Stephen Altschuler

thoughts on environment, politics, health, life issues

Human nature

“Cause that’s where the money is”

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Someone once asked Willie Sutton “Why do you rob banks?” “Cause that’s where the money is,” Sutton famously replied. Same thing Trump would say if someone asked, “Why do you continue with the Big Lie?” Or “Why do you support LIV Golf?” Or “Why do you continually attack Liz Cheney?” Or why do you now attack the FBI?” Or “Why do you call the Capitol rioters patriots?” Or “Why do you continue to dangle the possibility of running again in 2024?” All the same answer for the same reason. Trump’s father drilled it into his head early on, “Whatever you do, go where the money is and do whatever you need to do to get it.”

And for Trump, all of the above leads to incoming money from gullible followers who will indeed support their cult leader, as he said, “even if I went out and killed someone on 5th Avenue.” It’s a sickness, on Trump’s part, certainly; but on his follower’s part as well, voters and politicians who each have their motives for supporting a terribly off-balanced human being who happens to have a lot of political power at the moment.

I say “at the moment” for that won’t always be the case. One day, Trump will be a cipher, a footnote, a paragraph, at most, in an exhaustive history of the U.S. We will survive Donald Trump. But, unfortunately, we must endure more of his intractable behaviors and shenanigans. How much more? A blip in the scheme of history, but a significant blip in an era of unbridled and unrestricted social media, conspiracy theories raised to the toxic level of truth, and fake news raised to a level of real news perpetrated by Fox “news”, “News”max, and One America “news”.

So, for the moment, we are saddled with the reality of a Donald Trump and friends such as Taylor Green, McCarthy, McConnell, He-Hawley, etc. etc. etc. It will change. And that change will occur through the action of voters like you and I, as long as trust in our election process remains intact.

Unfortunately, that faith and trust is weakening, and so our democracy is on the brink of crumbling. For what is a democracy if not the sacred ability of the people to choose its electorate? With dictatorships like China, Russia, Hungary, Afghanistan, Cuba, elections are a sham, decided in advance by the ruling party or leader. Rules and laws are also determined by the few loyalists to the leader or the leader himself. The Taliban now forbids girls from advancing their education, orders women to wear a full body veil, and bars them from holding government jobs. Stalinist Putin imprisons or has murdered those who actively oppose him. Xinping keeps his country’s people in a continual state of fear via the secret police and civilian informants.

As we’ve seen, Trump has similar inclinations, seeking revenge on all he deems enemies, weaponizing “his” Departments of Justice and Defense, and actively instigating a violent insurrection against the U.S. Government. He is a criminal, plain and simple. And we’ve only seen a preface to what will come if he, or any of his surrogates, is reelected in ’24.

But ’22 is still ahead, and Trump’s influence has been alarming in the primaries. So the lines are clearly drawn: Trump extremists versus Dems. It will not be an easy fight. Dems will need money, for with politics, money talks. Dems will need grassroots volunteers, for only volunteers can canvass neighborhoods directly, making eye contact with voters. And Dems will need voters to vote in record numbers, up and down the ballot to prevent the kind of results Republicans are crowing about will happen.

For if the radical GOP takes over either of the two Houses, they will stymie Joe Biden as they stymied Barack Obama, thus paving the way for a Trump run in ’24.

We can’t let that happen!

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“Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” ? Our country, on all levels, is not fulfilling its promise

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Our country has once again failed to provide us with what the Founders promised. Another mass massacre at Highland Park, Illinois proves that. Innocents mowed down with an AR-15 at random, any age, gender, religion, sexual persuasion, nationality. Just people, like you and me. Kids, their parents, grandparents, just enjoying a Fourth of July parade. It’s now a national version of Russian Roulette. When I now take my daily walk around the neighborhood, I do not know if a person in a car will shoot me just because I’m a person. Like the Highland Park shooter, he or she will have no other reason to shoot me. I’ve lived a long, productive life so I am OK with dying. But my death will bring much suffering and change the lives of my wife, my step children, my friends, and my extended family back East and elsewhere. The two books I have started to write will not get written. My care packages for the homeless will no longer be distributed. Others who have read my previous books will lament and grieve my death, and perhaps reflect on how vulnerable they themselves are.

