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Hmmm…

October 3, 2020 by redtreetimes

It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . . .

–The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

I came across the bit above and immediately knew that I was going to use it to illustrate the effect of the current president***, someone who has crashed every aspect of his  life with reckless abandon and carelessness. He always leaves behind a trail of destruction — and now, death– in his wake and like Tom and Daisy Buchanan, lets other people clean up the mess he has made.

This sense of hubris and selfishness was in clear focus yesterday as the covid-19 virus swept through their ranks, finally taking hold in the Oval Office.

He** and those around him have known the risks longer than any of us, even as they tried to downplay the danger of it as over 210,000 Americans died from it in a little over 6 months. They have been told by the highest authorities how to best combat the spread of this virus. They have incredible access to information and resources– medical equipment, testing, doctors and treatments– that would be unavailable to almost all of us. They have the ability to control their environment and reduce risk factors in a way most of us cannot.

Yet, with all of this, they practically thumbed their nose at it all. They refused to wear masks. Refused to stop gathering in groups or maintain any social distancing. Many refuse to quarantine properly. And with the virus running through their ranks, they continued to go out among the voters.

The sheer selfish disregard for others and the willingness with which they put others in peril is astonishing.

As one Secret Service agent who has put their lives on the line in protecting this person** stated, “He’s never cared about us.”

That’s a quote that should remain in the minds of the voters when they go to their polling places or mark their mail-in vote.

“He’s never cared about us.”

Like Tom and Daisy and others like them, he** only sees people as resources to be used for his own benefit and pleasure.

Folks are seen as either as steps to climb up or obstacles to be kicked out of the way.

Kindling to be burnt to keep him warm.

So, as he** remains in Walter Reed getting better care than any of us could ever expect, excuse me if I don’t show a great deal of compassion for his plight. If our situations were reversed, he wouldn’t go out one inch out of his way to express concern.

If I were on fire on the side of the road, he** wouldn’t stop to piss on me to put it out. That is, unless there was something in it for him.

And you know why? 

“He’s never cared about us.”

So, don’t ask me to care about his health now.

Maybe that sounds a little bitter this morning. Well, it probably is. My dad’s death and how our response to it has been tempered by the virus, the sheer folly of the covid outbreak at the white house, the recent surge of covid cases in my local area– these things and so many more have me a little on edge. Plus, the first thing I saw this morning was an announcement of the death of my greatest childhood hero, Bob Gibson, at age 84.

A legendary pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, Gibby was it for me. He was always the toughest guy out there on any field, a smoldering force whose competitive fire bordered on sheer hostility toward any opponent. With Gibby, it wasn’t that you were trying to best him a game. It was more like you were trying to take something from him. Every inning was an existential exercise. And he most often prevailed. He was so dominating as a pitcher that baseball changed the mound height because they felt the hitters needed help since he was practically unhittable.  I read his early autobiography, From Ghetto to Glory, numerous times and that made him an even bigger hero to me. He was eloquent and college-educated, a rarity for ballplayers of that era, and his story was compelling. He spoke out about issues of the day with intelligence and passion, like two of my other great childhood heroes, Bill Russell and Muhammad Ali.

And as the case with these three, Bob Gibson remains a hero.

Rest in Peace, Gibby. And say Hey! to my dad if you see him around. He’s new there, as well.

Have a good day.

Posted in Current Events, Opinion, Quote, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Dad

October 2, 2020 by redtreetimes

 

My dad passed away last night.

Please don’t send messages of sympathy. They are not required or expected. Instead, do something decent for someone you love and let them know you care. That will do much more for the world and yourself than sending me a message. I will be happier knowing you did that.

We are, of course, saddened. But more than that, we are relieved that his suffering here is at an end. These last several months have been a real ordeal for him. And for us in that we weren’t able to visit or truly witness his condition’s progress.

His skin cancer had metastasized and he was experiencing a horrible infection on the side of his head. I asked for photos of his head last week and the nursing facility hesitatingly forwarded them to me with a warning to brace myself.

