A Quiet Thanksgiving

 As I headed out on a morning bike ride today, the roads weren't deserted, but they were quiet. The patches of ice that had formed overnight had melted as the sun angled in and nudged the temperature into the mid 30s (F).

The lack of traffic and the silent houses made me think that the majority of people went away for the holiday, or were sleeping late. The sense of abandonment pulled up one of my favorite Thanksgiving memories.

In November, 1975, I was at the University of Florida. My family was in Cheboygan, Michigan. That's almost but not quite where the tip of the middle finger would be if lower Michigan was wearing a glove instead of a mitten. It was more than 1,300 highway miles to drive there. The family had already expended a lot of travel budget at the end of the summer to get everyone to my grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary party. So we all agreed that it made sense for me to stay on campus for the Thanksgiving weekend.

The scene on Wednesday looked like evacuation ahead of an invasion. Students stuffed luggage into their cars, hurrying from the dormitory exits and filling the street as they loaded up. It was a bit more festive than a real evacuation, but a tension hung over it as well. The frenzy peaked in the early afternoon and quickly dwindled until no one was left. Dust swirled in a gust of wind. Northern Florida doesn't have seasons the way New England does, but it still looked bleak.

I went outside to survey the empty campus. I lived in the oldest dorm complex, considered a bit slummy by the denizens of the more modern blocks and towers. The architecture was classic brick collegiate, with peaked roofs. Most of the sections were vertical, four stories tall, rather than long horizontal hallways. I wandered  through empty courtyards.

There were others left behind. We found each other and gathered to make turkey pizza on the day itself. I don't remember what I ate or where on the other days. I just remember that feeling of being outside of life, but fully alive. For those few days, we were the masters of the campus.

On Sunday, everyone else came pouring back.

In other college years I went with friends to their family gatherings. It didn't feel weird to me back then, but it certainly does now. I guess Thanksgiving family weirdness has cranked up a lot during this century, particularly since 2016, even among the relatives, let alone adding a lone weirdo. I'm just as happy to spend a quiet day. I have to get ready for an intense few weeks coming up, which involves gathering equipment and preparing.

In a wider sense, the holiday itself seems like an unquestioned habit: gotta gather for a festive meal with someone, anyone. Family, friends, a community group. It's nice, I guess, for anyone who needs to merge gratitude for life's blessings with a concentrated shot of social contact. But I sense that it seems like an obligation to some of the participants. It might serve as part of the glue that holds a group together, or it might just serve as little rocks that they have to wear in their socks for this one designated weekend a year.

November sunshine

 We're in the part of the year where the sun acts like an ex who ran into you in public and can't get away fast enough. If you see them at all, they're hurrying away, hiding behind anything convenient: a hill, trees, their friends the clouds, who block you. If you do get a clear shot, you'll get stabbed in the eyes just for looking in the general direction.

You knew it was coming months ago. They started sending love notes to that other hemisphere in mid summer. By late September you both knew it was over. They'd been spending less and less time with you, consigning you fully to the darkness of true night, and casting long shadows during their grudging daylight appearances.

Hold on for a few months. In only another month after this one, the notes will start to come your way, easier and easier to read. You have to get used to being a summer romance, year after year for as many years as you get.

The Democratic Party's accidental 4-D chess

 The Democratic Party has been a consistent disappointment at least since Lyndon Johnson buried us balls-deep in the Vietnam War. I mean, they've had their moments, but even after Watergate the party couldn't get the White House back for more than one term between 1972 and 1992. The Democrats did control Congress until the mid 1990s, but that power crumbled as well.

The Vietnam War was very much a bipartisan endeavor, from all the way back when it was our French allies getting forced out of their colony in Indochina. But it became the Republican Party's problem when the Nixon administration viewed it as not a burden but a joy when they took over from the departing Johnson administration. They became the party of war, of the military-industrial complex, of heavy handed reactions to protest under leaders like California governor Ronald Reagan.

The Democratic Party pivoted to an anti-war stance, or at least a portion of it did. It had already stressed itself by passing civil rights legislation. Now it dallied with being "soft on Communism." This was the era when you could buy bumper stickers that had a picture of a peace sign with the caption "footprint of the American chicken." Yep, even then, masculine virtue was linked to fighting in any war assigned to you, to prove that your physical courage -- or the insecure need to project its image -- far outweighed your moral courage.

Regardless of the party in power, our country made social progress on multiple fronts, as well as enacting environmental protections that addressed some of the more obvious pollution and degradation effectively enough to make industry organize politically and economically against government. As elections became more and more just sales campaigns, and society grew more noisy and complicated, voters were easier and easier to distract and divert while powerful financial interests focused on taking control.

A philosophical basis isn't really a detailed plan, but generation after generation of Republican politicians advanced the idea that the rich should be allowed to become richer. Because every American liked the idea of being rich, having seen the freedom, luxury, and leisure that the top tier enjoyed, even on the hippie side of the aisle no one seemed averse to making a pile if they could. During the dark age when a Democrat couldn't get within sniffing distance of the presidency, this embrace of a prosperity gospel seeped in to saturate them. The neoliberal was born.

Mind you, I witnessed most of this as a dipshit kid, and later as a dipshit adult. I always had this vision of a country and a world where everyone had enough, no one had too much, and we were all fine with it. I mean, how stupid is that? It seemed to me then, and still does, that it requires the least wasted effort on cruelty and the artificial suffering of war, for the most return on the true simple pleasures of life. As far as I could tell, I was nearly alone in this belief. There was absolutely no political machinery devoted to something so benign. But if anyone was going to pay it lip service it was probably Democrats. It was a thread in the successful campaign of Bill Clinton to finally unseat the Republican fuddy-duddies who acted like grandparents and made our government smell like mothballs and cordite.

Of course the Democrats couldn't break the Republican hold on the Oval Office without the leverage of corporate money. Someone has to pay for the media saturation. So lip service was all we got, along with incremental tidbits.

The partisan divide is the reason so many voters identify as unaffiliated. Shallow observers identify this as "the middle," where the wishy washy majority loll in contemptible political apathy, but it's more than that. It's a diverse ecosystem of assorted malcontents. We are all afflicted by the same foul forces from above. And here's where the accidental 4-D chess comes in.

There's some chess involved in governing, but what is chess anyway? It's a game with known pieces on a finite board. Seriously, after all these years with so many documented games, why doesn't every game between Grand Masters end in a draw? Any top level player knows where the pieces go and has gamed out every possibility. But in real life, a player blinks, forgets, or is successfully distracted for just long enough. Politics and government take place on an almost infinite board with many more pieces, none of them reliably under direct control. Philosophies that stress obedience to authority have an advantage keeping their pieces moving where the plan requires, so authoritarianism has come to dominate. But the combination of Republican centralized authority and Democratic structural instability may finally have pissed off enough of that reachable rabble of independent minds to get them to mutiny and take control of the one party still up for grabs and publicly devoted to the general welfare. The brilliant, accidental move by establishment Democrats has been finally to demolish themselves and let the next wave climb the rubble to plant a flag and build something better.

Some of us have been waiting a long time for a politically viable number of people to catch up. Maybe they finally have. The party label only matters because branding still matters. The Democrats were the party of slavery in the 1850s and the party of civil rights in the 1960s. The Republicans were the party of abolition in the 1860s and the party of cronyism and corruption in the Gilded Age. But we're comfortable with the names. I don't care what you call it. Just get busy proving that life really will be better when the lowest are lifted and the highest are hauled down a few notches.

It's never going to happen like the flip of a switch. Progressive activists today hiss angrily that the Democrats never really intended to fix anything, because they so seldom succeed. This narrow-minded perpetuation of the blame game betrays a youthful naivete about human nature and the political headwinds that nominal members of the same party face in their highly varied home regions. Democrats have been the less popular party for so long that they are always more worried that a backlash will whisk them out of office or that a "blue wave" will roll back leaving them flopping helplessly on parched sand before they can spawn a new generation. 

Ignorance and malice always move with great confidence. We are by far a country of bystanders when it comes to elected office. Snappy put-downs resonate with us as an audience, because most of us have never had to try to bring together disparate factions to enact large-scale policies against well-funded resistance. The oversimplification gives these darts a sharp point and a sticking barb. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom.

Cynics are disappointed optimists. Don't let the bitterness fool you.

