When one of us is victimized, we are all victimized.
Is it alright that some of us are being diminished? We better figure out really fast that everyone is somewhere on the list of those who will be diminished sooner or later unless something powerful happens.
You must take action. You must get up and speak out.
Black lives matter. Brown lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter. And we all better be demanding that. Otherwise, nobody’s life matters.
There are people who would take from you whatever you hold dear. The only way to stop that is to stand up for what you believe in.
Are you dispirited? That’s not enough.
Are you sad? That’s not enough.
Are you enraged? That’s not enough.
You must take action. You must get up and speak out.
Sometimes the threats we face are right in our faces and they are easy to see and easy to fight. Sometimes they’re hard to see, like global warming, but they’re here just the same. And they will harm you and the people you love unless you do something to stop them.
You must take action. You must get up and speak out.
Do you care? That’s not enough.
“I’m no longer Accepting what I cannot change . . . I’m changing the things I cannot Accept!” Chicago Women’s March, January 21, 2017
Do you worry? That’s not enough.
You must demand the world you hope to see.
You must vote.
You must demonstrate.
You must protest what you know is wrong.
You must take action. You must get up and speak out.
Are you smart and clever? That’s not enough.
Do you want better? That’s not enough.
You must take action. You must get up and speak out.
It’s hard work. It is full of disappointment and frustration. But you already know that nothing that is worthy of you is easy to achieve.
You must take action. You must get up and speak out.
Your children and grandchildren are counting on you. So take action. Get up and speak out because that is worthy of you.
————————————
Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
YOUR ACTION STEPS: Offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.Thanks! JA
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.
New York Times, April 9, 1944. Click the graphic to download the full article as it appeared.
Reading time – 2:55; Viewing time – 5:35 . . .
We need a good and optimistic start for the new year. That message is for next week. Let’s first establish in a blinding flash of the obvious and in a compelling way why we need that good and optimistic start.
You don’t need a pundit, a pol or a blogger to tell you that American institutions are at risk and look shaky. There is bad stuff staring us in the face in so many venues and there is a chance you’ve wondered how bad it can get. The answer is, very bad. Here are some examples.
Under the ultra-thin, see-through veil of ensuring decorum, Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House and beloved Republican brainiac, the proposer of changes to Medicare and Social Security that he says don’t privatize those programs, except they really do, has proposed banning live streaming and photos from the floor of the House. This comes as a knee-jerk reaction to Republicans having been sucker punched by Democrats who demanded an up or down vote on universal registration of sales of firearms. Ryan ignored them and they responded witih a sit-in. Ryan tried to quash the event by closing the House session, which turned off the CSPAN cameras, but smart phone live streaming foiled his attempt at abridging free speech. Now Ryan and Republican hissy-fitters want to further restrict speech by fining Democrats and perhaps telling their mommies on them. Start thinking about abridgement of rights and be clear that practice will extend to your rights.
President Elect Trump notoriously retweeted hate group tweets and offered mealy mouthed responses to calls that he repudiate hate groups. During his campaign rallies he repeatedly called for protesters to be beaten up and demeaned them as though they were sub-human. He continues to refuse to repudiate hate groups and has brought Steve Bannon, alt-right hater of all things not white and anyone not worshiping male dominance, to be his chief strategist. Oh, and he wants to deport 11 million Hispanics and register Muslims. Start thinking discrimination and scapegoating.
Trump has hired lunatic fringe Mike Flynn to be his National Security Advisor. This is the same Mike Flynn who retweets phony stories and conspiracy crap, one example of which motivated North Carolina resident Edgar Welch to drive from his home to DC to invade a pizza parlor, believing he was rescuing sexually abused children from the basement. He believed that because Mike Flynn brainlessly retweeted the bogus story. The good news is that the bullets Welch fired into the floor of the pizza restaurant didn’t hurt anyone. The bad news is that Mike Flynn, the fool who didn’t have the sense not to retweet this blatantly false story, is and will be advising the new president on when and where to use America’s military might, including nuclear weapons. Start thinking about military adventurism giving rise to horrific catastrophes.
There are many more examples of the democracy killing efforts underfoot, including Trump’s ridiculing and criticizing of the press so that you won’t find credence in reports from investigative journalists who report on Trumpian malfeasance.
