How Is It Possible that More People Haven’t Died in the Last 30 Days?
The MAGA folks are thrilled that people living here with brown skin are terrified about what’s happening under Trump. But how sustainable is this? How long will it take until fatal gunshot wounds between the hunters and the hunted become too common to keep track of?
Moreover, is this what we want from our government?
I’m a straight, white 70-year-old Quaker school graduate (largely pacifist) who doesn’t own a gun. But what if this were a different situation, say, one in which I had reason to fear that my family and I could be kidnapped at gunpoint by armed and masked criminals?
Who, regardless of their political/religious philosophies, wouldn’t buy weapons (big ones) and use them to protect themselves and their families?
I keep thinking of what I would do if someone knocked on my front door and told me to come with him, especially before my wife and I became empty-nesters and I still had our kids to protect. If he couldn’t produce a warrant, I’d say, “One more step and I’m going to blow a hole in your chest the size of a cantaloupe.”
My reasoning: I could go to prison, but I doubt it. I’d love to meet the jury that’s going to convict me for defending my own life and that of my loved ones.
We have a choice to make here before this gets really ugly.
It’s just a matter of time.
The story at left is a strange one, though worth telling for a good reason: We all should make sure that money plays its proper role in our lives.
I would describe what Rousseau said about himself here as “gutsy.” Most of us don’t want paradoxes in our mental lives; such “cognitive dissonance” as it is called is an uncomfortable phenomenon.
If Dickens’ hope as expressed here is going to come to fruition, it will be because decent people actively made it happen.
Trump’s following of amoral rich people and uneducated whites seems to be remaining in place, because neither group actually cares too much about the veracity of what comes out of his mouth. The former group is getting tax breaks, and the latter group is getting mass deportation of non-whites.
Donna Smedley writes:
Without doubt, a cleanly and frequently mowed lawn of some variety of grass was the paradigm for our front and back yards when we were young.
It’s hard to know how the mass deportation of law-abiding though undocumented workers will turn out. Here are a few possibilities:
At left are the words of billionaire Mark Cuban, offering an observation on the U.S. president that we don’t encounter every day.
It’s great to see the new pope promoting kindness. This represents real change from the entire history of the church before Pope Francis came along in 2013.