As always, success comes down to gathering the votes. Candidates and their organizations have thousands and millions of cats to herd to get everyone to go to the polls at all and then to make the desired choice. Then the actual legislating starts, with more votes to wrangle from officials gathered together from all across the sprawling country. Each one comes with their own set of leashes and tripwires installed by everyone who had a hand in getting them there. Some of the strings are clearly visible, some are not. Even the ones not obviously owned by some power bloc are answerable to the voters back home, some of them placid, others highly volatile.

Building the resistance movement

 The No Kings demonstrations on October 18th stirred up backlash from the right and left. You can find many examples for yourself in written postings and in videos from the many aspiring and established influencers.

Firebrands on the left want to fulfill the regime's wish for violence. Bullies on the right have been looking forward to violence for decades. Russia and China would be on board. The real losers would be the American people, no matter who "won."

Wiser voices have reinforced that the demonstrations of opposition encourage others who may more quietly oppose the regime to feel more confident and become more active. They energize the already committed. They show the regime and its supporters that their actions and policies are unpopular.

Because the regime has many fascistic qualities, and a visible percentage of their base openly displays Nazi imagery and expresses Nazi sympathies, resistance discourse has looked for parallels in the rise of the National Socialists in Germany, their use of power once they had it, and the opposition they faced within their own country and, ultimately, from the combined military forces.

The sad story of Sophie Scholl and the German anti-Nazi White Rose movement inspires many with her courage and tragic end. She and her older brother Hans, along with Christoph Probst, were beheaded by guillotine after a show trial in 1943. Their heads were cut off. They were young people in their 20s. Shoved into an execution device, and thunk.

Their movement and murder have motivated many in the years afterward to honor their sacrifice, even though it failed at the time. As I read the story, they weren't on a suicide mission when they set out leaflets for their fellow university students to find. It was just bad luck that their littering -- tossing their last 100 leaflets from an upper floor into a large space, just as one of the people charged with keeping that space tidy happened to be passing through -- spurred that person to chase them down and turn them over to the Gestapo.

Human sacrifice is a terrible recruiting tool. Christianity didn't really take off until it became the state religion of Rome instead of a great way to get nailed to a wooden fixture or get to meet a bunch of lions face to face.

As for the ultimate defeat and removal of the Nazis from power, that required years of military action, and the deaths of millions. The time for internal resistance against the Nazis to work was way back in the 1930s, when they seemed like a good bet for Germany. Even Hans Scholl and Christoph Probst were Hitler Youth and served in the German army. Political resistance before it was too late just wasn't going to happen.

The circumstances in Germany were not the same as what we have now in the United States. Political resistance has a very good chance here, without the strong risk of summary execution for those who speak out and act up. So far, anyway... Which leads to the other half of the comparison to de-Nazification in Germany: the world war itself.

Hitler's big mistake was in pushing for more and more territory. If he had stayed more or less within his own borders, he could have committed atrocities to his heart's content. Other nations might condemn, but they wouldn't interfere. It would be like Russia today, where political opposition faces arrest and/or unfortunate accidents, elections are for show, and everyone knows who is and always will be in charge. The German citizens might not be extremely happy, but they would get by.

Even when the United States was finally dragged into the war by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the armed forces didn't magically spring into full size and strength on Dec. 8. Over the course of the war, 61 percent of the people who served were drafted. They served with valor, but they waited to be called, and probably hoped that they would not be needed. That wasn't recruiting. Patriotic films and whatnot served not so much to trigger a flood of volunteers as to take the sting out of inevitable induction.

Moving forward in time to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, there again the front line people faced injury and death at the hands of adversaries who would in most cases never face punishment or, if they did so, it was so many years later that it was a formal gesture at best.

Every murderer gets away with the crime. Even if the killer is caught, tried, convicted, and serves a sentence, the victim is still dead. This unfortunate inequity is even worse when the killer has gotten to live a long and prosperous life. In the case of unrepentant racists, their legacy is the continuing culture of bigotry that shows no sign of just dying out on its own. Younger generations aren't born at the highest level of enlightenment. They're born empty, blank, to be filled in by whoever is around them.

Humanity faces a huge challenge now, as every neglected area of concern reaches a crisis at the same time. Economic disparity, gender bias, racism, environmental disregard, and general paranoia all need to be addressed. They can't be addressed by one single thread of appeal, because not enough people connect the dots to get the picture. All are related, but have been treated as separate for eons. Our species needs group therapy, but avoid getting homogenized into a bland blend or forced into a mold under restrictive authority. On the other hand, restrictive authority has the power to act quickly to respond to the crises that can't wait for the slowest students to reach consensus. Like, the planet is baking right now. Resources are being devoured right now. At least two factions of super wealthy power mongers have different -- but both unpleasant -- visions of the future that they are poised to impose on the rest of us.

How much should one person or one generation worry about the generalized future? You live, you die, you're gone. Maybe you think you care about your children and grandchildren, but once you're dead you can't hear them complain anymore. The planet itself doesn't care whether we're here, or even how we treat it. What reason does anyone have not to live completely selfishly to the fullest extent of their skills and budget? That logic exists at some level inside every human mind. "Why should I care?" You have to make a damn good case. Find out what motivates each individual with whom you interact. Not too many of them will be very enthusiastic about getting their head smashed like John Lewis, or get murdered by racists just for trying to sign up voters, or guillotined for a principled stand against one of the most evil regimes that ever rose.

Peace is most definitely possible, a productive peace with a high degree of personal freedom of expression and movement. All it requires is universal acceptance that it is the greatest good. Sacrifice in a case like that consists of mild things like forgoing seconds on dessert rather than submitting to lynching or state execution. A simple concept but a surprisingly hard sell.

Edited petition to Brooke Rollins

You probably get these too: emails asking you to contact various government officials to ask them to be decent human beings or good stewards of the environment or some crap like that. If they were either of those things, we wouldn't have to petition them. So in the part that I can edit I usually try to reach them where they are rather than call them to where the petition sponsor thinks they should be.

The most recent example is a petition to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, asking her to release the contingency funds to cover SNAP benefits during the government shutdown. The suggested language was conciliatory and deferential to human rights and values of which this regime has not demonstrated a single scrap. So I took my usual approach.

To: Brooke Rollins, Secretary of Agriculture

 At some point, your party's top-down approach to ruling has to become obvious, as it does now in this cold move to use Americans in need as hostages to coerce the Democratic Party to surrender to your party's overall plan to make life more precarious for the working class.

Your party's policies will increase mortality among children, the elderly, and the disabled, three groups that represent little value to a wealthy elite. Children have some utility as future workers, but only if they are sturdy enough to do the work required of them before they are discarded by your system when they get too old or injured. A good example here is how the Republicans pay lip service to military personnel and veterans, while cutting funding for support systems after their service. As for the elderly, just die already, am I right? And the disabled... they never had anything to contribute in the first place. Life ain't the Special Olympics. Eventually, it will be legal to just leave a defective baby out on a frozen hillside to die, won't it? Or maybe part it out for useful organs first. Just because some parts don't work doesn't mean that no parts work. All that lies a little further down the road, but we're at a critical fork right now.

Preventing 42 million Americans—including about 16 million children and nearly 7 million pregnant and postpartum women, infants, and young children—from being able to buy groceries seems unnecessarily cruel and dangerous until you consider that it's a first step toward necessary culling of useless people. The tough will survive. Anyone not tough enough to endure the test is just dead weight on society anyway. Am I getting this right? You know I am.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has an emergency contingency fund, and experts indicate that the US Department of Agriculture is able to use this or other funds to keep food on people’s tables. Or you can siphon off the funds to pay for CBP officers, golf trips, and Gatsby parties. Maybe pay to ship senior military commanders in for another pep talk by Major Hegseth over at the Pentagon.

According to your own shutdown contingency plan, the agency has a reserve of funds, which can be used to pay SNAP benefits directly. In fact, the SNAP Appropriation law’s own language makes the contingency reserve broadly available for program operations. Even in President Trump’s first administration, SNAP benefits were paid out during the government shutdown in late 2018 through early 2019—the longest recorded shutdown in American history—without interruption. You can come through again or admit that was a mistake, a moment of weakness you won't repeat.

I now return you to the earnest entreaty that assumes that you have a core of humanity that can be appealed to. Who knows? Maybe they're right. Surprise me.