That’s the thing, really. All of us American residents (one of those killed at Highland Park was a Mexican grandfather visiting his family) will realize that none of us are safe from mass and/or random shootings. And to answer Republican deniers, the shooter in Highland Park, a peaceful, idyllic suburb a few miles north of Chicago, did not have a diagnosis of mental illness, and had never before been arrested. The police did confiscate a number of knives and a sword from his home a few years ago since he had threatened to “kill everyone” in his immediate family. He was on a red flag list nationally but was sold five guns/semi-automatic rifles after passing a background check which apparently highlighted that red flag. So in spite of GOP lies and apologies around gun control that “guns don’t kill people, bad people kill people,” in this case, as with many others, if gun restrictions were tighter, this bad man would never have been able to legally purchase these weapons of war. But they have no ear for such common sense, for the GOP has become a fringe party with a coterie of disingenuous Fox “news” commentators, violent and Fascist White Supremacists/Nationalists, hypocritical Christian evangelicals, wacko QAnon adherents, vaccine deniers, Trump election deniers, Trump death threat cultists, and extremist Trump Supreme Court appointees. And that’s just the top eight!

So without guarantees for our life, liberties, and happiness, what do septuagenarians like my wife and I do/go? Good question, as many today would respond as they take a minute to breathe and let the question rattle around their brains for their neurons to recover and get up from the floor. Do we write or call our representatives in government most of whom are scratching their own heads over such a question? Do we write letters to our local papers which are themselves struggling to survive decreased advertising revenue and often haven’t the staff to field such letters anyway? Do we join a Zoom therapy group that might get photobombed by an aforementioned extremist? Do we say or do nothing and allow anxiety and depression to invade our psyches? Or do we leave our lovely home in the Pacific Northwest and emigrate to, let’s say Portugal where house mold, roaches, mosquitoes, tiny apartments, language barriers, and unusual toilet procedures may await us?

My Zen practice tells me “Don’t know! No thinking! Only go straight!” Which is fine when a stray thought enters my pristine meditation. But instructions for real life? I’m afraid not.

So seriously, what do you and I do in response to this attack on our way of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? I mean we are rapidly moving in the direction of a fascist dictatorship with Trump or a Trump clone as “Dear Leader.” I have advised voting as the answer, but we can’t be sure our vote is what it used to be: One person, One vote, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. I mean SCOTUS is on the verge of allowing state legislatures to change the vote to a result they’d rather see, and do this legally. Look it up: That is not democracy. And even without such a SCOTUS decision, 19 states have already enacted laws that make it easier to do just that, along with making it more difficult to vote!

Each of us has to decide individually or as a couple or as a family what to do. One thing that Zen has taught me is that the problem is not the figurative flat tire that hits every so often, but how we relate to it. Do we get an ulcer over it, or do we calmly respond to the problem, do what needs to be done, and move on with our lives? Many years ago, many of my relatives in Eastern Europe decided to stay put when the Czar or Hitler endangered their lives. Most of them died. But some left and, well… here I am. We are now confronted with something very similar to what they encountered. History is repeating itself, and we have yet another opportunity to learn from it.

Human beings very often do not learn from history and continually ignore what it tries to teach us. Will you? Will I? Each of us must access what is happening to our country and decide for ourselves and our families what to do about it.

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The Trump Conspiracy: Then and Now

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It started when Trump tried to prove that Barack Obama was not a natural born citizen, which helped Trump build a following, a base, and ultimately a cult. He sensed the undercurrent of racism in 2016, linked it with xenophobia around Hispanic immigration and fear of Islamic terrorism, enlisted the support of Russian cyberterrorists and was able to paint Hillary Clinton as a candidate worthy only of a prison cell. With a scorched earth approach, Trump blasted anyone who opposed him, regardless of party affiliation. He essentially and ironically stole the 2016 election, blatantly promising to appoint anti abortion judges to the Supreme Court, again parlaying a hot button issue among evangelical Christians and pro life Republicans to energize the Republican base to come out and vote for him, despite his obvious moral shortcomings.

