Monthly Archives: October 2022

Love without right action

Love without right action is as useless as an expensive friendship card with a handwritten note expressing how important your love is.

Right action reassures those we love of our intentions. We take immediate steps when we see they’re hurt, to comfort them, to protect them.

Love that can’t listen patiently but jumps in to interrupt and object, defensive, deflecting, anticipating hurt, is not the kind of love that can heal anybody’s hurt.

You can declare your love with a torrent of heartfelt words, and with complete sincerity, but only love you demonstrate by compassionate action is worth more than an expensive Hallmark card and an impressively pricey token made of gold.

Note to a hurt friend who will not talk

Two old friends come to a painful impasse, each blaming the other for causing the hurt and extending their deepening  estrangement.  Everything that happens between them afterwards seems to confirm their view that the other person is a hurtful asshole, probably hurtful beyond redemption.   

This pain between them, and the corrosive blame they place on each other, will resolve either into eternal silence, that resolute death during life, or they can learn things they don’t really know how to do regarding friendship:  how to make amends, how to forgive, how to heal after an angry, traumatizing conflict.   

These lessons must be learned by both of them before there is any hope of fixing their mortally wounded friendship.  Silence, whatever comfort one may take in sheltering in it, may not be the best way to learn these difficult arts.

The world at war

We sometimes find ourselves in the middle of wars we don’t understand.  We can be under siege long before we even find out about the attempt to starve us into surrender.  Sometimes surrender is not enough, only by offering our lives will the blood debt be settled, if the enemy is implacable enough.  This has been going on for thousands of years, among Wise Apes, homo sapiens. 

At one time, within tribes, there were wise elders you could go to when you found yourself under attack by someone intent on destroying your good name and erasing you from society.  These elders would listen carefully, ask questions, pose other questions and broker peace, except when peace was impossible, in which case they’d render a judgment.   If you lyingly assassinated a fellow tribe member’s reputation you would be censured by the tribe, or sometimes sent packing.

Today we have a different system.  Nowadays we must rely on self-help.  Sometimes, we are told, we just have to suck it up if we find ourselves on the wrong end of somebody’s undying need to prevail, no matter what.   We either pretend everything is fine, or so much the worse for us if we still have the childish need to remain in pain, just because we were treated roughly, unfairly and told to suck it up and stop being a fucking baby.

Mel Brooks’s timeless truth about empathy comes to mind, when I think about others on the outskirts of the war, quietly taking the side of the righteous aggressor by taking no side:   Tragedy is when I break my fingernail.  Comedy is when you fall into a manhole and die. 

subway drawing

The mask mandate on the New York City subway is a bit squishy right now, they kind of recommend you wear a mask, but nobody will really make a fuss. It’s usually about 50% in each car wearing masks. Somehow this lady’s face on the A train the other night seemed to say it all to me, as I huffed into my mask.

anti-masker

Ron DeathSantis– cool dude

Heather Cox Richardson on strongman wannabe Ron DeathSantis:

This destructive storm highlights the distance between reality and the ideology that calls for getting rid of the federal government.

As a newly elected congress member in 2013, now-governor of Florida Ron DeSantis was one of the 67 House Republicans who voted against a $9.7 billion federal flood insurance assistance package for the victims of Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey. Now, with Florida on the ropes, DeSantis asked President Joe Biden for an emergency declaration to free up federal money and federal help even before the storm hit, and said Tuesday, “We all need to work together, regardless of party lines.” 

Heather then describes the hugely successful Republican push since Reagan to move wealth increasingly toward the already very wealthy and away from the average American

There is a direct correlation between growing economic inequality and the growing popularity of authoritarianism. Scholars of authoritarian systems note that a population that feels economically, religiously, or culturally dispossessed is an easy target for an authoritarian who promises to bring back a mythological world in which its members were powerful.

But, having lifted strongmen into power, they learn that they were only tools to put in place someone whose decisions are absolute and who is no longer bound by the law.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-28-2022?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Got to work hard to get out the vote and make sure this Trump wannabe DeathSantis, overruling the will of Florida voters regarding former felons voting, with his armed “election integrity” goons intimidating voters, still loses reelection as Florida gauleiter [1]  by a million votes.

[1]  A Gauleiter was a regional leader of the Nazi Party who served as the head of a Gau or Reichsgau. Gauleiter was the third-highest rank in the Nazi political leadership, subordinate only to Reichsleiter and to the Führer himself. The position was effectively abolished with the fall of the Nazi regime on 8 May 1945.

MAGA= fight to the death

In order to ensure that the greatest former and future president in history has the final say, no matter what, loyal MAGA officials will do whatever he tells them to do, espouse anything he tells them to believe in.   It was a small shock at first to see a “principled” “moderate” “true conservative” like Mitt Romney (who once famously, if belatedly, took a stand and voted guilty on one article of impeachment against Trump after MAGA-man literally unleashed a lynch mob to try to overturn the 2020 election) vote with the rest of his party for united rejection of everything Biden looked for a bipartisan coalition to pass.   It’s just normal now.  If we can call it that.  Usual is a better word, or expected.

So F POTUS, who shut down his own government at one point, to get his way (very presidential, sir!) and who had the debt ceiling raised three times to pay for things he wanted government to pay for, has stamped his cloven hoof and told his MAGA followers in Congress that they better not piss him off by caving in to the partisan, sick, dangerous Radical Left Democrats who are destroying the nation he’s still working so hard to make great again.   

Here’s Heather Cox Richardson with the story about the looming fight to the death about raising the debt ceiling (and the alternative is the US defaulting on its debts, massive unemployment and a major recession) and the demand of the psychopathic god of the godless party of religious fanaticism.  The rest of her Letter from an American gives the historical parallel with the same scorched earth tactics used by the former Confederacy in 1879 — and how it came back to bite them in the 1880 election:

And yet, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who had voted to raise or suspend the debt ceiling 32 times in his career, said, “There is no chance, no chance the Republican conference will…help Democrats…resume ramming through partisan socialism.” His stand was in part because it was not clear he had the votes he needed to support an increase, even though establishment Republicans like McConnell were quite aware of the damage a default would create.

Driving the Republican stance was former president Trump, who pushed MAGA Republicans to use the threat of default to get what they want. “The way I look at it,” he wrote, “what the Democrats are proposing, on so many different levels, will destroy our country. Therefore, Republicans have no choice but to do what they have to do, and the Democrats will have no choice but to concede all of the horror they are trying to inflict upon the future of the United States.” Trump was not happy when McConnell backed down. He issued a statement blaming McConnell for “folding” and added, “He’s got all of the cards with the debt ceiling, it’s time to play the hand.”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-29-2022?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

The logic is so clear, so classic.  They hurt me.  Kill them all.  It was the final stand of one of F POTUS’s great heroes, Mr. Hitler, another master of five dimensional chess: if Germany lost the war they all deserve to die, for letting me, God’s chosen instrument, suffer an undeserved defeat because they are weak, unworthy of a leader like me and deserve to all die defending my corpse.  And so it was for many German boys, slaughtered at their posts as the Red Army and the Allied armies took Berlin the day Hitler shot his beloved dog, poisoned his wife and killed himself.  Insane fuckers fight to the death and beyond.