What Would Great Actually Look Like?

Posted on by Tim

For years now Donald Trump and his loyalists have been talking about “Making America Great Again.”

It is a phrase adopted from White Supremacy groups of the 1940s and 1950s. The meaning is the same now as it was then.

Trump’s idea of a great America is a White Nationalist America which would also be an America returned to the Corporate Feudalism of the Robber Baron era along with the complete erasure of the achievements resulting from both the Civil Rights and Women’s Suffrage movements.

So, what would “Great” actually look like if women, People of Color, and non-Cisgender people weren’t completely, or even partially, excluded from the benefits of it.

An exploration of the answer touches on more things than one might imagine at first.

As an example lets discuss the intersectionality of several issues.

Guns are now the leading cause of death in the United States for those in the age range of 1 year old to 19 years old. This can be attributed to a number of factors including, but not limited to, toddlers and young children accidently discharging poorly secured loaded weapons found in their homes, teen suicide especially among the oft attacked members of the LGBTQIAA+++ community or just those that haven’t yet come to terms with who they will become as they mature into their sense of self and those whose families are unsupportive, and racial and religious hate crimes

American gun rights advocates argue against any and all efforts to address any of these issues, most often by claiming that American gun violence is not a gun issue but a mental health issue.

At the same time, they refuse to do anything to help those in need of mental heath care. That alone would be bad enough, but they are regularly enacting laws and stoking the hatreds that push the mental health issues of both potential perpetrators and victims of violence further into the danger zone.

There is more intersectionality between each of these items and affordable health care, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, reproductive rights, voters’ rights, policing, disparity in justice, and every other aspect of our society than any one article could possibly properly address.

Instead, we’ll turn back to our original question:

What would “Great” actually look like if women, People of Color, and non-Cisgender people weren’t completely, or even partially, excluded from the benefits of it.

It could begin, not with a doomed attempt to eliminate bigotries, but to eliminate the ability to weaponize bigotries through our various societal systems, programs, and institutions.

It would begin not by asking everyone to be nice to each other, but to simply stop going out of their way to be mean and hostile to anyone and being swift to address and correct it when they do.

It would continue by electing officials who prioritize the welfare of the nation’s citizenry over the welfare of stock market investors and the war machine economy. They could then begin the work of not just restoring, but establishing, a true democracy. As the HBO show ‘Succession’ just stated in its most recent episode: America has only had a real democracy for about 50 or 60 years, “unless you don’t count Black people,” and the last few years have proven even that is still remarkably tenuous.

Those elected officials could begin by working to take the best aspects of our society and its potentials and build upon them while weeding out and discarding the worst. This would require abandoning a Constitutional Originalism view which requires holding our society to a standard set by a group of men who couldn’t possibly predict the evolution of the country, or the world, two or three centuries beyond their lifespan and allowing for either a string of Amendments to update the the social contract they created. Or better yet, developing a whole new one to lead us into a better future for all.

The early steps toward accomplishing these lofty goals would require a revamping of our policing, sentencing, and incarceration practices to end the militarization of community police forces and the war mentality their current training instills. Also, it would be necessary to end inequitable justice in favor of rehabilitation instead of punishment for non-violent offenses through a means that was fair and just to all regardless of their societal status or means.

In turn, those things would require the establishment of universal health care and a universal basic income, along with public education. That health care must include mental health care and protective services for children and adults at risk of domestic violence due to their gender or sexual identities. These steps would dramatically reduce the frequency of violent crimes.

All of that would allow for companies to automate far more jobs without detriment to the economy supporting those companies. It would also require a return to much higher corporate and excess wealth taxes to offset the expenses. With companies no longer burdened with responsibility to provide health insurance, and workers no longer trapped with a specific employer to maintain access to health care or basic survivability, companies would be free to find other benefits to attract works to positions that could not be automated. Those workers would be motivated by something other than a simple paycheck to do the work they have chosen to do out of desire instead of necessity. Those not working would be free to pursue their passions without risk of financial ruin if it doesn’t work out; if they excel at those things they may even be able to monetize them for additional income if they were to chose to do so.

