Morford: Resolutions for the hopeful, and the Trumped
Resolutions for the hopeful, and the Trumped
We may never see another like him in our lifetime. What a gift he was. Maybe we weren't quite ready?
The questions loometh over 2017 like a plague of very despondent locusts: What can you do? How to steel yourself proper, lock your jaw, gird your loins, hold your ground and set your resolve against the coming Trump hatestorm, even as you remain fluxive in spirit and effective in action, calmly rejecting the impulse to jump off the nearest bridge of anthropocenic doom? This much we must re-acknowledge: No matter the era, no matter the orange-faced, pussy-groping wolf pissing on everyone’s door, we must, the wise ones say, always resist. Fight the dogma. Aim for the light. Why? Because the alternative is far worse. The alternative is only death. Here, then, a quick, clip n’ go list of only mildly ominous resolutions for those who might feel, as I do, that the classic resolutions – eat better, exercise more, don’t kill things, et al – seem to lack sufficient… how do you say? Right: Karmic firepower. For 2017, maybe try:
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Surreptitious mocking
Nothing, but nothing works like humor – a wry wink, a carefully placed witticism, a sweet grenade of serene sarcasm – to deflect and/or infuriate the tiny-brained and the myopic. If you must occasionally engage with the darker forces eagerly dragging America into a karmic sewer, skip the facts (they reject those anyway), and try compassionate dismissiveness, served with a sly smile. What, too lefty elitist? Bulls-t. In a land where rage and gleeful ignorance elected a tyrannical new king, savvy parody can help light the path to sanctuary.
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Decapitate like Organa
Carrie Fisher often said what she loved most about playing Princess Leia, aside from Organa’s sharp-tongued feistiness (and hooking up with Harrison Ford), was that Leia got to kill – not coddle, not have a sympathetic conversation with, not try to understand the sadistic mental slitherings of – but straight-up kill Jabba the Hut, choking him to death on the chains of his own monstrous oppression. You read it right: she loved doing it. Sometimes a careful reconsideration of one’s own views and a thoughtful hearing-out of others’ positions is very much in order. And sometimes you need to choke that fat, authoritarian bastard to death on his own slimy megalomania to achieve imperial liberation. Hey, it’s what the princess would have wanted.
Re-champion the Goddess
Time to relocate and re-champion all feminist icons and heroes for 2017. Galvanize the goddess.
To my reading, no other group in America was as devastated, as hurled into the regressive abyss this last election than progressive women. More than immigrants, more than Muslims, more than the black or LGBT communities, American women are about to undergo a savage, crushing reversal of much of the pro-feminist progress made in the last 50 years, to a degree it’s rather sickening to fathom. From reversing Roe v. Wade to gutting women’s rights, from Trump’s groping support of rape culture to eliminating rules for equal pay and family leave, from defunding Planned Parenthood to undermining Title IX, the Trump era is to feminism what nuclear war is to organic farming. Miss no opportunity to support and re-ignite the intelligent feminine. I still believe the future is female, but, sadly, it’s going to take quite a while longer to get there.
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http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2016/12/30/resolutions-for-the-hopeful-and-the-trumped/#photo-782921