They were right as I actually gasped and said Oh, my god! when I opened the photo. It was a horrifying sight made all the more awful by the fact that it was on someone I loved. It was like looking at an autopsy photo of a family member.

I only describe it now so that you can understand when I say that we are somewhat relieved. Nobody wants their loved ones to endure such agony, such indignity, especially as his dementia clouded his perception of what was happening to him. It was the best outcome in the minute.

We saw him one last time the other day, all masked up and trying to protect ourselves as best we could from the covid 19 virus that had recently been identified on his very floor, making it a de facto quarantine unit. That sense of contamination along with his deeply medicated condition made for a sad goodbye.

For now, that is the image of him I will carry. Hopefully only a short while. I would rather remember him in more vibrant times like the photo above.

Here’s a post that I have ran a few times about that photo followed by a song that he often sang when I was in the car with him as a kid. He would laugh at it now as he did then. He liked to laugh and could say some pretty funny things. I can still hear him interjecting a Hey! at the end of every line of the chorus of this song.

So, don’t be sad at my own sadness. Have a drink today, eat a nice meal, hug your kids, and do something good for someone else.

That’s so much better than being sad or worried or fearful. Rest in peace, Pops.

The photo above is a photo from back in 1963 or 64. We were living in an old farmhouse on Wilawanna Road, outside Elmira, just on the NY side of the border with Pennsylvania. You could walk over the hill behind our house and be in Pennsylvania. It’s a place that played a large part in my formative years.

We had a large chunk of yard to one side of the house that became a ballfield, a place where many of the kids on our road came to play baseball regularly and where Dad would often pitch to us or hit soaring fungoes that we would run under, pretending to be Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle. Dad is standing near home plate in this photo. That’s my brother, Charlie ( Chuckie back then), in the background.

I love this photo. When I think of images of my father this one is always first in line in my head. It was a Sunday morning, Easter if I am not mistaken but time has fuzzed that detail a bit.

It show my father at about 30 or so years of age, as strong and powerful as I would ever know him. I was four or five years old and he was larger than life to me then, could do no wrong. My protector, my boon companion, and still my hero at that point. This view of him sums that all up.

The pose has a bit of the pride and arrogance of youth in it, still brimming with the what-if’s and what-can-be’s of potential. It’s not something you’re used to seeing in your parents and witnessing it is like seeing a secret glimpse of them, a side you know must have been there but remains hidden from you in your day to day life with your parents. Maybe that’s why I like this picture so much. It seems like a marking point between his youth and ours, his kids.

I don’t know. Like many personal things, it’s hard to explain. All I know is that when I see my Dad in my mind now, the image of this photo is never far from my mind.

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

The Caring in Despairing

October 1, 2020 by redtreetimes

“Never Alone” – At the West End Gallery

“When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.”

― Dmitri Shostakovich

One of the things I worry about as I get older is that there may come a day when I don’t care anymore. That there might come a day when I would lose all interest in those things that once sparked fires within me.

That I won’t be moved by the emotion of the moment.

That I will lose the ability to feel love and joy.

And despair and grief.

How awful it must be to not feel those things?

They represent the high and low moments of our lives, marking our existence here. We experience both poles of emotion simply because they come from our caring for something.

And to not care anymore signifies a loss of believing that we have any sort of purpose here on this planet or that we owe nothing to its future.

It’s like an old person not planting a tree because they won’t be around to one day see it in its maturity. They don’t see that the simple act of planting it is a sign of belief in the future, that their nurturing of the young tree is a symbol that they still care about that future.

It is ultimately an act of caring and kindness.

I think you will find that those folks who plant trees when they are really too old to dig a proper hole have a great love of life, that they care deeply for what happens to the world around them. They laugh loudly and cry heartily. They know joy when the world is right and despair when the world is wrong.

And in their despairing of these wrongs, they seek to make the world right once more.

Because they still care.

I feel despair on many days lately. But I also find myself gladdened by knowing that it is a result of still caring, that I haven’t thrown in the towel and just given into the virtual death that comes with a life lived in not caring.

That beyond despair there remains the hope of joy once more.