To bring this to a focus, let’s check in with President Franklin Roosevelt’s Vice-President, Henry Wallace. He knew something about the harm that authoritarian regimes do to democracy and the world and has agreed to speak to you from his day and explain this fully and clearly. Click here to download a PDF copy of his comments as originally published in the New York Times on April 9, 1944. Click here to download a highlighted, easier to read version. Read it, especially the highlighted parts and you just may see a parallel between then and now and you’ll begin to realize just how bad the bad stuff we’re facing really is.
No one knows who said it first, but it’s often attributed to Sinclair Lewis:
When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.
Click me and sign the petition – because you can fight fascism right now.
Fascism? In America? Do the reading. Do an online search of fascism in America. The alarm rang a while ago, the snooze button is broken from our banging on it, hoping the alarm would go away and we all have to wake up.
I’ve heard it said and am beginning to believe that we are one or two ISIS-related terrorist attacks in America away from Mr. Extremist, everything in the false language of unearned greatness President Trump declaring martial law and suspending civil liberties. Just look at those he surrounds himself with, consider his absolutist, power-grabbing, self-congratulating nature, factor in his pathologically thin skin and the retaliatory abuse he heaps on innocent people. This just doesn’t look good for our nation.
If you had already caught a glimpse of this you likely have wondered what can be done and who will stand up to the bullies. Start with this: It’s up to us.
In addition, both some help and some hope are on the way and will be in the next post. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, it’s your turn now – in the Comments section below.
————————————-
Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
YOUR ACTION STEPS: Offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.Thanks! JA
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.
What do you suppose the reflection in Escher’s sphere would look like to Donald Trump, were he holding it? Surely, he would describe the image with superlatives, but that’s neither useful nor is it new information; neither is it important.
The far more important question is what would we, the American people, see were we to hold Escher’s reflecting sphere? Would we see ourselves steeped in democracy and freedom? How about liberty and justice for all? What about freedom of speech and of the press and freedom of and from religion? Are we a people who love peace and believe war is the last and worst option? Do we still reach out our hand, saying, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”? And do we still tell those looking to us as their last best hope, “I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”? We have a Declaration of Independence, a Constitution and a Statue of Liberty that say that we should see those things as we look at ourselves.
But what if some of us aren’t exactly like “us”? What if they don’t speak English yet or are sleeping on a sewer grate for warmth this winter? What if the brains of some are a bit scrambled because their mothers were druggies while they were pregnant? What if some have lived nearly all their lives in this country, they were good students and helped the high school basketball team win and America is the only country and culture they know, but they and their parents were born in Guatemala and entered this country illegally? Do these other “us” people deserve liberty and justice for all and the rest?
In point of fact, we don’t agree about that and quite a bit more and it gets even more complicated when we’re angry or afraid and need to feel muscular.
The challenge before us now and extending far into the future is to find the things that unite us instead of finding things that divide us. The challenge is to stop racing to judgment about those who don’t agree with every nuance of belief we hold, to stop knee-jerk demonizing others as stupid or ignorant, hateful or unpatriotic. The challenge before us is to start asking questions, seeking to understand, rather than trying to cram our views down anyone’s throat, because that cramming guarantees unnecessary conflict.
Get over your certainties and I’ll get over mine and perhaps, in some future with a bit more hope in it we can find a way forward that has room for all of “us” and we see in that reflecting sphere the things that unite us.
————————————-
Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
YOUR ACTION STEPS: Offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.Thanks! JA
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.
I’ve been wrong. I’ve been short-sighted and reactionary and embarrassingly foolish. The embarrassment is because I know better.
Something didn’t feel right and then I read Nick Kristoff’s A 12-Step Program for Responding to President-Elect Trump and it was then – at step #3 – that I knew that I had tripped on the attitude diving board and done a belly flop onto the political pool deck.
Step 3. I WILL avoid demonizing people who don’t agree with me about this election, recognizing that it’s as wrong to stereotype Trump supporters as anybody else. I will avoid Hitler metaphors, recognizing that they stop conversations and rarely persuade. I’ll remind myself that no side has a monopoly on truth and that many Trump supporters are good people who want the best for the country. The left already has gotten into trouble for condescending to working-class people, and insulting all Trump supporters as racists simply magnifies that problem.
