Just when I vow to step back, take a deep breath, for a few hours view politics from afar, knowing (and not exactly forgetting) the horrors of so many lives: the refugees and other homeless humans, those mired in death and starvation in countless deadly military/gang/thug actions around the world—it gets personal in various ways. For starters, personally terrifying in the way fascism, communism, capitalism, all creep up and into, if not my life directly right now, it’s in the next field or village or city or country over.
I do try sometimes to pull away from the words and pictures, just a ways, not completely. Can’t think about the UK or EU or NATO; Iran or India, and please god, let me not see an image of joker-in-charge on page or screen for a day or two.
But then I conduct my quick morning scan just to make sure New Mexico is not in a shooting war with Texas (that’s meant to be a joke! Still today…a joke). And while the world-danger is not as close as Texico, it feels ever more personal to me. It’s guns ablaze in places I’ve lived and visited…and loved and enjoyed. Seriously…if there’s one tool that literally cries out for use it is guns. And if you have too many unemployed and, in many cases, otherwise unemployable men (mostly men) and you give them a gun, things will go bang in the night.
For a moment of enjoyment: “From Ghoulies and Ghoosties, long-leggety Beasties, and Things that go bump in the Night, Good Lord, deliver us.” (source may be a British prayer, quoted by Alfred Noyes in a 1909 anthology, The Magic Casement—origin of ‘bang in the night’ possibly).
Here’s what I want to say before continuing: I am terrified and heart-broken about what’s taking place in the U.S. and in much of the rest of the world. But like most of us, not directly in the line of fire, my days are a mixture of despair and going to the grocery store; of loathing of ‘my’ president and his minions and watering the plants; of a deep and visceral anger and of watching a Britbox murder mystery. When there’s a big march against our ruling fascist, I march. I subscribe to a few trustworthy news sources (even though I try to avoid reading anything from time to time, if journalism leaves the room, we are truly goners). I do read ever more history—gives me perspective I say. I rant and rave to myself, to friends…and then I even remove myself from the source of the furious rants for a few days. No media, I say. Take a breath. Smell the roses! Which is what I intended for this week.
But now it’s become personal: Minnesota. Not the next state over. But home. Where I grew up and still consider myself a citizen thereof. Minneapolis. Where I lived and worked. ‘My’ government has sent, and is paying, masked and armed thugs to patrol and murder on the streets of Minneapolis! Seriously. Oh yeah, that’s right. Minnesota is a blue state. Well-off blue state. The Minnesota state governor, during the campaign dared call dt and minions “just plain creepy and weird as hell.” The truth’s a bitch, isn’t it? And, Minnesota’s biggest urban area has a lot of brown people. Good looking, smart, relatively well-off, recently-foreign, Muslim, brown people—the worst kind.
And, yes indeed, there are probably some crooks among them. Likely nothing to compare to the crook-in-chief and his happy grifters. And have you noticed how hard it is to find a race, ethnicity, culture, religion, gender, occupation without a crook of two? Give it a think, I dare you. Name one. Not saying that’s all fine, but I’ll guarantee if you look into the facts of the Somali fraud scandal, you’ll find both truth and lies about the extent of it…and I’ll also guarantee you’ll never find anything to match the level of corruption rife in the administration currently occupying Washington DC.
Since I’m not physically traveling so much anymore, please bear with me as I revisit places dear to me—being trampled all over by MAGA goons. I’d use the R-word, but every now and then a Republican has a lucid and oh-so-brave half-minute and makes a stumbling little move in the right direction. So rare though, let me just go ahead and say Republican Goons. Any emergence by any one of them above sewer-level has been so brief as to be hardly noticeable.
Eating lots of Walleye makes for good politics.
Well, I was going to move on to Greenland and Colombia and Canada from the morning’s ‘quick’ news scan, but I’m already exhausted and it’s only 9am.