I call on you to do the right thing for the American people and put politics aside to fund SNAP benefits so that millions of families can eat. You have the power to stop needless suffering and children going hungry. Please use it.

Sincerely,

(Your information here)

Even Hitler's power came from the bottom up

Back during the first Trump regime, he supposedly said that he wished he had generals like Hitler had. But what he has really needed, and lacked, is a populace like the German people in the 1930s.

The winners of the Great War were both righteously pissed off and more than a little opportunistic in their punitive attitude toward Germany after what was known at the time simply as The World War, because no one knew at that time that there would be a sequel. It was the most horrific conflict the world had known so far, taking machine guns, artillery, and aircraft to completely obliterate the last vestiges of the 19th Century style of military engagement. Once it started, no participating nation would dishonor itself by stepping back and saying, "Hold on a minute! This is complete bullshit! We need to figure out a better way to solve our problems."

The oversimplified version is that Germany started a fight it couldn't finish, despite doing a really good job for the first half or so. When they lost, the other combatants stuck them with the whole bill. This hobbled Germany's economy and battered their national pride. After the nastiest war in human history (to date), the opposing nations all said, "Good. You have no right to pride after the way you acted!" In that oversimplified version, the decision looks rash, but totally understandable after what Germany put everyone through.

In the book The Origins of the World War, published in 1928, Sidney Bradshaw Fay, professor of modern European history at Smith College, went into great detail about all the ways in which the other world powers of the era played games with each other and set up the calamity through more than the simple "entangling alliances" that supposedly tripped everyone at the last minute, more or less, into having to have this disastrous war. The book can be heavy going, because it backtracks a lot, covering colonialist rivalries, French resentment after the Franco-Prussian War, Balkan politics, and various movements swirling through Europe to try to create shared interests. Entangling alliances barely describes the uppermost surface of the deals and double crosses and shifty shafty shit that the French and British were pulling, in the European land grabs of late stage colonialism. So the Germans had more to resent than just a heavy handed treaty at the end of the war. They were in some sense set up beforehand.

You don't need to know that, but I found it fascinating. I was really bummed when I noticed that the book I had was only Volume I. How will I ever find out how it turned out?

Anyway, Germany was already ripe for a change, and the National Socialists already existed before Adolf dropped in. In many ways it was like Trump jumping to the front of the Republican Party's grievance wing and showing the rest of the party how to really exploit all the anger and paranoia that they had just been stringing along since the 1970s.

The thing is, Germany had a much higher grievance percentage than the United States had, regardless of how obnoxiously those bastards fill the airwaves today. Hitler could really pack a stadium. Trump on his best day couldn't match it.

The media have always helped Trump immensely. If he had not been a reality television star, he would have had no power in the political arena. Once he launched his campaign, the analysts dutifully analyzed him, rating his chances very low on the basis of experience, ability, character, and couth. None of those qualities mattered in the least to the voters who chose him. In many ways those were his best assets. And the cynical plutocrats and ideologues who briefly opposed him before going all in just saw him as a vehicle to their own ascendancy.

The Trump base is committed enough to be good German citizens of the 1930s. But they are a much smaller percentage of the overall population. And Trump lacks another critical element that Hitler had: a world where he could entertain a realistic fantasy of conquest. War was hell, but it was not yet capable of peeling the entire crust off of the earth in one glorious nuclear exchange. So while Hitler riled up his followers about the enemies within, he also fired them up to take revenge on the smug bastards in France and Britain who had done Germany dirt since way before the shooting started in 1914.

The combination of conventional warfare (more or less. Germany did innovate there, to its obvious advantage in the early stages of the war) and a Europe reluctant to get into it again helped him convince his people to throw their support behind the glorious campaign to claim what rightfully should have been theirs. Look outward to the foe! Those decadent people in other countries are soft! Now let's go get 'em!

Hitler's generals were actually good at generalling, unlike the current Secretary of Defense. And Trump and Major Hegseth's obsession with loyalty to the regime is further hollowing out the officer corps. Hitler's generals famously tried to off him more than once as they realized that he could fire up the people but he couldn't strategize worth a crap.

Regardless of whether the Republicans succeed in their decades-long campaign to gerrymander the country and suppress voting so that they always win, the general population is not behind them. It's statistically unlikely that the general population can be coerced into getting behind them, either.

They might be forced to try machine gunning a few public gatherings just to see how that goes. It's a risky gambit, though. The majority of the citizen militia types who stockpiled weapons so that they could fight in a glorious revolution against government tyranny only meant the tyranny of having to be nice to minorities and weirdos, and pay into a universal health care system that actually treats people without a lot of rigamarole. When it comes to actual masked, unidentified quasi-law-enforcement troops dragging people off to prisons without due process, a lot of them have already signed up. I've seen the bumper stickers. This is their dream job. Tyranny is great as long as they get to inflict it. But they're still spread too thin to subdue the entire country.

I said years ago that our enemies would finance our civil war. They may be chipping in a little right now, but the tensions that the right wing has stoked on behalf of the wealthy are so great that we can tear ourselves apart with very little input from outside. If the United States implodes, China and Russia will compete to take over the space and develop it for themselves. My money's on China, but I'd prefer that we didn't come to that at all. How about we reclaim our goal to be a shining example of how a nation can be run by its people, for its people? We need to set aside the politics of selfishness in order to achieve our full potential as a force for good.

There is no great era in our country's past to which we should aspire to return. Our wavering progress has always been linear and, until the last decade or so, generally upward. The only parts of the past that were good were the platforms from which we could build better. Not bigger. Not more posh. Actually, fundamentally better. We squandered our opportunities to correct course with relatively small adjustments, in favor of our experiment in unchained greed. The enemy within is not in slums and trailer parks and drag queen story hour. It's in boardrooms and brokerage houses.

As much fun as it sounds, storming the mansions and office towers of our overlords and putting them to the sword will not provide the lasting value that simply voting for higher taxes and other curbs on them will bring us. Our species needs to outgrow violence before it permanently stunts our growth.

Government is boring. Government should be boring. Pledge to dedicate yourself to plain old boring, effective administration. If your chief executive needs lapdog generals, military parades, a reign of terror over any portion of the country's inhabitants, and a giant ballroom appended to a very modest presidential mansion, that's a very bad sign for the health and well-being of ordinary citizens. I know each of us is extraordinary in our own way. We need to appreciate that about each other. Ya bunch of lovable weirdos.

The Politics of Selfishness in the Land of Opportunity

 As the current regime demolishes our functioning government to make way for dictatorship, they represent the culmination of the politics of selfishness carried out over more than half a century.

We hear a lot about the failure of civics education as if it's a new thing. It was already starting to fail in the 1970s as class sizes overwhelmed the size of school buildings and waves of Boomers were assembly-lined through the system to seek their fortunes after graduation. An awful lot that came at us just merged into a drone. This was on top of the sanitized history that minimized the sins and maximized the glory of each succeeding generation of rich white men who courageously got lots of poor people to work really hard for tiny shares of immense fortunes. In the case of slaves, that share was nil.

Those of us growing up in the 1960s learned in school that competition is what makes our country great. We also learned that any one of us could grow up to be anything we wanted to be. If you didn't happen to live near one of the stress points in the civil rights movement, you could even believe that this opportunity was being extended equally to all strivers of any color or creed.

I never cared if I shared a classroom with Black kids. I saw no reason why I shouldn't. However, I never really did until high school in the Miami, Florida, area. And I was oblivious to the unrest that had only just simmered down, even though my new schoolmates told me about schools being closed during riots. In Annapolis in the late 1960s, the high school saw some upheavals that led to broken windows and light fixtures, but I had been sent to a private school with exactly two Black students, both of them several grades ahead of me. They were well regarded in their class. One of them went on to become a doctor. He also punched out a classmate for using the n-word in casual conversation, while the group around him completely approved of the punitive fist in the face. It seemed downright post-racial, and it was only 1970 or '71. So let's get out there and be all we can be in this great land of opportunity.

The Vietnam War ended just in time to save my older brother from having to choose a branch of the service or a trip to Canada. The draft was suspended in January, 1973. I still had to register in 1974, but military service was no longer a ritual of young manhood unless you wanted it to be. Most of the guys I knew decided to skip it. Everyone I knew was focused on figuring out what they were going to do for a living. That's a universal theme in any generation emerging into adulthood, wherever their society places that threshold, but in the late 1970s the world still seemed hopeful and full of opportunity. It seemed safe enough to major in business and set your sights on earning your first million. You might even be able to buy a $12,000.00 luxury sports car. We would be fine as long as the Russkis didn't nuke us.