 

 

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“Darkness Started Following You”

September 30, 2020 by redtreetimes

Dr. Seuss Slaying "America First" 1941

Dr. Seuss Slaying “America First” 1941

I don’t fear the dark.

I don’t fear the forest or the city.

I don’t fear being alone.

I don’t fear losing everything or being without.

I do not fear the rain or snow or wind.

I do not fear god.

And I don’t fear terrorists.

And I don’t fear criminals.

And I don’t fear missiles raining down from the sky.

And I don’t fear foreign nations invading this country.

And I sure as hell don’t fear any child or mother or father who flees to this nation to escape war and death.

But what I do fear is your fear.

I fear your cowardice and indifference.

I fear your apathy and distraction.

I fear your tiny attention span and your short-sightedness.

I fear your willingness to accept an evil done in your name.

I fear your preference for dividing people into us and them.

I fear your lack of empathy and compassion.

I fear how you mask your prejudices.

I fear the cruelty of your greed.

I fear your ignorance of your civic responsibilities.

I fear your sense of entitlement.

I fear your indifference to education, history or knowledge.

I fear the blatant stupidity and gullibility you proudly display like a new tattoo.

Don’t mistake this as attack on others– I am as much the you in this as anyone else.

And that is to my great shame.

Our great shame.

Enough is Enough.

************************

When I came into the studio early this morning and flipped on my phone, the first notification on it that jumped out at me was one from Pinterest that said:

Darkness started following you.

That was not the first thing I wanted to see this morning.

After a day spent on a death vigil for my dad and a night spent watching a pathetic creature who resembles someone midway through their transition to orangutan squeal and fling their poo on the debate stage, I wasn’t feeling too upbeat this morning as it was.

Pinterest, in its infinite wisdom, just confirmed what I thought might be the case.

Of course, I am kidding. Not about the Pinterest part. Yes, Darkness is, indeed, following me, whoever this Darkness person is.

But I don’t believe in being trapped under a cloud of bad luck, don’t believe in curses or spells. I don’t believe in anything or anyone that discounts my ability to overcome it.

I believe in my own determination and that of others like me. People who will not live under the darkness cast by a cloud of fear and stupidity any longer.

Now, the cartoon at the top and the words below it are from a post that first ran here back in January of 2017, just as the would-be-king took the reins of power and started his division of America.  The cartoon is from Dr. Seuss in 1941 when he took on the America First crowd of that era, a group of American isolationists and Hitler appeasers who would feel right at home in the MAGA world that cheers as the ghoul-in-chief gleefully breaks our bonds with longtime allies and kisses Putin’s Russian ass.

I felt that nothing in the message of both the cartoon and the accompanying words had changed in the nearly four years. In fact, it has become worst, as has almost every aspect of our nation and its culture. I can’t think of one solitary thing, one metric of any quality of life, that has improved in this nation over the past four years. People are still cowed by fears and division stoked by their ingrained prejudices, their own ignorance of the facts, and in believing the constant stream of misinformation and outright lies that fuel alternative media sources.

These people seek the darkness.

And I see that darkness but I also see the light shining through it. And I will march through the darkness until I reach that light.

Okay, enough for such a morning. In the original post four years ago, I ran the terrific Johnny Cash version of the song I See a Darkness from Bonnie “Prince” Billy  aka Will Oldham with the following as part of its chorus:

Oh, no, I see a darkness.
Did you know how much I love you?
Is a hope that somehow you,
Can save me from this darkness.

Here’s Bonnie “Prince’ Billy’s original version.

Have a day. And if you run into Darkness, tell him that I am looking for him.

Posted in Current Events | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments »

A Brave and Startling Truth

September 29, 2020 by redtreetimes

A BRAVE AND STARTLING TRUTH

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.

–Maya Angelou

I needed something with hope this morning, something not wrought of despair. I need something on a higher plane today, being as I am, so tired of hearing from the hate-filled people, as the late poet Maya Angelou put so well in a certain poem: whose mouths abide cankerous words/ Which challenge our very existence.

