Grow Up, Stand Up, Speak Out, or Stand Down, But For God's Sake, Do Something
Grow Up, Stand Up, Speak Out, or Stand Down, But For God's Sake, Do Something
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/jaime-oneill/87890/grow-up-stand-up-speak-out-or-stand-down-but-for-gods-sake-do-something
We have a new year looming, a year front-loaded with the prospect of more trouble and pain. For anyone paying even the slightest attention to what's going on, it's pretty obvious that a shit storm is coming our way, with the howling winds of more Republican lies, chicanery, voter suppression, presidential tantrums on a daily basis, and big packages of ugliness, callousness, irresponsibility and cruelty delivered ceaselessly. We'll see more sneaky laws passed by corrupt right wingers that advance the danger we're all in. We'll see more mass shootings, followed by the thoughtless thoughts and empty prayers from those who refuse to offer anything else. We'll also learn, ever-so-incrementally, of the worldwide web of criminality that underlies the Trump presidency, the ripple effects of corruption seeded by Rudy, Lev, Igor, and friends in their assault on democracy. We'll know more of what we've experienced since the day Trump made that godawful inaugural speech that set the tone for the ongoing mindfuckery ever since then.
Our intelligence will be insulted every damn day in one way or another. We will be told things that are clearly not true; we will be gaslighted, tormented by the tyrannical reign of stupidity and denial of reality, sickened by Fox "News" and Sinclair broadcasting bullshit. We will be treated to obfuscations that will continue to plague our very sanity. And we will be held in suspense as a none-too-duly-elected POTUS is tried on two articles of impeachment issued on the basis of an obvious record of abuses of power far more expansive than what's mentioned in those articles of impeachment. And we will hold our breaths, hoping that there is a particle of decency or courage or love of country in the hearts and minds of Republican senators, or in those people who cling to Trump as an infallible agent of God's will, the great deliveryman of stock market gains and restrictions on regulations in the fight to save human and animal habitat.
Hope, as Emily Dickinson wrote, may be "the thing with feathers," but that bird's been pretty damn plucked over the last three years. The thing with feathers hasn't enough feathers these days to take flight. It's a dodo of hope, damn near extinct. So forget the feathers. We try every day to find a worm of hope in the day's news, but the worms are small, and there aren't many. First, we clung to the idea that the Mueller report would create a wave of revulsion, a surge of outrage that would create a national commitment to democracy, the rule of law, and our insistence that Americans would not tolerate foreign interference in our elections. That hope died, a dead bird on the highway of disinformation and lawlessness issuing from the top law enforcement officer of the United States, the low bar of William Barr, Donald Trump's Roy Cohn.
And then there were the hopes raised by Trump's tweets, or his bald-faced lies and unfolding criminality, his implacable obstruction of justice, his orders to underlings to ignore legally issued subpoenas to appear before Congressional committees, his displays of deep ignorance. With each of those outrages, those of us surviving clusters of brain cells were sure that our revulsion would at last be shared by all, or almost all, that the popular will would turn, at long last, against such blatant misrule, so much chaos, so much harm to the nation's security and fundamental values.
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