Vietnam veterans began to filter into the higher education system alongside kids who had been young enough to avoid the war. Somehow, they seemed to assimilate with the vapid disco 'droids and other happy materialists who had watched the war come and go on television. We who had not served just figured that they were picking up where they had left off, after a bad interlude of following orders from a misguided government that had now been brought to heel by mass public protests. Now c'mon and have fun! You're home safe! Push those dark thoughts aside!

Most of us are superficial. We deal with the immediate circumstances in front of us and extrapolate a vision of  the future, filled with things that we do want and things that we don't want. "Don't borrow trouble," my father used to say. In a way it's good advice not to leap into someone else's problems or stir things up for your own entertainment. But the same philosophy enables you to look away from genuine injustice while you protect yourself in the interim, ignoring a situation that could conceivably slop back onto you at some point. Here was a man who made his living in part as a professional seafarer. What are preparations and drills but a form of borrowing trouble? A little borrowed trouble can serve as a vaccine against bigger trouble, or a quick, prophylactic dose of antibiotic before an infection gets out of control.

The trouble with aphorisms is that they don't differentiate. There are no universal words of wisdom that can never be interpreted in numerous ways. If the saying in question has an essence, we still lack the discernment to nail down which interpretation expresses it. Oh well. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If you can't fix it, use it as it is.

The 1970s was a period of rapid liberation. As a young dude in a male-dominated culture, I did not have the slightest awareness how new the emerging women's freedom was. To a young horn-dog, the area of greatest interest was that birth control pills had made a lot of women more willing to accept the endless invitations leveled at them to try it and see if they liked it. As it happened, many of them discovered that they did not, for various reasons. Horny dude culture did not then go, "oh, well that's all right then, sorry to have bothered you."

The student government in my senior year in high school was entirely female. I don't know how many of them went on to law school. One of them was majoring in architecture at U of F at the time I graduated and emerged into the welcoming job market of an incipient recession. Other female classmates definitely did pursue law and business degrees. We were all going places.

Whatever one chose to do, personal income was a driving principle. We also looked for job satisfaction, which helps if you are pursuing veterinary medicine, or nursing, for instance. And pure science careers didn't draw students in with the big bucks, but applied sciences sure did. And engineering. One psychology major I knew got hired by an insurance company as a claims adjuster. You can definitely use some psychology in the process of chiseling down someone's financial payout. And she got a company car! 

Computers were still a joke and a futurist fantasy. No one seemed to realize how quickly the future would arrive, regardless of songs and stories harping on how fast time passes ("Well, the cat's in the cradle... etc.) Engineering types gravitated to the field to turn cutting edge technology into obsolete junk as quickly as possible. The aim was improved function, not just consumer enslavement. Consumer enslavement was a happy consequence. First you need the better machine to help you design the even better better machine.

Alongside the high tech future ran the path of the evolved hippies: organic farming, homesteading, hiding out from the government that we couldn't trust. Those philosophies lead both left and right. The "Jesus freaks" of the hippie years begat the evangelicals of today. You take care of your own. The world is doomed, but you don't have to be. On the other hand, sustainable practices are all that will assure us of future survival at all.

The theme of individual liberty ran throughout. And not just liberty but prosperity. You could choose to settle for less, but it was relative to the pursuit of excess that we already saw taking shape. Sales positions always recruited with the line "unlimited earning potential." In an era when $10,000 a year was just about enough to get started with an okay apartment and a beater car, as long as you got regular raises, the goal of "earning your age" set the standard for really making it. "Dude's pulling down 40 grand! Nice!" He's 33 and way ahead of schedule. But that didn't last long. Maybe if you count your age dating from when Homo Sapiens first emerged  almost a million years ago you can settle for that figure.

Wealth and government were seen as separate, monolithic entities, not as the combined result of shared human effort. People might be rivals or marks or useful. Friends and loved ones are nice, but they should either bolster your own pursuit of income or at least be an affordable indulgence.

Even the concept of contributing to society was measured in dollars. If you have a good job -- i.e. one with a healthy paycheck, you're a good citizen and an asset to the community, even if you run a laboratory where animals are tortured to test mascara, or you direct a high-kill animal "shelter." Maybe you manufacture weapons, or cigarettes, or you're an environmental lawyer greenwashing the enterprises of an oil company. Or you work with your hands, on a fracking rig or building oil pipelines across wetlands. If the money's good, you're good. Just throw a little to charity.

If our society wasn't still driven by selfishness, pickup trucks would be a lot smaller and far less numerous. The discussion of social safety nets wouldn't center on "spending my tax dollars on other people's (insert basic need here)."

To earn a billion dollars you would have to make 20 million dollars per year for 50 years. We hear a lot about the rights of the wealthy to keep their "earnings," but absolutely nothing about their responsibilities after capturing so much of the money supply for their own uses. Sure, they have expenses, and many of those expenses involve paying people in various capacities to work for them. But a lot of money just breeds more money in a vacuum, feeding off of the perceived value of stocks, and transaction fees generated by trading them. Companies may employ people, but the stock market itself provides only thousands of jobs in an economy with millions of workers, and their employees don't produce anything.

Transparency laws require that financial services companies disclose their compensation. Trading is regulated although we're seeing more and more how insider trading is common and unpunished. Elected officials have been playing the market with inside information for decades. It's reached a crescendo now, with the executive branch up to the elbows in graft, and members of Congress still profiting off of companies that they regulate. Further proof that the best way to avoid criminal prosecution is to get elected to office. The second best way is simply to be obscenely rich -- too big to fail and too well-lawyered to jail. As Trump has proven, you don't even need good lawyers to do it, as long as you have enough of them to slow the system to a crawl. Go ahead and lose the case. Just take a long time doing it.

As far back as the 1980s one school of sleazebag life coaching laid out how you could go into debt and just keep moving it, moving it, moving it, until you could die and abandon it. As bankruptcy became less a suicide-worthy shame and more just another chess move in the business of life, you could shuck some of your burden that way, too. Hapless failures would set up payment plans that would never discharge the debt, and keep on living. Heck, the minimum payment on any credit card bill will never pay off the balance. As the population grew faster than the economy and environment could support it, harsher standards would have led to legions of starving people in the streets. And now we have that anyway.

While the Baby Boom pursued its indulgences, they started producing the next generation, instilling the same values, but dumping their progeny into a much more competitive landscape. And Gen X begat Millennials, and Millennials begat Gen Z... or something like that. I really dislike generational labels because they try to homogenize people while ignoring the variables that shape individuals within the group. You can analyze statistics, but you need all of the statistics for it to reflect reality. Who has time for that shit?

Indeed, time has been the critical factor helping the wealthy to grow more wealth and pull away from the working hordes. The people in power have taken care of themselves while looking down at the state of the world that they made, and using its crumbling state as their excuse to design private space programs and plan for the extermination of millions because automated production lines and AI data centers don't need them. The working classes are too busy staying housed and fed to critically analyze the political information hosing them down.

Those private rockets don't stay up for long, though. The fantasy that the tech bros have, that they will fly off into space and find new worlds to consume and destroy is not supported by their current success rate. Using far more primitive technology, the United States government put multiple craft onto the moon more than half a century ago.  It was a time of much higher top tax brackets, and much lower CEO compensation.

John F. Kennedy ushered in the 1960s saying, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." It was a call to civic responsibility. By the mid 1970s, the citizens had decided, "yeah, fck that! The moon was cool and all, but that Vietnam thing was bullshit. We'd rather get rich and have fun." Failing the rich part, we'll settle for the fun. What got progressively buried was the idea that citizen government has a higher purpose. The government we had seemed big enough to take care of itself. We could sneer at it and vote for politicians who said that they would save us from it, but it would always be there, taking care of...business. And that's the problem. It has taken care of business ("the business of America is business") as separate from humanity. Labor is a necessary evil, a cost to be controlled. Calvin Coolidge's original statement from which the popular misquote is distilled was more detailed and nuanced, but it still supported the idea that America is a nation of business people, "profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world."