That is from the poem above, A Brave and Startling Truth. Maya Angelou wrote this piece in 1995 in specifically for the commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the United Nations. The video below is her reading of the poem at that event.

Hope it lifts you a little higher today.

 

 

Posted in Current Events, Poetry, Video | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

The Fraud

September 28, 2020 by redtreetimes

Whoever commits a fraud is guilty not only of the particular injury to him who he deceives, but of the diminution of that confidence which constitutes not only the ease but the existence of society.

–Samuel Johnson

Come on, you knew he* was a fraud.

A grifter. A con man.

It was always out there for us to see if we took the time to look and weren’t distracted by the gaudy golden letters that screamed out his name being plastered on every surface of his properties. But a lot of us didn’t take the time to look deeper and some were indeed mesmerized by his branding.

I pointed out four years ago that one bit of evidence of his ineptitude as a businessman was to be found in looking at his Atlantic City casinos. His casinos were part of a publicly held corporation from 1985 to 1995. It was the only time he was answerable to shareholders and he failed them in a most spectacular fashion. You have to realize that in that specific time period, almost every company and stock affiliated with gambling and casinos were highly profitable. Yet, his was the exception, somehow managing to go bankrupt after ten years.

In fact, if you had invested $10,000 in his corporation’s stock in 1985 you would found yourself with a nearly worthless pile of paper. It lost 96% of its value in the ten years and your 10G’s were worth a measly $400.

$400.

All that was left after a 10 year investment of $10,000 in a booming industry at that time.

Yet, people continued to call him a great businessman. And it continued even as his every venture went boots up or were implicated in some sort of fraud litigation. His self-named university(!) and his ridiculous steaks or bottled water, for examples. The fraud even extended into his efforts to appear as a charitable benefactor.

His charity was disbanded and he and his family of grifters are prohibited from operating any charitable foundation in NY because of his illegal handling of the funds.

They actually stole money from a children’s charity, for chrissake.

He hasn’t done anything in the four years that changes any of this (and there is so much more that I just don’t feel like documenting here this morning) and the swampy, corrupt deals he continues to make every single day only enhances the truth of what he is– a fraud.

And maybe that is the only time you can use his own brand of narcissistic hyperbole and say that he is the greatest at anything.

He may be the greatest bad businessperson of all time. He certainly has perpetrated a fraud bigly.

And you know something? I don’t hold it against him that he is a shit businessperson. There are plenty of them out there who do little lasting harm.

Hell, I was and might still be a shit businessman.

But I hate that he has parlayed his failures, through shady deals with foreign interests and a deepening and broadening of the swamp that is public corruption, into a position where he has eroded all public confidence in nearly everything that binds us together.

His fraud, even if you can somehow dismiss the criminality of it, has put our entire system of democracy at risk.

It must stop.

But he is shielded by his enablers in the Senate and House, who only serve now to perpetuate the fraud.

The only way is to stop this is to Vote Blue in huge numbers up and down the ballots.

That is the only thing that can end this fraud.

 

Posted in Current Events, Opinion | Tagged | Leave a Comment »

Sign of the Times

September 27, 2020 by redtreetimes

“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

This certainly is a time of mental pain. It’s time with a lot of moving parts, so many things with so many repercussions all going on at one time. Everything, every emotion and passion, feels heightened.

And that can be overwhelming. After all, most of us devote our lives to avoiding pain and difficult emotions.

Unfortunately, there are times when it can’t be avoided.

This is such a time.

We will all have to dig deep into our inner reserves and call on whatever courage and strength we have accumulated there. And if our reserves feel lacking, don’t despair alone. As C.S. Lewis points out above, mental pain is hard to bear and trying to go it alone makes it even more difficult. Everyone–and I mean everyone–needs help now and then so in these times of super stress, reach out and let someone know.

The exposure is often purifying.

On that note, here’s song from someone who, several years ago, I never thought I’d be playing here. It’s Sign of the Times from Harry Styles, who came to fame as part of the manufactured British boy band phenoms, One Direction. But going out on his own, he has proved himself quite a talent and this song has stuck with me from the first time I heard it a few years back.

Give a listen, reach out to friends and family and have a decent day.