I know that Kristoff is right, that nobody has a monopoly on the truth and that having voted for Trump doesn’t mean that someone is a racist. Indeed, I’m wondering what percentage of Trump voters were simply so convinced of the evil of Clinton that they were willing to ignore Trump’s negatives – or the percentage of Americans who chose Trump because at least he was speaking to the suppressed rage they’ve carried in their gut for decades due to government having so consistently ignored and abused them.
I’ve been frustrated listening to righties who claim the high ground of patriotism and love of America, who imply or outright say that they have it right and others simply aren’t patriots. I often have imaginary conversations with them and explain that I love America every bit as much as they do and I very much want to excoriate them for their closed-mindedness. At this moment, though, my aforementioned embarrassment extends yet further, as I’ve realized that I’ve been thinking about them with a closed-mindedness of my own and it’s as harmful as theirs.
Flagrantly demonizing people is wrong no matter who does it. Stereotyping is wrong when I do it. On the other hand, calling out hate mongers is the right thing to do.
Kristoff advises letting go of Hitler metaphors, so let’s play with that a bit. “Alt-Right” includes Neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, white supremacists, militias, the Posse Comitatus and likely other fringe hate groups. Trump has installed Alt-Right hater Steve Bannon as his chief strategist, and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions as his attorney general and he’s bringing hyper-anti-immigrant hotheads like Mike Flynn and Kris Kobach into his cabinet. He has promised to round up Hispanics and to discriminate against Muslims and make them “register”. He stereotypes African-Americans as ghetto bums and continues to refuse to repudiate the hate mongers, including the seig heil morons. And Kristoff really wants me to let go of the Hitler metaphors? I don’t know if I can do that. I’m not confident that refusing to see a Hitler-like pattern is a good idea, because the hate induced catastrophes always begin this way. A key part of our answers moving forward lies in opposing the haters and stopping the bullies.
Meanwhile, we’re left with the rest of the question about what to do for our country, and I – perhaps you, too – need to take a step back and do a 12-step program – or maybe an 11.8-step program – and find some balance, accept that some don’t see it our way, but that doesn’t make them wrong or foolish or hateful or bad. Then perhaps we can all start finding some answers.
————————————-
Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
YOUR ACTION STEPS: Offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.Thanks! JA
– See more at: https://jaxpolitix.com/8280-2/#sthash.Vem4eKsP.dpuf
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.
And he continues to lie. On Friday he claimed credit for ensuring that a Lincoln automobile plant would be kept in Kentucky, preventing the job loss disaster that would have happened if Ford had decided to move the plant to Mexico. That would be great, except that Ford never considered having the plant anywhere but in Kentucky. Trump had absolutely nothing to do with Ford’s decision about plant location. Trumpian dishonesty is a constant and it will take a huge toll on American culture, our people and our safety in the world.
Significant risks will occur when Trump slathers his fatuous dishonesty on foreign leaders. They won’t take kindly to it and the safety of the world will be at risk as he undermines international trust. And we most certainly won’t like it when he lies to us about whatever he agrees to as he fawns over Vladimir Putin.
What will happen to justice in America, which he claims to champion – like the right of every citizen to vote – when Trump makes racist, segregationist Jeff Sessions the attorney general? What will happen to America’s national security, the very same security that he brayed he will be the best at protecting, when Trump picks for his national security advisor hyperbolic Michael Flynn, a retired 3-star general who was forced to retire from the military and from his position as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency because of his flagrantly extremist behavior.
What happens to our freedoms when Trump’s ubermeister, White Supremacist Steve Bannon, starts registering Muslims and rounding up Hispanics to shuttle them off to who-knows-where?
What happens to the climate of the entire planet now that we have a Global Warming Denier in Chief?
People are already being hurt – read the post and comments here and here.
I have been accused of helping to drive the polarization of this country. I don’t know if I’m doing that, but if I am, look for me on the pole labeled, “Facts, Reality and Equal Justice”. I acknowledge that nothing bad has happened yet on the Trump national policy level. On the other hand, the preparations for very bad things to occur are happening in front of us right now and to refuse to see that is self-defeating for this nation; it may be disastrous for our minorities. We need to take action.
I’m in discussion with some clergy people about what we can do to address the interpersonal hate that has oozed from slimy places under the fragile rocks of American tolerance.