My high school guidance counselor in 1974 told me "success is money!" Perhaps he was a little bitter over his own life choices, but at least he was trying to save me from wasting my life in pursuit of illusory satisfactions. Get rich or die trying.

The only place where taking better care of the planet and each other might get the smallest toehold in Coolidge's summation is in the word "prospering." Are you "prospering" in a fortified luxury community with sprawling slums for miles outside its gates, under a smog-filled sky, with a view of the lifeless, multicolored chemical stew that used to be the ocean? Some would say that since such a scene is inevitable, it's far better to be in the fort than the slums.

You bet your life on the course you choose when you are young. Then you bet your children's lives that they will find a path through the world that you prepared for them. The workers have numbers, and immense power if we act together. But we are each entitled to our opinion about the help and harm that we spread, and to whom we spread them. That's the democracy part of our republic. That's the cumulative effect of our lifestyles.

Political Prosecution Part Two

 As the current regime does what it falsely accused the Biden administration of doing, the problem of how to investigate and prosecute elected officials and partisan political appointees joins the clamor in the news cycle.

Political scandals that slop over into criminal behavior are nothing new in this country. Watergate was huge in its day, and has resonance even now. Richard Nixon resigned because his own senators told him that they would convict him after the House impeached him, which would then cut him loose to face criminal prosecution for his part in the actions of his minions.

Those were the good old days, when members of Congress recognized their power and responsibility, and respected their office enough to exert its Constitutional powers even against a member of their own party. Cynically, one might wonder if they would have been as diligent during Nixon's first term, rather than when he was already a lame duck with poll numbers that would reflect badly on the re-election chances of all of them, but regardless of that, they did carry out their duty.

The hyper-partisanship that reasserted itself in the 1980s and ramped up in the '90s has reached the point of complete breakdown. There has always been ugliness, but easy access to ugly opinions via social media has given it vastly more reach. An older Republican acquaintance of mine told me back in the 1990s about a Republican coworker of his who came in right after John F. Kennedy's assassination, saying, "I'm glad that son of a bitch is dead!"

If "the enemy of your enemy is your friend," political violence becomes a convenience. You may say that the assassin should not have committed the murder, but you freely admit that you're glad they did. It's partisan warfare pushed beyond rhetoric.

In that climate, when it comes to criminal investigations of people who happen to be in the opposite political party to the one in power, it ceases to be an earnest search for truth and justice and becomes, "they investigate one of ours, we investigate ten of theirs." A cynical public, saturated in propaganda for decades, doesn't really trust either side. Researching the details seems like more trouble than it's worth.

Unfortunately for the jaded public, one side is right. In this instance, it's the "left." Not to say that the Democratic Party doesn't have its scammy sleazebags like Bob Menendez. But they have not been dealing in a broad campaign of targeted persecution toward an extensive menu of marginalized communities. They haven't engaged in the obvious, persistent collusion with extreme wealth and foreign autocrats that the Republicans have. Not so much lately, anyway.

Because unelected civil servants are members of political parties, and these affiliations are known, their ostensibly nonpartisan actions on behalf of their responsibility to the Constitution get skewed by partisan media outlets as sinister or virtuous depending on the D or the R associated with the lead investigator and the target of the investigation. Long before anything comes to trial -- if ever -- the court of public opinion has heard and reheard the case dozens of times and issued conflicting verdicts. While that should not have an effect on the speed and efficiency of the justice system investigating genuine infractions, the political component looms over the proceedings.

Because power is gained and retained through elections -- at least until the current regime succeeds in turning them into a meaningless piece of theater -- prosecutors know that their actions will have a direct influence in the publicity campaigns leading up to the actual voting. The partisan loyalty of the prosecutor may not influence a jury, but it will influence voters. One of the best ways to hide out from criminal prosecution is to become a political candidate and condemn the "partisan witch hunt" coming after you. Maybe you only get as far as George Santos did*. Maybe you end up dragging a right-wing authoritarian cabal into the executive branch twice. Maybe you serve as the Attorney General of Texas for ten years despite beginning that phase of your career by negotiating away fraud charges and later surviving impeachment for bribery, and go on to be a candidate for US Senate.

The saying goes that power corrupts. Power corrupts the corruptible. It also attracts the already susceptible or criminal. Elections are sales campaigns. The majority of voters are not digging deeply into political philosophy and the myriad details of each candidate in every election presented to them at local, state, and national levels. Who has time? When things are good, the problem doesn't seem acute. When things are bad, average citizens are busy surviving. In either case, they vote from the information that comes easily to them.

Information is everywhere these days. From three broadcast networks and a handful of major newspapers in the late 20th Century, we now have broadcast and cable TV, hundreds (or more) of online journalists, the remnants of print journalism, and the online versions of corporate media. The truth may be out there. You might even see it flit by on one of your devices, but you don't have time to capture and verify it.

People end up in information silos because it's convenient and comforting. Their biases are upheld. The choice is simplified. Even in the old days with less media, you had to buy the newspaper, and the television news only covered what fit into the half-hour slots morning and evening. When longer format news programs emerged, like The Today Show and Good Morning America, the stories often repeated during the news portion, before the show then switched to vapid pap for its second hour. Whatever you got "in depth" was edited for space and time. What got cut would subtly -- or not so subtly -- reflect the bias of the management. The bigger the corporation, the more the bias favors corporate interests. The business side of media overcomes any commitment to journalistic or artistic integrity in the news or entertainment divisions.

In the early days of consumer Internet, those of us with computer geek friends heard that you could knock together a rudimentary website or go to one of the emerging free blog hosting sites like Google's Blogspot, to post your thoughts for anyone in the world to find, read, and pass on, building international readership and perhaps fame and fortune as your previously obscure voice gets lifted worldwide. It's true: in the decades that I have been posting to my blogs, more than a dozen people have seen my work as far away as Australia and Russia, according to my stats.

Today there are many more platforms offering much more sophisticated production values, mostly in the much more popular video format. The basic service may be free to content creators and their audience, but the infrastructure and personnel that allow this to happen are owned by very wealthy people and corporations. Your free, independent web journalism is seen, judged, and managed by a profit-driven corporation. That influence might be more obvious on some sites and less intrusive on others, but it's in the background everywhere, ready to shift the influence to protect its own interests. Any site could go the way of Twitter if the right wrong billionaire takes it that way.

That brings us around again to the primary impediment to prosecution of political figures: for every educated and informed commentator explaining the nature of the crimes and the threat they pose to the basic freedoms promised by the Constitution, there are dozens of presenters insisting that the prosecutors themselves are the threat. Or maybe the prosecutors are the threat, as we're seeing now, and the loud voices of obfuscation are drawing a false equivalency between the unconstitutional abuse of power now and the actual exertion of constitutional power in the previous administration's investigations.

It seems as though the government is tasked with regulating itself, and it's true. So is the watchdog suspect because of who holds the chain and fills the food bowl? It's possible, because the only powerful independent entity to demand decency is a unified American public. So far in history, we have never had that. We've only had temporary majorities -- sometimes significantly large -- that manage to hold power to account through the actions of elected representatives. Movements come together to right wrongs like slavery, improve working conditions and food safety, advance civil rights and women's rights, end the Vietnam War, pay lip service to the environment... and then dissipate when the battle seems won enough, momentum established. It will take care of itself from here. And of course it does not.

*Written before Trump commuted Santos's sentence.

It's scriptural to them...

On the subject of elder care costs today, the shop owner shared that the cost of his father's residence in the veteran's home had surged to more than $10,000 a month since the death of his mother. He was talking to a family friend who currently works as a plumber after selling his family's heating oil business a few years ago. The plumber griped that the government cuts funding for veterans and spends the money on "illegals." He blurted that out without the slightest hesitation. It's as true as God's word.

Therein lies a big problem. Our whole political system runs on public opinion. It's how we, the people, decide who gets our vote. The GOP has managed to make "illegals" the catch-all for the nation's ills. By extension, the Democrats  -- who try to enact humane policies and easier pathways to citizenship -- are evil because they don't vigorously persecute immigrants in general and undocumented ones in particular.

Hard-working people like simple answers. "Democrats spend too much money helping illegals, so our own people get short-changed" places blame instantly for the nation's problems. The solutions is simple: get rid of the illegals. To do that, get rid of Democrats.