None of this will be easy. It will take require the strength and determination to break free of outdated beliefs and traditions that have become entrenched within our #Culturalinertia. It will take the fortitude to oust those in power that would resist it.

This is not something that will be achievable overnight. It is however, something that will never be achieved, if we aren’t aggressively striving to accomplish it.

Nobody ever becomes truly great at anything without putting in the time, resources, hard work, and effort to achieve and maintain it. Countries are no different.

If we want a great society, a great nation, or a great world, we have to build it.

Then we have to maintain it.

Manufactured Chaos

Posted on by Tim

The Republican party appears to be in turmoil.

Trump, his entire inner circle, and his fellow insurrectionists at FOX News are all caught up in criminal and civil court battles that aren’t going well for them. However, they have no intention of giving up their efforts to get Trump re-elected, in large part because an active campaign is continuing to shield them from those cases being permitted to advance properly.

Republicans in control of the House appear to be obstructing each other as much as they are their opposition.

At least twice this year, Speaker McCarthy has turned over the entire House to insurrection spokesperson Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as Speaker Pro Tempore.

Republicans in the Senate have mostly gone quiet in the halls of Congress.

None of them are giving any appearance of being willing to actually govern. None of them are making any effort to work with Democrats or the Biden administration on any meaningful legislation.

Their one cohesive policy stance seems to be a willingness to force the nation into default by refusing to raise the debt ceiling to ensure the government continues to pay off the debt it has already accrued.

Meanwhile, all these Republican leaders have pretty much stopped appearing on any news networks other than FOX News and that network is choosing to give the majority of its air time to the most extremist Trump loyalists.

When they do speak publicly, on air or online, they’re rhetoric feeds the hatred of violent extremists embracing fascism through White Nationalism, patriarchal misogyny, and religious bigotry.

It is not only easy, but extremely tempting and extremely dangerous, to dismiss all this as disorganized and incohesive chaos. Don’t fall into that trap. It becomes far more terrifying when you allow pattern recognition to settle in.

Since the beginning of our country, regardless of the party name they chose, America’s political conservatives have had the same agenda that they currently have:

To establish a society of multinational corporate feudalism with most of the populace serving as serfs enriching the corporate ownership both as consumers and servants using racism, bigotry, lies, misinformation, and any other tools they can get their hands on in order to accomplish it, and insure that the populace does not have the resources or willpower to do anything about it.

If you accept that premise, then their ongoing efforts against health care, birth control and abortion, living wages, food and housing assistance, social services, social safety nets, and more all make sense. If you accept that premise, their constant efforts to divide us over race, religion, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexuality, age, and more make perfect sense as tools to keep us from uniting. If you accept that premise, then all their efforts to discredit and dismantle the federal government, especially its regulatory enforcement, make perfect sense. If you accept that premise, all their lies and misinformation make perfect sense.

If you accept that premise the appearance of constant infighting, incompetence, and outright stupidity make perfect sense as a tool to get us to dismiss the underlying patterns as well as from what the damage they are doing nationwide in the state level governments they’ve managed to gain control of.

If you can see beyond the smoke and mirrors and all the bluff and bluster, taking a look at where we are right now in relation to the 2024 election cycle makes far more sense.

Trump is currently the front runner for the Republican party’s presidential nomination, and will likely win it barring any unforeseen health issues or sudden movement in any of the several criminal cases pending against him. Despite CPAC attendees deciding that they want Kari Lake as their VP nominee, Trump is more likely to pick Marjorie Taylor Greene. She both idolizes him and looks enough like his daughter Ivanka to be too enticing for him to pass up. The news that she and her husband are finally divorcing after staying together through the last 8 years of very public disagreement about Trump does nothing but add to this possibility.