There is a petition going around now urging the members of the Electoral College to vote for Hillary, as most are under no legal obligation to vote according to their state’s voting outcomes. Go ahead – click through, sign it and pass this post to your friends urging them to do the same. Make your voice heard.
What else can we do? Put your ideas for action in the Comments section below. Help us all.
————————————-
Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
YOUR ACTION STEPS: Offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.Thanks! JA
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.
Pam Verner is a psychotherapist who specializes in treating people with addictions. She is compassionate and caring and she is an expert. She recently penned a clarifying and compelling message and gave me permission to share it with you. Her message is vitally important. Now Pam.
I rarely (actually never) send out group emails—because we all generally get enough. I figure, why take up your time to read yet another email? But this time I decided I wanted to speak and share a video—just this once. This email is particularly for those who are unhappy with Hillary and want to vote third party just to make a statement to the current political parties. This is not the time for that. Here’s why.
First my take—(please know this is based upon my professional training and experience as a psychotherapist dealing with addictions):
Trump behaves and speaks like every addict in the throes of addiction. Please know, I deeply love alcoholics and addicts—and pray for their recovery. But they should never be at the helm of our country when they are held within the throes of their addiction. Someone in the throes of addiction needs help and support to see a better and truer path in life. Whether Trump is currently consuming drugs, alcohol, sex or whatever in an addictive pattern—I truly do not know. However, his thinking and behavior patterns surely resemble what I would call a “dry drunk,” i.e.– a pattern of addictive thinking. And that snorting he does when he is in a debate and appearing to feel somewhat threatened—well, to me that appears he is trying to call upon some sense of “remembered” power before speaking. Notice that he snorts deeply, then speaks. This is also reminiscent of a dry drunk —only perhaps more telling, a “dry drug.”
A hallmark of the mental pattern of addiction is to be caught within the web of “victim/rescuer/perpetrator.” It’s a classic dynamic in my field with which we frequently work. Trump is extremely skillful and intense in engaging with these three dynamic roles. I believe his populist support comes from sounding the rescuer trumpet. When he believes he is being attacked, he sounds the victim trumpet. The inordinate number of lawsuits he has [filed] against others shows how skillful he is in doing victim yet going into perpetrator role. What we are seeing now with the current tapes and female testimony is his perpetrator role.
With Trump, I believe the victim role and the rescuer role are simply covers for his primary pattern of perpetrator. Make no mistake, he is a threat to any vulnerable aspect of our country—our women, our children, our environment, our small businesses, our minorities, our public schools and anything else that does not have the strength to fight. Because that is the simple definition of a predator: A person who exploits vulnerability.
Watch this video of Trump being a predator. He looks as if he is stalking Hillary when her back is turned. That’s one thing a predator does – strikes when backs are turned. This video is both funny and horribly unsettling.
Remember the predator and vote [in] this election. Please do not throw your vote away on any third party.* The stakes are higher in this election than in any other in our history.
Instead, send Hillary to the White House (yes I know for sure she is not perfect). And send Trump to the treatment facility where he can get help to restore his humanity. It must be in there somewhere—it always is.
Watch the video. It’s creepy, but it’s important that you see it. While I was watching the second debate I desperately wanted Hillary to turn around, mid-sentence, and say, “Donald, this isn’t your turn, so go to your chair. I don’t care if you sit or stand, but women don’t like to be stalked.”
Share this with your people, your friends, your colleagues, your neighbors, every Millennial you know or have heard of and even with your crazy Uncle Bill. Link it to your FaceBook page – just use the FaceBook linking button below (blue square with an “f”) and link it to all the other social media you use, too.
THANK YOU PAM VERNER for your professional insight and wisdom and for your courage to speak out!
————————————-
Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
YOUR ACTION STEPS: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.Thanks! JA
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.
It’s not at all unusual to refrain from contributing to research on, say, Parkinson’s Disease – until your mom’s voice begins to shake and she has trouble getting her hands to do the most ordinary of things.
It’s just human nature to have cared when Malaysia Flight 370 went missing, but it’s likely you went about your day in an ordinary fashion. Unless you had loved ones on that airplane.
And so it is as we react to the revelations about Donald Trump and his sexual assaults. You care, but if it wasn’t you or yours, perhaps you just go about your business.
It wasn’t just the so called “locker room” tape from years ago that made this so awful, because there is now a steady drumbeat of women coming forward and disclosing his lewd, bullying and apparently illegal behavior that harmed them. Women across the country have rejected Trump because of his obvious misogyny.