Since the vast majority of people right around here are white, and most of them work in practical trades where they identify problems and fix them through straightforward direct action, they gravitate to the idea that you just have to get yourself a good, honest job and work hard at it to extract a decent living from the rich people who own the money supply and kindly share it with us.

Inheriting a well-established family business doesn't hurt, either. The plumber is no billionaire, and he's done more than his share of mucking around in nasty basements and crawl spaces installing and servicing systems, but he also never had to apply for work, especially far from his birthplace and home town.

The willing labor of these unconscious beneficiaries of privilege genuinely entitles them to more than just flippant dismissal. In a very white state like New Hampshire, nearly every role is filled by a white person, including "impoverished dirtbag." Contempt for the poor is not linked to race here. Interestingly, this does nothing to blunt the racism with which bigots view the problems of those other places where the gangs are awful and the migrants swarm in to rape the women, force drugs on unwilling clients, eat the pets, freeload on the welfare system and still take a lot of good jobs from good Americans.

The great Puritan work ethic can be summed up thusly: misery loves company. The virtuous toilers who have done fine for themselves can't imagine life any other way. Around there, they serve the wealthy with a smile, but they don't become friends. I really don't know if they envy the fortunes of the leisure class, while voting reliably to make sure that the leisure class remains in control. You work in that system and don't complain. If you try to change things, it's because you are lazy and you're looking for a way to slack off at others' expense.

New Hampshire is isolated from the major conflict zones in the United States right now, but it is not isolated from broadcast and internet media. As the former first in the nation presidential primary state, New Hampshire has bred into its population the idea that they are politically astute. The congressional delegation at this time is all Democrats, but the state legislature and many local offices are dominated by Republicans. At the local level, conservative attitudes dominate, shaped by the national information machinery that keeps the right wing unified by the same oversimplifications and distortions.

Work toward a better world while you're hanging around

Nearly everyone thinks they're working for a better world. The conflict arises between values, not intentions. There are nihilists who want to let it die or actively make it die, but the majority of people do try to live their values and think of the world they will leave for their children and grandchildren. It's just that some of those visions are cruel, hostile, exclusionary, and require the deaths of millions to create the future that the specific faction will dominate. The prime example is "the white ethno-state." Christian Nationalism or any theocracy makes for bad neighbors both inside and outside of a nation's borders. And that's hardly a comprehensive list of political philosophies that run on death.

When people gather to chat informally about the world's problems, around the keg, the bong, or in the church of your choice, the concept of monoculture can seem comforting. No more disagreements! How incredibly bland. How fundamentally impossible. You can neither persuade nor kill your way to absolute uniformity of thought and behavior. But it's tempting. At any given time, millions of people are drawn by it. We're being ruled by a cabal of them now in the USA. One of the few things that helps us oppose them is that their visions don't perfectly align. Even on the dark side, so dead set against diversity, their own diversity leads to conflict. And these are not people who handle disagreement productively.

The reason our country has been dragged into a far-right lagoon of manure is that the right in general has been tugging that way for more than 40 years. If you want to get super technical about it, it's been since the 17th Century, with early antecedents in the 16th. Heck, even the 15th. European conquest and colonialism underlies the entire modern civilization of the Western Hemisphere. Looking down on inferior people has made us feel better about ourselves for as long as there have been people. When inferiority centers on skin color or command of a certain language it lumps masses of people into a quaking mat beneath the feet of the people with the "superior" appearance. You might respect some aspect of their skills, but still annihilate them in whatever numbers you have to when a material goal demands it, because they're ultimately inferior overall, and disposable.

Working toward a better world is not inconsistent with reducing human numbers and acknowledging that life is pain and ultimately pointless as far as we can tell. Not everyone should raise kids directly, but many of us grumpy bastards can still be helpful in a variety of ways. Remember I said "self extinction," not "self annihilation." Life can be good, and we can raise the standards of it for nearly everyone. I say nearly because some children are born with congenital diseases that will make their lives painful and short. Other people might get a little further before some built-in defect takes them down. Or a big storm hits, or an earthquake, or wildfires, or you're unlucky enough to live during a pandemic and die before we develop a treatment -- assuming we can -- you know: circumstances beyond our control.  That still leaves a vast array of circumstances that are most definitely within our control, such as how we view and treat each other.

I'm not a sociable person. But I'm not an antisocial person. If people want to gather and have fun, that's great. I prefer if it's not intrusive and destructive, but that still leaves a lot of room for all kinds of activities I find distasteful or boring. Sometimes you have to grit your teeth and put up with shit because it's not your business, it's only temporary, and it's not really hurting anything. Other times, seemingly innocuous acts like leaving your car or truck idling for hours are truly antisocial when you add up all the instances of this selfish behavior that occur in a country of 340 million people, or a planet with 8.2 billion people on it. It's a lot of little things, along with the high profile big things like mass shootings, wars, and economic policies that turn the working class into beggars.

The internet and social media are full of content creators promoting community activism and local involvement. I don't ever talk to my neighbors, and they don't talk to me. It's not hostility. It's New England. I do reflexively avoid people who display symbols of the regime, but they have probably been avoiding people with rainbow flags and touchy-feely bumper stickers already. I display none of that, but I have published a cartoon or two that made me wonder if I was going to get beaten up after a public meeting. Did it do any good? I don't know. Point is, I know I'm a weirdo and not much of a conversationalist, so I keep to myself. If I see a chance to do something in a group that helps the group, I do it and then fade back. Community involvement sounds so positive and friendly and involving, and it intimidates the shit out of me. I would still do my best to pull you out of your burning car, no matter what your bumper stickers say. Then I would run away.

When it comes to voting with your wallet, how you fill it is as important as how you spend. Assuming that the human species will try to continue, our definition of success will control how cruel or benevolent that future will be. We will still need skilled workers in practical trades and in supporting roles. Compensation will depend on how we structure our economy. Arguing or calculating from existing numbers is wildly misleading to say the least, because current numbers are based on suicidally rapid resource depletion and grotesque overpayment to the topmost tier of the ownership/management class.

I tried to train myself to live within a very modest -- not to say meager -- income, but associating with normal people has lured me into the culture of routine luxury that we call a middle class lifestyle in the United States. Restructuring the scale of wealth may mean that I get stripped of what little I have, because I can no longer afford it under fair distribution of the reduced income each generation receives in order to preserve something for the succeeding generations that they create. It's a scary calculation, but the alternative is to assume that we will develop interstellar flight and find a ready supply of new planets we can deplete in our voracious quest for endless growth. Either that or just go out in a gorging, guzzling blaze of glory depleting this one.

Choose your vision and support it, or just live by impulse and let evolution choose for you.

The radical resistance of self extinction

 The statistics are easy to find showing that a handful of billionaires control more wealth than the bottom half of the population in the United States. Extreme wealth generates its own gravity, sucking more and more resources toward itself.

The United States owes much of its prosperity to the stolen labor of slaves. When official slavery was ended, powerful men in the former Confederacy made sure that the Black population would remain subjugated. By the end of the 19th Century, powerful business interests built immense fortunes by suppressing labor -- creating a virtual slave economy -- until reformers in the government heeded the uprisings and broke the power of corporate consolidation and collusion.

Big business kept trying, and had flourished again by the 1920s, setting up economic collapse. A few rich tumbled, but the solid fortunes survived. Let the common folk bear the brunt of the decisions and follies of the powerful. It has been that way throughout history. Power accretes, life is cheap, and you're a slacker and a coward if you don't play along.

While humanity plays out its endless power struggles, we trash the environment. We keep discovering that we removed some key piece that we thought was not important in our haste.

At the moment, we are developing technology that allows the wealthy to keep tabs on us and suppress us better than ever. Any government that we instituted to keep them in check would use the same technology to protect itself. It might be okay as long as the government was staffed by people who would not abuse that power. What are the odds?

The future seems to hold a couple of unpalatable probabilities: the majority of us end up grubbing for sustenance in a global economy run by a few for the benefit of a few, and we end up in constant losing battles with the armed forces and law enforcement of the regime in perpetuity.

We can "vote with our wallets" all we want, boycotting this or that visible head of the multi-headed mega-corporations, but we're just an inconvenience for a single division or two. The major money machine thrives. We can elect progressive champions who will vote for the things that would truly improve our lot in all respects, but they will have to deal politically with the well-funded representatives of the corporatocracy.

