It's What We Got

You know, folks, I really would like to be discussing pretty much anything but politics right now.

If there is one thing I will be forever grateful to Joe Biden for it is that he was boring. For four blessed years I didn’t have to wake up wondering what catastrophic nightmare the sitting president had pulled out of his ass in the wee hours and foisted off onto an unsuspecting world. I didn’t have to try to figure out ways to protect my loved ones and my communities from the militarized hatred of bigots, fanatics, and lowlifes. I didn’t fear for the survival of the American republic.

It was nice.

And now it’s gone and we’re back to all of that after a four year hiatus.

Just in the last forty-eight hours:

Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has launched a catastrophically stupid and immoral trade war with our closest trading partners – Canada and Mexico – as well as our largest (China). Because nothing says “stable genius” than trying the same thing he tried last time when he got his ass handed to him, only on a grander scale. Folks, you have no idea what this is going to do to the American economy and, to cite the meme I saw float by a couple of hours ago, I’m not about to try to explain how tariffs work to people who think DEI causes planes to crash. That would be like trying to explain calculus to a dung beetle and all I’d get out of it is older. In both cases I’d probably get shit flung at me. Both Canada and Mexico are going to respond to this with their own tariffs, which Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has already promised will simply escalate the trade war until the entire economy collapses.

Co-President Elon “Seig Heil” Musk, whom nobody actually voted for, has installed his minions into both the Treasury Department and the OPM, locking out the civil servants who actually work there and downloading all of their files and information onto portable hard drives. There isn’t anything in that sentence that is even remotely legal. When actual government employees have tried to stop these crimes they’ve been fired and slandered. Co-President Elon “Seig Heil” Musk has declared that the entire USAID – an agency that leads international development and humanitarian assistance efforts in allied countries – is a “criminal organization” for not doing exactly what his minions have ordered, and he’s declared the Evangelical Lutheran Church to be a money laundering organization. He’s also declared that he will unilaterally stop releasing funds to groups he dislikes, which alone should have had him arrested and jailed by now but these are the times we live in.

Federal employees are now being warned by their colleagues to document everything, say nothing, and generally behave in a manner consistent with self-defense in a Fascist regime. There is nothing unwarranted about that advice, either.

And so on. There’s more.

I’d really like to be talking about other things here. I have a life. I have observations that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the collapse of the American republic. I’d like to focus on better things.

And at some point I will do that, no matter how bad things get. You need a break now and then.

But for now it is important to use whatever platform I have to get the word out.

It’s not much, but it’s what I have right now. When there is more, there will be more.

Here I stand. I can do no other.