This is why McCarthy has given her control of the House twice already despite having many more experienced and slightly less crazy options available. They’re trying to get you used to seeing her at the podium.

Meanwhile, the “traditional republicans” — a term which merely means they prefer to be more subversive with their efforts toward obtaining their party’s long term goals than overt — are currently pushing for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to be their nominee. Ron is far more dangerous than Trump. He shares all the same petty, vindictive temperament, the same quirks, biases, and more, he’s just a more skilled politician who knows how to get his hatreds built into legislation proposals that he can get passed into law.

Honestly, all the Republicans would be perfectly fine with either of these candidates winning. Either continues them full speed ahead toward the goals they’ve been laying the ground work for across the nation with there recent slate of “state’s rights” bills that are nothing more than a rehashing of the original secession letters of the Articles of the Confederacy that led to the Civil War.

I think; however, that Republicans will find that if Trump gets too hard to elect, the Trump voter base won’t rally behind DeSantis after they’ve torn each other apart in a primary. So they’ll opt for a more “traditional” member of their party. They’ll rally behind someone more like Sens. Richard Burr or John Thune who have mostly kept themselves out of the national spotlight and present them as their “moderate and rational” candidate to lure back in the party’s disenfranchised conservative moderates.

But, know this, even if they were to choose someone more like Adam Kinzinger or Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney, they’d still be putting forth a candidate that was 100% behind the modern Republican party’s long established policy platform and goals. The ones behind the smoke and mirrors and bluff and bluster.

Pay attention to what they are actually doing and what they are actually accomplishing by working so hard to make you believe they’re not successfully working together to achieve their goals on a nationwide scale.

Because they are.

And that is far more important than anything they say that they are or are not doing, or will or will not do.

End the Nightmare, Help Make His Dream Our Reality

Posted on by Tim

I did not want to be the middle-aged White guy posting the obligatory Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., quotes today in order to honor the holiday named after him while our society continues dishonoring everything he was, he did, and was done to him, in order to earn that holiday.

A lifetime friend, and retired federal law enforcement officer, who is also a Black man born around the same time the Reverend Doctor was assassinated, and raised in the supposed “post Civil-Rights” era, posted this reminder this morning:

“Dr. King was arrested 29 times. He was a protester. He was not a nice man who said nice things from the pulpit. He was a protester. He was also not well liked as people like to assert. At the time of his death he arguably was the most hated man in America, due to him speaking out against the Vietnam war.”

“Two days after his ‘I Have A Dream’ speech, FBI Domestic Intelligence Chief William Sullivan wrote in a memo ‘We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security,’. Which culminated in the FBI sending a letter to Dr. King’s home which was opened by his wife, documenting their surveillance of his extramarital affairs and telling him that he was an ‘evil, abnormal beast’ and that he needed to commit suicide with 34 days.“

Now, over half a century later, the same type of people that screamed at and attempted to kill young Black children being integrated into previously all White public schools, the same type of people who screamed and attempted to kill Martin Luther King, Jr, and his supporters, are the ones still fighting against “Black Lives Matter” movements and screaming about their intentional misunderstanding of actual history as “critical race theory.”

In many cases it isn’t just the same type of people, it is the literally the same people.

Republican politicians around the nation have been working hard to eradicate all of the Civil Rights gains that Dr. King helped us to put in place and the voting rights protections that came about as a result of those continuing his work after his death. These same politicians will be very carefully cherry-picking quotes from his speeches and work today — mostly likely out of context quotes that seem to be calling for perpetual non-violent protest of uncompromising oppression — in order to further the white-washing of his legacy.

If you haven’t read Dr. King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” you should start there, before doing anything you think is intended to honor his memory today. Only then will you have a true understanding on his feelings toward the use of both non-violent and violent protest of unjust laws and systems. Only then will you understand what he was truly fighting for and why he was assassinated.

Only then will you understand why we can never be a truly free and democratic society until we reject the nightmare he was protesting and start making the dream he had for us all into our reality.