Thinking about a real shootin' revolution? Your odds are terrible, given the global reach and vested interest of the wealthy. Forget whether you would win. The war itself would reduce the planet to a smoldering rock. This is not hyperbole based on the power of nuclear weapons. It's a mere fact about war: it pollutes and destroys without restraint. Lots of things will get blown up. Both sides are fighting for their lives with nothing to lose.

I hate to be a downer, but any future generations you produce now will be slave labor or doomed cannon fodder. But it doesn't have to be grim and sad. You've just freed up a lot of disposable income as well as relieving yourself of a moral burden. You don't have to leave, just because you have refused to give the wealthy your children as hostages. Have fun! Eat tasty food. Listen to music. Travel.

See, here's the thing: The rich will keep breeding. They'll go on for years before they even notice that we've stopped providing cheap labor. They will produce more of their privileged offspring than the top tier can accommodate. Those kids will filter down into the lower roles. Laws will have to be rewritten to disinherit them, so that they can't rebel and take over the system that their families have maintained for generations.

The wealthy themselves, mostly not expert at anything except keeping a boot on the necks of the people who work for them, will have to develop expertise pretty quickly to keep up the automated systems they paid others to invent so that they could lay off a bunch of workers. Their utopia depends on having just the right number of underlings to keep things humming. If we all refuse to help them meet their staffing needs, they lose their comfy bubble.

Lest you think we could bring about paradise on Earth just by starving out the wealthy and collapsing civilization, remember that violent coercion was one of humanity's first innovations. It isn't going away. The only way to end it is to end us.

Naturally, this is not going to be a popular point of view. I resisted it for decades. Lots of people will continue to feed the voracious appetite of the culture of power. I decided early on not to have children, but I held out the hope that a better future was truly -- though remotely -- possible. However, as years have passed and technology has evolved, life has gotten simultaneously more comfortable for the privileged and more tenuous for the vast majority of us. Many of us down here in the disposable masses enjoy comforts and conveniences that did not exist 20, 30, 50 years ago. My view of a nice world to live in was shaped by childhood observations in the 1960s and '70s. In many ways it has not changed. But generations that followed have completely different baselines and perceptions, and they far outnumber me. I was already outvoted by my own generation in making the first steps toward that better world.

The permaculture crowd seems to have a rough idea of what I had in mind and had no name or platform for, but they're locked in battle with elements in their own age group who want to put medieval religion in charge of government and make racism great again, while driving petroleum fueled vehicles in defiance of repressive science. So what progress have we made? The former "greatest country on Earth" (USA! USA! USA!) is now lurching toward a polluting dictatorship that considers war crimes to be expressions of national might and virtue. Will those forces win? I join with those who say that they will not. But the struggle to stop them delays all other progress as we ally with disillusioned former followers of the regime who are willing to defend democracy at long last, but only so that we can go back to the same stupid arguments that were dooming us before and paved the way for the authoritarian takeover in the first place.

We will beat them. We will unseat them. But they will still be around, seeking another route to power. The struggle doesn't end. A multitude will labor in obscurity so that a minority might feel like they've made a substantial difference. We need warriors, champions, heroes to sacrifice themselves in defense of all that is great and good, but we mock their sacrifice by refusing to learn how to keep it from happening over and over.

We all do better when we all do better. But starting right now, getting the resources to help the lowermost do better means taking a big chunk out of the uppermost. Thus we aren't "all doing better." The great rebalancing may be beyond the will of the sizable percentage who will see their fortunes diminish. "What's in it for me?" will take over as the guiding principle. Take over? It never left. 

A growth mindset has driven humans for at least thousands of years. Why pay for what you can take by force? Why settle for your own little valley when you've produced more sons than your farms can feed, and they're getting restless? 

I have lived my whole life under the threat of World War III. We have avoided it so far, but the threat remains. Fans of the Star Trek universe remind us that the peaceful future of the Federation lies beyond World War III. Like human beings need to teach themselves that dumb lesson one more time, using even more modern and horrific weapons than in the second volume of the trilogy.

With so many people designing their lives around fantasy fiction, whether it's the Bible, Star Trek, DC Comics, or what have you, it's such an ingrained tradition that we have groups of believers trying to bring about specific events described in their texts as stepping stones to the good part. Ironic when it's science fiction blinding people to the open eyed, unprejudiced observations of the actual scientific method, which could show us how to get to the good part now without the firestorms and bloodbath. But no: let's use cautionary tales as an instruction manual instead. Let's get so caught up in fantasy and cosplay that we dance right into the fiery crash that no one in their right mind really wants to go through.

We have yet to produce a complete generation of offspring that say en masse, "Hey! You people are crazy! We're not doing it!" We keep breeding rival teams to fight on in perpetuity while the whole ecosystem crumbles.

Vote with your wallets. Vote with your sperm and eggs. Tell the power-mad bastards no.

Kidney donation

 Kidney donation looks so easy on TV. The long lost or estranged sibling shows up in the last seven minutes of the medical drama and it's off to the operating room.

Kidney donation sounds so easy in urban legend. Just book a holiday at a low-budget  Central American resort, go to the bar that night, and wake up the next morning in a bathtub full of ice cubes and blood.

When my wife was diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease a couple of decades ago, I thought that donation required a very high degree of genetic compatibility. Researchers she was working with said that it wasn't that difficult. Blood type matters, and mumble mumble something didn't quite catch that, but we were years away from having to know. Overall, it seemed like anyone with two kidneys and generally good health should just scoop one out and toss it to someone who needs it.

On the advice of her nephrologist, my wife started looking for a live donor several years ago, when her GFR dropped into the mid teens. Another nephrologist I had consulted after I discovered I had kidney stones by passing one during a long, wild night at home had said that he didn't think I should donate to my wife. Because the situation at the time wasn't acute yet, I did not follow up to ask him what he meant. He retired a couple of years after that, so his notes and memory of my case had been overwritten by other priorities in his life by the time I followed up.

My wife and I have the same blood type, O+. That blood type is a universal donor: anyone can receive our blood. But we can only receive blood or transplants from someone who is also type O. As a starting point, my general appearance of good health and blood type match demanded that I investigate further.

The kidney folks had made the surgery sound pretty low key, at least as far as surrendering a vital organ goes. The preferred method is laparoscopic: the surgical team makes small incisions to insert viewing equipment and the extraction tools themselves, and just slurp that bad daddio right out of ya. In certain circumstances they might have to make an old-fashioned large incision, but most of the time they get away with minimal cutting. That was my general impression.

Recovery calls for a few days in the hospital, a couple of weeks of very limited activity, and then six more weeks or so of increased but still restricted activity, including a weight limit on lifting. This could seriously impact my job, especially now in the age of e-bikes. I put in a block and tackle to hoist them into the work stand, but some of them still need a few good shoves and some extra support to clamp them securely. And the two week initial period includes no driving or travel.

My wife is registered at Penn, the center nearest to where she works during the school year. Our permanent residence is in New Hampshire, where my job is. If I went down to slip her the ol' organ, I would be there for the entire two-week initial recovery. If there were any complications, I would be away from work for even longer. Then on my return to work I would not be at full strength for at least another six weeks. When it's all theoretical, being somewhat breezily described by an expert who knows that it's not imminent and has probably given the talk hundreds of times, it sounds very manageable. When it actually looms, with everyone two decades older (more or less), with a regime in power that threatens even the flimsy social safety nets that our country already put up with before they started swinging a wrecking ball, the prospect seems more precarious.

The transplant folks continue to be encouraging, but as you become more of an actual prospect for them they have to start getting seriously detailed about what you would actually be doing. The basic outline holds, but now you need to consider every ramification: financial, social, mental, emotional, as well as physical. You might have trouble getting health insurance in our system driven by corporate profits. You might have long-shot complications from any point after anaesthesia is administered, all the way down to years later. You get preferred placement on the transplant list should your remaining kidney fail, but the donor pool is far from adequate as it is. Cloning research proceeds way too slowly.

Of course my wife is screwed without a donation, whether live or deceased. Live donation has the best outcomes. If not a transplant, the alternatives are dialysis or death. So my risks as a donor are still far less than the risks to her, even if the transplant is successful. Survival rates are above 90 percent on average for one year, dropping to high 80s to low 90s at the five-year mark. Some recipients have lasted more than 50 years. One recipient told her that the return of vitality was stunning after she got her transplant. It seemed well worth it to see if I could help her feel that way.