 

Posted in Advice, Music, Quote | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Partisan

September 26, 2020 by redtreetimes

In the last week or so, I have featured a few songs of resistance from the past century. The song we’re looking at today, The Partisan, is a song most often associated with the late Leonard Cohen and his 1969 recording of the song. It has come to be seen as one of his songs but it has an interesting history.

The Leonard Cohen version is actually an early 1960’s adaptation and translation into English of an earlier French song from songwriter Hy Zaret, who is best known for writing the huge hit Unchained Melody for the Righteous Brothers.

The songs origins however go back to World War II France and the Resistance fighters battling the invading Nazis there, the Free French Forces. The song was originally composed by Anna Marly, who is an interesting case.

Anna Marly, born in 1917, was the daughter of a Russian noble family whose father was executed by the revolutionaries in the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1918. Her family fled first to Finland then settled in France, part of the White Russian exile community there. As a youth she was aballet dancer in Monte Carlo and was also taught music by fellow Russian exile, composer Sergei Prokofiev, best known for his Peter and the Wolf. By the time she was 17, she had changed her Russian name to Marly and was performing her own songs in the Paris cabarets.

She fled to England in 1940 when France fell to the invading German forces. There she began to communicate with members of the rebel FFF, the Free French Forces. A leader of the group heard her singing her song, Chant des Partisans, in Russian in a London club while there in 1943. He asked two French writers accompanying him to translate the song into French with the intention that it might become a replacement for  La Marseillaise, the French anthem banned by the occupying Germans. The translated song soon became the new anthem for French resistance and the two writers, Joseph Kessel and Maurice Druon, were credited for many years as the writers of the song. It wasn’t until quite a few years later that Anna Marly was credited as the writer of the song.

Marly ended up moving to the USA after the war, living for some time in Richfield Springs, NY, not far from Cooperstown, near a Russian Orthodox Monastery there, the only such monastery in North America. She died in 2006 in Alaska at age 88.

But her song lives on in history and in some form today.

Here are three versions below. The first is an Anna Marly version in French from 1944. The second is an early 1960’s version of the Hy Zaret translation and the final is a performance from Leonard Cohen of his adaptation of Zaret’s version. All have their own feel and power.

 



Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

When I Am Among the Trees

September 25, 2020 by redtreetimes

“Sublime”– Currently at the Principle Gallery, Alexandria

WHEN I AM AMONG THE TREES

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

–Mary Oliver

It’s been my privilege and good fortune to spend much of my life among the trees. I have climbed and played on them as a child and there are many memories of specific trees from my childhood. I have planted multitudes of trees and nurtured them.  I have lived under their watchful cover and have built a studio among them where I worked for many years. In fact, much of my livelihood has been derived from a certain Red Tree.

Throughout it all, there has been a sense of them as beings, unlike us humans but living beings nonetheless. I think that sometimes that we are the aliens living among their native race here on earth. I also like to think that I have a neighborly friendship of sorts with the trees around me. An understanding it might be called.

I try to not harm them and try my best to protect them, That it is becoming harder as invasive species become more and more prevalent. The ash trees in our area are on their last legs, for instance, from the emerald ash borer beetle. It is tragic to see them begin to fail from the onslaught of the beetles. But they maintain their stoic dignity until the bitter end, as they slowly dissemble with their upper limbs falling first. Eventually, all that remains is a tall sheared off trunk standing as a memorial to the life that once stood proudly in that space.

I do mourn for the trees. There is a white pine that stands by our drive. It is probably 25-30 years old and watching its growth over the years has been a delight as it grew large and full in that time. But this year, this goddamn 2020, its needles suddenly went brown and it died quickly and completely. Each time, we pass it as we go down our drive, I feel a great sense of loss, a deep bite of anguish over the fact that it died on my watch.

It feels like it was our responsibility. We are the caretakers for our trees. Or rather, we serve the trees so that they can complete their destiny on their land.

That being said, the poem at the top from Mary Oliver certainly rings true for me as it recognizes the profound gift that trees often offer to those of us lucky enough to spend time and share space with them.