There have been appeals to men on the grounds that they may have daughters, wives or sisters, so they should be able to relate to this brutality and abhor Trump and his abuses. After all, that would affect them. But that rather misses the mark, because some men don’t have daughters, a wife or sisters. Does that excuse them from the imperative to reject Trump?
Anna Marie Cox said it best after the Trump “locker room” recording was released. She said the obvious, that every man had a mother.
So, to all the men who had a mother: Is being abused by Trump the way you would have wanted your mother to be treated when she was 19 or 25? If she was beautiful, would you have thought that her beauty made her fair game for sexual ambush? Would it have been okay if she had been in the Miss Teen USA contest when she was 15 years old and Trump had walked into her dressing room while she was undressed? Would it have been okay if she had been assaulted by lewd comments as she did nothing more provocative than walk down the sidewalk or show up for work?
Perhaps it has to be that close – it has to affect we humans personally – in order for us to truly feel the empathy and sometimes the outrage we should feel over the undeserved suffering of others. Now, though, you don’t have to be a woman who was leered at or groped or raped or pinned against a wall, nor do those things have to have happened to your daughter, your wife or your sister. You’re not exempt from the imperative to reject Trump, because you had a mother. So, this is personal. This is about you.
Oh, and by the way . . .
When I’m wrong, it’s important that I admit it, and so it is that I offer this ‘fess up.
A while ago I claimed in a post right here that those who support Trump aren’t idiots. They are simply people who are angry over being blown off and abused for so very long and Trump is the voice of their rage. Now, though, we’re told that 27% of American women still support Trump. Clearly, I was wrong. They really are idiots.
————————————-
Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
YOUR ACTION STEPS: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.Thanks! JA
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.
Reading time – 87 seconds; Viewing time – 2:42 . . .
In a snappy article in the New York Times cleverly entitled, A Week of Whoppers From Donald Trump, authors Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns list a single week’s “. . . blizzard of [Trump’s] falsehoods, exaggerations and outright lies . . .” and then debunk them.
After reading the piece it occurred to me that watching the September 26 debate would be more fun if I were to keep track of the false innuendo and bovine fecal matter that dribbles from Trump’s lips . . . just to record his prevarication score in Bingo-like fashion . . . to identify which lies he told the most times in just one 90-minute period.
Given that he was to be just one of the two debate participants, he would be limited to about 45 minutes of blatant deceit possibility, minus the time moderator Lester Holt might use for posing questions and suppressing audience reaction. Surely, not even Donald the Deceiver could rack up a high score in so little time, right?
Wrong.
In a debate where I found Donald Trump to be especially incoherent and non-specific, here are the top scoring Trump untruthables according to our crack CYA News staff:
I was against going into the war in Iraq. He said something like that 4 times. Hard to tell because of his meandering, incoherent rhetoric. He said it other ways, too, which if added to the blatant denials of the truth brings the total to about 8 whoppers.
Our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape they’ve ever been in before. He said some form of that approximately two times – sort of. Again, it’s hard to nail this down due to the Trump verbal blizzard of non-sequiturs.
Lots of whoppers vying for third place, like:
ISIS is in more and more places.
I’m all for NATO.
The Iran agreement is one of the great giveaways of all time.
We lose on everything.
“Stop and frisk” wasn’t found to be unconstitutional.
Perhaps things seem hopeless and you feel your sense of dignity and even your sanity assaulted by the Trump blasts of political dishonesty. Well, take heart – there is hope!
Have a look at the newest offering from the Represent.us folks. After watching their highly encouraging video, click through to their website. Then maybe even do something to make things better. I mean, really, that shouldn’t be too hard, since the bar is set so low.
DIRTY STINKING LIES BONUS SECTION:
David Leonhardt heads the New York Times Daily Opinion report and published the following summary of Deceitful Donald’s excursions from reality. There is no link to this in the newspaper, as this material was only offered as the lead article in the email to subscribers immediately following the September 26, 2016 debate.
Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
YOUR ACTION STEPS: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.Thanks! JA
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.
There is a difference between the act (saying something deplorable) and the person (they are deplorable) and my belief is that to condemn the person is to vilify, and that is a deplorable thing to do. So, I’m forcing myself to read between the lines and make a differentiation.
