doing, and this trend of ignoring science, because it makes me very, very sad, and so frustrated, and yes, angry!

“…After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are the moving impulses of our life. But it is only those who do not understand our people, who believe that our national life is entirely absorbed by material motives. We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things that we want much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism.” 

Calvin Coolidge

I mean, what do I pick? Where do I start? A company in Illinois getting a pass for 6 months from the EPA before it announced it was pumping cancerous stuff out into the surrounding population? That’s nice, eh? Or, do I rant about Yellowstone National Park being opened up for hunting, or the quiet way in which Trump is dismantling the laws protecting endangered species?

To be honest, I don’t even read a lot of those articles anymore because the rage inside I feel for how backward and short-sighted this administration is, how greedy, how the pack of them are pandering to wealthy and opinionated corporations who have been allowed access to what should be more rational minds, and paying them to look the other way whilst they poison their fellow Americans, dump waste in to their own waterways putting millions of people at risk of God alone knows what new horror, wipe off the face of the map more and more endangered species, that the damage all that is going to do to the surrounding ecosystems will mean future generations will have to spend millions and millions of dollars to clean it up, not to mention the millions of people whose very lives will be put at risk by their greed, and sometimes that all is just too paralyzing.

Yet, let’s be honest here, many of these wealthy opinionated individuals who run these companies do not give a rat’s arse about those millions and millions or the minions, perhaps they think of all that as a small price to pay, nothing more than an unfortunate side effect on the path to whatever they may desire, if they think of them at all, and that really, really, really pisses me off to see that go completely unchecked, and that greedy man has been given carte blanche to do whatever he wants.

Clearly, he sees compassion as a weakness reserved for the more democratically inclined snowflakes.

There is no other way to see Trumpers as anything but mean and nasty and don’t care a fig about the quality of life of anyone but themselves, and certainly not someone who has a different skin colour than themselves, and will push their neighbour or friend or mother out of the way for that down and dirty priced SmartTV the day after Thanksgiving.

And there stands the rumpTus at his podium, turned in towards the centre of America, concentrating his sole attention on the navel of his loyalists, campaigning for re-election almost since day one, I suppose cause maybe that’s all he knows how to do.

He is completely incompetent and not fit for such a role as President of the United States, but boy oh boy, he’s good at inciting the multitudes to hate whomever he points his finger at, and notice he doesn’t seem to want to take credit for that? Must be mesmerizing, I suppose, to realize you have that sort of power. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Now, one would assume, incorrectly, that even pompous fools would acquiesce and take advice, maybe advice on the basic needs for their countries security, like not using their goddamn cellphone to make calls! Yeah, took him till last year to finally give in and use the more secure landline, and gawd knows what crap he said or did on that thing and who might have been listening.

But hey, no worries mate, it is commonly thought by his aides that he doesn’t really know all that much sensitive or top secret shite anyway, cause he doesn’t read his intel briefs, so what harm can there really be?

You know, to keep the country going along tickety-boo, and prevent the idiot in chief from betraying his country, unwittingly or otherwise has become a fulltime job. Well, he certainly did say he’d create jobs. Far more fact-checkers, researchers, more forensic accountants with a nice cushy long-term contract, like the probe into all these guys records sort of jobs. Security details for journalist jobs I would imagine went through the roof, and book deals, holy moly cannoli.  

AND, the Ruskie still have their noses up into U.S. business,  more election meddling, and like WOW that’s a big shocker. Imagine, with the United States government has done absolutely nothing to prevent it from happening and again they are found to be meddling? That’s curious. 

It was laid bare when prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia revealed on October 19 they had taken the Washington mantra “follow the money” to heart in tracking the activities of Russian citizen Elena Khusyaynova, chief accountant of Operation Lakhta.

VOX – By Alex Finley – Center for Public Integrity  Oct 25, 2018, 6:00am EDT

So the hypocrite in chief rants on and on at his rallies about crooked Hillary, for the crime of using her home, unsecured, computer to send work-related emails. Ahem. Lock ‘er….what was that last bit?

He really just doesn’t care. Really, really, doesn’t care. Doesn’t acknowledge that he might want to listen to the advice and wisdom of those whose job it is to protect and secure the nation from foreign and hostile powers.

And he certainly won’t ever admit that his rhetoric incites people to violent acts, to join racist violent groups, to even go so far as to send bombs to whomever he deems an enemy because he has taken them from the fringe to the forefront. Nope, nothing to do with him, he says. 

But no, oh no, he knows best, have a little temper tantrum once in a while so that everyone pays more attention to him, and then he slumps off into the isolation he enjoys back at his little oval office, tucked inside his white-columned mansion on a hill, oblivious, tweeting out absurdities at 3:14 AM, advocating violence for his own amusement, proclaiming this and that, and giggling at the chaos he creates, as if that is what is most important, his own amusement.

“The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his “ideas” almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.
Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill.” 

Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here

To be honest, I really think it is. I think he just finds this all very amusing. He’s not Presidental because he doesn’t want to lead, he just wants to be amused, and the centre of your attention, of course. He rolls back regulations that prevent greedy folks from destruction for his sole amusement, for the reaction he gets. He doesn’t care that companies pump cancerous gases or whatever out into their surrounding environments, or that so many poisons are being pumped out into the ecosystems that they will forever be destroyed, which BTW, will kill tourism to those areas.

Hey, wanna go to Yellowstone National Park and be shot at? Sounds like a blast. I know from experience when I was living up at the Lake, in Mid-western Ontario, everyone was warned to stay out of the woods and meadows and fields as stupid hunters up from the city would be traipsing around in their brand spanking new gear when the season was in full swing – thankfully it was only for a few weeks.

It today just seems that this man encourages the worst in people. His language incites people to violence, his words are all these angry and disillusioned citizens desire. He feeds into their fear, hand spooning into their fragile and naive minds lies, and dissent. He surrounds himself with greedy individuals with their own agenda, cause he really could care less, and gives an ear to foreign entities that every past President would never have given such acceptance to. He praises these despots as strong leaders and gives them a level of respect that in the past would have been reserved for one’s allies.

Basically, he has within just two short years completely destroyed the strong and moralistic, value centred policies, and politics, that once fashioned America as a world leader. Today, America is a, well, both a laughing stock and whose word on anything is now taken with a grain of salt, since no one really knows anymore who is really running that show. Oh, and show it is, reality show that is. A reality show is all the man knows, in truth, I really believe that he doesn’t distinguish the difference, and many of his followers don’t, and leadership to him is about getting his own way, and not in any way for the good of the country.

I mean,  those who have this sort of wealth and power know that these things they do will have little to no effect on them. They, the rich and powerful, can always afford to go to higher ground when the worse happens. Sure, millions may die by their inaction or deregulations, whatever, here and there, PFT, why should they care?

A plutocracy or plutarchy is a society that is ruled or controlled by people of great wealth or income. The first known use of the term in English dates from 1631. Unlike systems such as democracy, capitalism, socialism or anarchism, plutocracy is not rooted in an established political philosophy. 

Wikipedia

This is what happens when a plutocracy is allowed to govern the land. When the greed and profit of the few are given the keys to the Capital, to the government, and are free to use the long arms of that government to squash the dissent of the freedoms enjoyed by the press through demonization. Dismantling the power of government branches, such as the EPA. Even Newt Gingrich admitted that Kavanaugh was a plant to protect the president;

“We’ll see whether or not the Kavanaugh fight was worth it,” Gingrich said in an interview with the Washington Post. With Kavanaugh’s confirmation, the Supreme Court is the most ideologically conservative it has been in a generation.

VOX – By Tara Golshan  Oct 26, 2018, 12:20pm EDT

Yes, just let that sink in. These guys seem to be so confident that they are now admitting publically that Kavanaugh was a stooge, a Judge there solely for swinging the vote to whichever way the President desires, or requires, as well no doubt of being the means to further their nastiest alt-right agenda’s.

Right now this man has basically be given a free reign, with Republicans leading in all the layers of government, and now we see the true face of the party.

A party that now represents the very essence of corporate greed, of open racism, white nationalistic mean-spirited and selfish individuals, the wealthiest, led by a man who only serves to amuse himself, and feather his own nest, and if the Democrats take the House back and try to lay a hair on the 45th, or try to punish him for his corruption, well, no worries, he has his very own Judge on a leash.

It is astonishing to watch it all unfold, even though it is happening in another country from where I live, the proximity of the U.S. has always meant that this area of SouthWestern Ontario is heavily influenced by whatever was going on down yonder of the 49th parallel.

Our Premier is a case in point, Ford, who is cutting or discontinuing any programs that has anything to do with the environment, clawing back the wage increase and all the other worker protections the previous Liberal government put in place, and I can not even express the sadness and horror at the damage this man and his gaggle of greedy corporate backers have in store for us.

When the wealthy are given this sort of power, when this level of greed and these profit-driven decisions are allowed to fashion government policy, we are doomed.

The only answer is to forge ahead. To not let this stop us from pushing for what we know to be right, to gather our own sense of what we KNOW to be right and wrong.

Compassion is and always will be a strength, never a weakness.

The environment does and always will need our protection from those who only think to serve their own ends. 

And, finally, that wealthy men and women should not be given such a free reign. 

Oh, and that there is more of us then there is of them. Remember that!

And here’s something to chew on, my fellow Americans;

“We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians — be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.

How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.” 

Wendell Berry

A friend recently had a wonderful idea, that rather than protest being a loud and angry march through the streets with nifty slogans and placards, instead have a large and expansive gathering of individuals all quietly standing stock still staring at, oh, I don’t know, the Supreme Court, the White House, on Capitol Hill, watching, making sure they know they are being watched, being judged, and to remember who it is they serve. Spook the hell out of them at the very least, and about as far from an angry mob as one can get. 

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