Once elected, he conspired with Mitch McConell, another power hungry oportunist, even before the election, to block the Obama nomination of Merrick Garland to the court several months or so before the election, something entirely unorthodox as well as unethical, and probably illegal. It was also in violation of the Constitution but no one took any significant action to block McConnell. It was part of a plan to put a minority party into a majority position and essentially control the federal government through judicial control of the courts.

With McConnell’s help, a president Trump was able to nominate and push through three right wing judicial extremists to the high court who as he and the radicalized GOP had hoped would set the country back about what…50,60, 70 years, defining “Great Again” as white and segregated again and where women would return to the kitchen and their traditional place of mediocrity?

The next phase of Trump’s take over plan is to fill the congress with representatives and senators who are beholden to him for their election, and are therefore pawns in the game of his ambition, which ultimately is designed to increase the financial fortunes of the Trump family dynasty. That will lead, he hopes, to his regaining the presidency in ’24, and his solidifying his oligarchy–an essentially fascist rule which has absolutely nothing to do with government of, for and by the people. The people under Trump’s rule will be just that: under his thumb and forced by fear to pledge loyalty to him and his chosen oligarchs, modeled after his friend Putin’s increasingly fascist rule in Russia.

It’s not a very copacetic scenario, is it? We’ve not seen anything like a Trump before and so don’t quite know what to do with him. The 14th and 25th Amendments address it but no one really knew or knows how to enforce the Constitution, especially when trying to figure out how to handle a seditious ex president who attempted a bloody coup against the government, who would not agree to a peaceful transition of the presidency after he lost, who instigated a violent, armed mob to attack Congress with the intent of stopping the counting of electoral votes and hanging Mike Pence, who even tried to commandeer the car he was in after Ellipse rant, trying to grab at the wheel and choke the driver and head secret service agent who was insisting returning to the White House instead of joining the rioters as Trump wanted–a loyal civil servant who would take a bullet to protect this asshole. First time for that. Go figure. It’s got many of us pretty buffaloed, hasn’t it? As Riley (played by the great William Bendix) used to say, “What a revoltin’ development this is!”

Good day, y’all. Be well. Sleep tight tonight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.

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The Battle Lines They are Drawn

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The battle has begun. Trump misogynists vs. a woman’s right to choose. The Trump Republican base vs. the Democratic Party. A clear division. Both sides are equally energized after the Supreme Court ruling obliterating Roe v Wade as Trump conservative appointees said they wouldn’t do. They lied in order to gain confirmation, as Trump lied to illegally regain a presidency he lost. The ’22 midterms define the battleground. And as often in political war, the outcome depends on how many troops show up to the final battle on election day.

Voters in America are often energized by one primary issue or candidate. They went for a madman in ’16, i.e. more Republicans turned out, because of his promise to reverse Roe. And with the scurrilous help of another madman, namely Mitch McConnell, he did just that appointing and seating three ultra conservative justices to the Court. With that, though just a one term president, Trump changed the direction of American politics and civil rights in a drastic turn backwards and sharply to the right.

Since the Civil War, such conservative turns have stymied our march to make this a more perfect union, with justice and civil rights for all. Linked with big money interests, extreme conservatives have stood in the way of every piece of legislation and initiative that hoped to level the playing field to allow the progeny of slaves to recover and share in the wealth and original vision of this nation, as spelled out in the Declaration of Independence. Now, still under Trump’s influence and using his violent tactics, though still a minority, they are achieving their goals of returning to a predominately white Christian paternalist nation where some are more equal and privileged than others.