Here’s lovely reading of the poem from Amanda Palmer.

Posted in Biographical, Favorite Things, Poetry | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

A Defining Vote

September 24, 2020 by redtreetimes

It’s your life — but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else or a community or a pressure group, you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

–Eleanor Roosevelt

I read a comment by someone on social media that tried to defend their possible vote for the president*** in the upcoming election by saying that who they voted for did not define them.

In normal times, I might agree with them to a point. I know plenty of folks who voted for Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes along with John McCain and Mitt Romney  and their values were not so different than my own. We shared some beliefs on some things and had different viewpoints on others. But we didn’t live on different planets, didn’t hold beliefs that were against every fiber of our moral selves.

However, these are not normal times, as you may have noticed.

Things are spiraling quickly with a deadly pandemic.

The forests burn, the rivers flood and hurricanes wreak havoc as we experience more and more dire climate crises throughout the land.

The streets are filled with protesters fighting for justice and racial equality. Opposing them is an armed legion devoted to open white supremacy that we are finding extends deeply into law enforcement.

There’s an economy that is staggering from job losses and business closings along with an exploding budget deficit.

Forgotten immigrant children and families are still in detention centers with allegations of sexual abuse and forced sterilizations coming out in recent months.

Our longtime and sworn foes around the world openly interfere in our elections.

I am sure I am missing some awful aspect here but none of it is normal.

And leading us is a man*** who seems almost pledged to making every one of these situations worse. He refuses to take any responsibility for his actions or inactions.

He has no plan for dealing with the pandemic. There was a plan early in the pandemic but it was set aside for political purposes because they believed the virus was only affecting the more populated Blue states. He then refused to take all the actions available to him because he felt that by passing responsibility for action on to the governors, they would be held accountable for a virus he knew was deadly even as he publicly said was not much of a threat.

A man who refuses to criticize our longtime enemies even as they pay bounties, on which he also refuses to comment,  on the heads our troops. The are the same troops he calls “suckers” for serving and “losers” when they are captured or killed. In fact, he fawns over despots and dictators, often subjugating himself and our nation to them. All of this while he spurns and alienates our longtime allies.

A man who openly foments racism and uses it as a pry bar on our population. Who refuses to criticize the white supremacists even as the FBI and other agencies point out that they are the most deadly and dangerous terrorist group at play in this country. In rallies, he talks about the “good genes” in states that are homogenously white and uses racial buzzwords when describing people of color. This racism extends to his immigration policies.

He has openly invited foreign interference in our elections and in recent days has set the stage for creating a crisis around the election, negating the ballots and sending the election back to state delegations that would be allowed to set aside the actual votes and choose the president as they see fit. His campaign has called for an army of able-bodied patriots to volunteer to surveil polling places during the election.

He speaks openly of ruling after a second term, much like his Russian mentor.

His actions are those of a dictator.

He is corrupt. He is dishonest. He is immoral. He is a racist. He is hateful and vengeful. He is weak-willed. He is beyond selfish. He is loyal to absolutely no one and no country.

There is no gray area here this year.

You are defined more than ever by this year’s vote.

In this election, if you stand with this man***, those are the values you are adopting.

I will forever define you by your vote this year.

If you vote for this man***, I will forever see you as racist, as morally bankrupt, as dishonest, as weak-willed, selfish, bitter, mean-spirited and stupid as the man*** you chose. That is the definition you choose.

You may think that is wrong or harsh or that I am somehow being hyperbolic.

Maybe so.

But I stand by it. Especially in this year, this terrible mess we call 2020. Nothing I have seen in the past four years has given me pause or proven me wrong. You have had more than ample time and evidence to see what he truly is.

If you can’t see that, I can live with this judgement. Both mine of you and you of me.

There is a line in the sand. This is a binary election. Yes or no.

Yes to America. No to Trump.

Our future depends on it. Try to have a good day and keep this in mind: this might be the best chance you will have to have a good day if he*** is somehow reelected or subverts or outright steals the election because it will never ever get better with him.

So, remember that today might be as good as it gets for a long time to come.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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