So then the real process began. I had to formally register. Then I got the first set of lab tests, just basic blood and urinalysis. Clearing those gates, I had a couple of phone interviews. There is a National Kidney Registry, but no national screening of individual donors. Recipients and donors must register with individual centers. I could have done a remote donation through Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, but that would have meant that the organ would have to travel swiftly to Philadelphia, and that I would not be right there with my intended recipient. I would have had to go through the lengthy screening process at Brigham, and be tied to them for every aspect of the procedure. Being "across the hall" in Philly seemed like a better plan.

I made arrangements for a full day of screening appointments at Penn. This included collecting my urine for 24 hours prior to the first appointment in the morning, as well as fasting for blood draws. The blood work included a glucose tolerance test because of some family history of relatives with diabetes, so I had to fast for two more hours. That left a small window in which I could have grabbed a quick breakfast and coffee before fasting for two hours prior to a CT scan. Instead, other appointments in the middle of the day closed out that opportunity. By the time I got to radiology in the late afternoon I was about ready to have mystic visions.

In addition to the medical screening, I met with a financial counselor and a social worker about those social and financial factors. I also had to get blood drawn for infectious disease analysis because I had lived in south Texas as a small child and might still be harboring one fungal infection and one parasite known to lie dormant for decades, but that might hop over in the kidney to the immune-suppressed recipient. It's a deep, deep dive into your entire life and as much of the lives of your forebears as you can dig up.

The results started popping up on my patient portal by the next day. They mostly indicated that I am in good health, but the CT scan disclosed that I have cooked up another little stone in the left kidney. The one I passed about seven years ago was 3mm. The pain ramped up from back spasms around 5 p.m. to side pain, abdominal pain, wave upon wave stronger and stronger to a crescendo that made me think I might puke, shit, and pass out all at once. That was the transit through the ureter to the bladder. After that, the urethra was almost casual. I managed to catch the stone -- if indeed there was only one -- in the bottom of the toilet. I hadn't been thinking about collecting it, only getting it the fck out of my body, but then I realized that it might have diagnostic and scientific value. I fished it out and put it in a little plastic vial.

The 2mm stone discovered by the CT scan was described as "non obstructive." Even so, I don't want the little bastard growing big and strong before it eventually decides that it wants to go see the world. I'd been drinking water like it was a second job for all the years since I'd passed the first stone, because my nephrologist friend had told me that stone formation goes down 85 percent if you can pass 1.8 liters of water a day, and down to ZERO if you can pass 2.5 liters a day. Sign me up! But sometimes it's not possible to drink -- and pee -- as much as you have to. Road trips, public events, or sweaty bike rides on hot days all cut into that target volume. I guess accreting a 2mm stone over seven or eight years isn't too bad. But now I'm back to really watching my sodium and oxalate intake.

That little 2mm piece of crap also figured in the transplant board's decision to decline me as a donor. I got that word yesterday. There were other factors, including my isolated lifestyle up here. Also some other family history elements that don't present an immediate threat, but too much of one for them to advise a guy nearly 70 years old to yank out a kidney.

An altruistic donor with the wrong blood type had already offered a kidney to my wife as I began the screening process. I just believe that I couldn't ask anyone to do something that I wasn't willing to do myself, and if my O+ kidney turned out to be the bestest match ever, then it was hers for the asking. So now the other donor can pursue the paired or voucher donation option, and my wife might just get a few more years feeling more like her old self. She's still working, because that's where health insurance comes from in our capitalist hellscape, and because she really does like her work (even when her job pisses her off).

Soft secession is concession

 As the Trump administration cripples the power of the federal government, some Democratically controlled states have floated the idea of "soft secession." They hope to take up the slack for the rescission of federal funds and the gutting of federal agencies that provide essential services to all Americans by instituting state programs and creating interstate compacts to achieve what they can of the abandoned beneficial goals.

Soft secession acquiesces to the concept of "states' rights." It also echoes state initiatives that formed the basis for the progressive reforms at the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, but the concept of states' rights has been a rallying point for the political forces that have sought to demolish the federal government since the New Deal was enacted. Before that, of course, it was used to justify the spread of slavery in the expanding nation, leading to the Civil War.

Increasingly through the latter half of the 20th Century, and exponentially in the age of the Internet, states' rights has been used as cover for repressive laws enacted at the state level as federal oversight has been crippled. Voting rights,civil rights, women's rights, public health, infrastructure, energy modernization, and more have been demonized by well funded institutions pretending to be about personal freedom while exploiting bigotry and religious zealotry to advance a narrow view of what freedom is and who gets to exercise it.

Soft secession initiatives legitimize the idea that states' rights can be a viable method of organizing the country. The primacy of states' rights completely undermines the concept of the United States as a single nation. The Constitution was supposed to advance the concept of one nation with a set of undeniable universal rights of citizenship, replacing the unwieldy confederation that had been falling apart as the national government after the Revolutionary War. The confederation would have broken into a bunch of little nations, separately easy prey to the larger, powerful, established nations from which the colonies had broken philosophically.

We can hope that soft secession efforts succeed in the interim to navigate through the constant crises brought on us by the corruption and incompetence of the Trump regime, but we must be sure that they are temporary, lest they lead to the fragmentation that the misguided ideologues of the far right have longed for.

The federal government failed in many ways in the latter half of the 20th Century. This led to the distrust that the right wing has turned to its advantage after the liberals abandoned it once the Vietnam War was over. Between leftover lefties who don't trust The Man, and rebellious righties bent on unlimited individual liberty even if it kills us all, the clever institutions seeking control have plenty of handles with which to steer paranoid voters. But we have to look at when, why, and how the federal government failed. Those failures were a product of their era. They also reflect basic realities of the conduct of a nation dealing with other nations. All nations have common and competing interests. All nations present varying levels of threat and opportunity to the other nations.

Life is simple, but foreign policy is a tangled mess. There's no way to have absolute transparency, and you will never satisfy every citizen in a large population in a democratic republic. You'll be lucky to satisfy a majority with what you can say in public. It all factors into the biennial popularity contests that sweep the country with regularly scheduled, mostly bloodless revolutions.

More than foreign policy will require a degree of confidentiality. But most legitimate government secrets relate in some way to managing the relationship with other nations. There are things we don't want them to know in full detail. Make them at least conduct some espionage to find out. It creates jobs in the spy community.

Full and permanent secession -- a reversion to confederation -- would require each little nation-state and sub-confederation to supply its own military and intelligence capability, funded by whatever economic resources the state or confederacy controls. Who gets the former federal military assets in a given state when the breakup occurs?

When the Soviet Union broke up, the United States and NATO stood as a bastion of stability and arbiter of standards. The "free world" and rising Asian powers oversaw the distribution of hardware. Now that Russia seeks to reclaim its imperial glory with the help of a puppet government in the United States, our breakup would be supervised by a rival nation that has sought our downfall for 80 years. At the same time, an ever more powerful China watches and maneuvers to counter both the sabotaged and crumbling United States and the wily chess players of Russia on the global game board.

Nuclear war seems like the big nasty. It serves as the monster under the bed to frighten citizens in every country, while the real horror is that conventional warfare has never ceased. The lives of the general population are expended by governments controlled by rich egotists who feel no shame or horror at maiming and death of thousands. It's good business and great domestic policy to give people the blood sport of war on just the right scale.

Because nuclear weapons exist, the deterrent of mutually assured destruction will probably always be with us. In the name of avoiding it, we are encouraged to accept the heroic sacrifices of brave service members in conflicts below that threshold. We will need those for as long as humanity separates itself into territories and conflicting ideologies.

Small nations will always be vulnerable to the ambitions of the leaders of larger nations. Breaking up the United States does not serve any American well. It only serves the interests of the powers arrayed against what was once our steady march to better express our stated founding ideals of liberty and justice for all. We had much work still to do. Our worst enemies in that work live among us. Don't let their longstanding advocacy for states' rights carry out its true purpose of curtailing individual liberty and dismantling the United States. Your constitutional rights will mean nothing when there is no longer a federal government to act on your behalf.

Like gerrymandering, soft secession should only be considered as a drastic temporary measure to regain our footing as a unified, representative democracy. You can't claim to be a patriot while undermining the principle that our diverse nation draws its strength from the collection of individual citizens into a unified national entity.