I understand the next target of this Supreme Coup is gay marriage, and after that contraception, and after that… (fill in the blank!)

So, chose your side. Your weapon is your vote. But you’ve got to show up to the battle to cast it. The Trump gang is depending on the apathy of Democrat voters. But I sense an unusual upwelling of discontent among those Blue voters. As they gather forces and showed up to defeat Trump in ’20, this extremist Supreme Court may energize them to come out again and increase Democratic majorities in the Senate and House. It could very well happen.

Where do you stand? Will you vote? And if so, what kind of country do you want? For we are still a democracy where the people get to decide on their elected representatives. Whether it remains as such, is not up to Donald Trump and his cronies. It is up to you.

The AR-15 Assault Rifle

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These guns are weapons of war and mass murder, and, obviously, should not be so easily obtainable. So the question begs, Why are they? The Second Amendment starts with “A well-regulated militia…” In any ingredient list, the item of most quantity, and therefore, most importance, comes first. That’s why ingredient lists are so vital to us in making the right decisions about what we consume. For example, with many yogurts, the top ingredients are sugar-related, and so probably best to avoid and choose a brand with much less. So our Founders apparently wanted us to own guns as long as they were “well-regulated.” Are they well-regulated in this country? No, they are not. For God’s sake they don’t even require safety trigger locks or that they be locked up or that you have a permit in some states or that you have training or pass a licensing test as you do for vehicles. Is not a gun potentially more dangerous and potentially more abused than a car or truck? You don’t have to be a Harvard professor to read the news and see that they are.

So why do people keep voting into office people who continually ignore the beginning instructions–the most important item–of the Second Amendment? Now don’t get me wrong: I am not calling for an outright ban on the sale of the AR-15. I am calling for more regulations around this weapon, and actually a lot more regulations. We’ve seen what they and their high potency clips can do to a child’s body. Recently in Uvalde Texas, murdered children could only be identified by the shoes or the clothes they had been wearing, not by any physical body characteristics. That’s right, even their own parents could not identify their own children after many AR-15 bullets had torn through and ripped apart their little bodies.

You might be surprised to know that I, a liberal Democrat, have considered buying such a weapon. That’s right. Again, I do not advocate banning the sale of these weapons or any guns for that matter. When I was a boy in the 50’s I participated in NRA-sanctioned target shooting with 22 caliber, bolt action rifles at paper targets at safe shooting ranges. I got pretty good at it, a source of pride and satisfaction, as I showed off my bullseyes to my friends. I got used to the feel of a rifle’s kickback and I learned the proper and safe way to hold and aim a gun. My parents were not gun owners, at least not that I know of, but they encouraged my training and practice at the range. That’s what the NRA was all about in the 1950s in America. That, as we all know, has changed with this organization.

Why am I considering the purchase of an AR-15? Because this country has gone psychotic over guns and I am concerned that a full blown violent civil war could erupt within the next few years. As the House Committee investigating the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 is so graphically demonstrating, the opening salvos in that civil war have already happened with Capitol police officers suffering injury and even death as a result. The chief instigator of that coup, former president Donald Trump, has not even had the decency to call the families of the murdered officers to offer condolences. The enforcer of our Constitution, the Department of Justice, has prosecuted and convicted hundreds of rioters but has done little so far against the major organizers of the coup. And I worry that little will be done against those traitors at the very top of the government at the time–traitors who may still be plotting against our government. So if I and my wife are confronted by automatic weapon-wielding insurrectionist fascist militia Trump/Bannon white supremacist members, I want to take a few of them down with me. I do not want to go down without a fair fight. So, yes, an AR-15 with a 100 bullet clip will even the score some.