The polls have shown that a very large percentage of Trump supporters are motivated by some form of hate. The white supremacists are the extreme example, of course, but ordinary Americans with strong biases about race, gender identity, religion and national origin practice”othering” and they say and do, well, deplorable things. Like beating up protesters. My blood boils at the hatred of Trump and his cadre of brownshirts and brownshirt wannabees and I struggle to keep my “reject the action, not the person” mindset. In fact, there, I just failed again with the brownshirt comment.
Separating out these people who expressly promote hate, like David Duke, former Grand Peabrain of the Ku Klux Klan, and Alex Jones, Right Wing Village Idiot (and no, I won’t provide links to these two haters), I think a lot of Trump supporters are in his Kampf for far more benign reasons. They are frustrated at being lied to over and over by elected officials. They are suffering because so many good American jobs have disappeared (Fact: a large percentage of jobs are gone because of automation – off-shoring and bad trade deals aren’t the only boogie men). And they have been fed a steady diet of lies and hate from politicians, telling them that others are the cause of whatever their woes might be, all this in the absence of any facts that might be at least tangentially connected to reality.
All that doesn’t make these people innocent. At the very least they are guilty of allowing themselves to be ignorant. In their black and white world, they refuse to allow for the complexities of the world and foolishly insist on simple answers. And they allow themselves to be led by nothing more substantive than bumper sticker slogans.
And they are getting all of that from Donald Trump.
Stretch yourself, though, to allow that in their heart-of-hearts they love America just as much as you do and that they believe in right over wrong and good over bad. If you can do that, then Stephen King can explain our national obsession with delusion in this way:
Think about that as you watch the debates.
————————————-
Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
YOUR ACTION STEPS: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.Thanks! JA
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.
Reading time – 1:39 seconds; Viewing time – 2:47 . . .
July 5 – Alton Sterling is shot and killed by Baton Rouge, LA police.
July 6 – Philando Castile is shot and killed by St. Anthony, MN police.
July 7 – An angry sniper – a black man – kills 5 and wounds 7 white Dallas police, as well as wounding at least 2 civilians.
What are we to make of all that? Try this.
Tens of thousands of people participate every year in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. They are committed to preventing and curing breast cancer, so does that mean that these people don’t care about those who suffer from heart disease or diabetes?
The Mothers Against Drunk Driving leaders are singular in their focus, many of them because they have lost someone due to a drunk driver. Does that mean that they think it’s okay to drive stoned?
Tax Increment Financing is a tool used by cities in many countries for the purpose of redevelopment of sub-standard neighborhoods. Does that mean that the mayors of these cities don’t care if other areas fail?
My mother gave me two shirts as a birthday present many years ago. I immediately went to another room to try one on and then returned, only to hear Mom say, “You don’t like the other shirt?”
Clearly, choosing one doesn’t mean the dismissing of another. It isn’t a zero-sum game.
All of which is to say that the lily white criticism of Black Lives Matter, proudly proclaiming that all lives matter, is stupid and, worse, it’s racist. I have yet to hear any spokesperson for Black Lives Matter say or imply that only black lives matter. Their mission is about changing things so that black lives matter as much as every other life.
So, when you hear blabber-mouths complain about the Black Lives Matter movement, hear their words for what they are: an attempt to avoid the very real subject of active racism in America. They are trying to make it look as if whites are the poor victims of blacks who don’t want to get murdered by cops. That’s racism.
In an article for STAT about racism, police brutality and the training of our medical professionals, doctor/author Jennifer Adaeze Okwerekwu declares that, ” . . . as a nation we have a crippled conscience.” Perhaps those who complain about Black Lives Matter should get a pair of cultural crutches.
Does this speak to you? Then speak it along to friends & followers – LIke it, Tweet it, LInk it, FB it with a link to http://bit.ly/29RaiPA.
————————————-
Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
YOUR ACTION STEPS: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe. Thanks! JA
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.
With 25 years of hands-on executive experience as CEO of the commercial and industrial water treatment company I founded, I now use every bit of what I learned there in delivering workshops and keynote speeches on leadership. And it seems our national political leaders need a bit of that training, too. Let's talk about it here.
Reading time – 1:57; Viewing time – 3:25 . . .
Reading time – 1:39 seconds; Viewing time – 2:47 . . .