But, I want my purchase of that gun, if I do decide to go ahead with a purchase, to be “well-regulated.” Do an extensive background check on me, checking with all relevant law enforcement agencies nationwide. Test my proficiency with the weapon as you have tested my proficiency with an automobile. Make sure I am of an age of reason and maturity. Make sure I do not have or had a severe mental disorder. Make sure there are sufficient safety measures in place such as trigger locks and required lockboxes, by law. Yes, I am a law abiding, mentally stable citizen, but, unfortunately, there are many, many people in our society who are not, who are as unstable as a pressure cooker on a high flame that has run out of water and…and…have an AR-15 with a lot of ammo in their possession.

So when you go to the polls this November, check the candidates’ voting record or positions on gun regulations. Are they in favor of a “well-regulated militia…?”

Sad to Say…and angry as well

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Sad to say, but it doesn’t matter how the vote turns out in the next election:
Trump-infused Republicans will win either way. If the vote shows they’ve lost, they will challenge it pathologically as they have done for the 2020 Biden victory. And if they win, they will continue to put in place the building blocks for an enduring fascist autocracy frosted with a culture of denunciation, as Timothy Snyder put it in his excellent book “On Tyranny.” That will amount to rule by one party regardless of what the broad electorate voted for or wanted. So we are currently caught between a rock and a hard place, firmly behind the eight ball, exactly where the extreme right wing (which is virtually all Trump Republicans) want us.

Now many may not think that a particularly big deal, but they would be wrong. Of course, those many may not think at all, and I suspect that to be the case. As was true of Hitler in the Germany of the 30’s, and Stalin in the 30’s and 40’s, and Putin from 2014 and since then, and Trump since 2016, voters who allowed these despots power were mesmerized by them, hypnotized really by their slick talk of Germany or Russia or America first. Slick talk of how they alone could solve their problems. Slick talk of how immigrants and foreigners and Muslims and Jews and Blacks and gypsies were the cause of all the problems. And slick talk of “getting rid” of these interlopers who were out to “replace” white Christians.

We’ve seen their tactics first hand now in the United States. That culture of denunciation that Trump and his allies have used to smear the reputations of their opponents as much as McCarthy did in the early 50’s. It’s scurrilous, to say the least, but it’s a tactic that works in America, sticking in the brains of gullible people, only to be spit out in gossip and misinformation passed on to their friends, relatives, and even children. Extreme right wing lawmakers and TV personalities perpetuate these lies, adding credibility to such toxic conspiracy theories such as QAnon, Replacement Theory, and the Big Election Lie bandied about since 2020.

Republican leaders have made sport of denouncing Joe Biden and his program to bring the country back from the ravages of the Trump era. They started with Bill Clinton, went on, via Mitch McConnell, to disparage Obama mercilessly, and then attack Biden without missing a beat. Let’s go, Brandon is a slanderous dogwhistle never heard before for a sitting President!

At the same time, they’ve set in place an infrastructure of suppression: via gerrymandering, voting restrictions, culture wars, books that need burning, strict guidelines as to what teachers can teach, and even stacking ballots with election officials with the power to reverse the decisions of the electorate, if need be. If you read a history of Germany in the 30’s and 40’s, it’s all been done before right after the Reichstag burned.

Now the figurative guillotine seemingly draws closer to Trump’s head. But will it drop? Trump senses danger so has lined up all his lawyers, all his cult members, all his loyal legislators, all his lackeys in a phalanx of suppression, innuendo, and a continued avalanche of lies. One of the Capitol police officers battered by the Trump legions thinks he will get away with all his crimes against the state. Teflon Don has a way of getting away with things, all the way back to his bullying childhood days. His father taught him well. We know that from Mary Trump’s depictions of her uncle.

So, sure, go ahead and vote. Go ahead and send in your hard earned money. Go ahead and write stuff like I do. Go ahead and rant and rave to your sympathetic friends and relatives and avoid your Trumpster relatives like the Covid plague. But I believe the die is cast. The coup is well plotted. January 6 was just the first salvo in a larger battle. That was just to get the saliva flowing from the bellies of the beasts.

I am sad, yes, but more so, angry. Enraged even. Our great democratic experiment is crumbling. And it doesn’t have to be that way. If we’ve learned anything from the past, it is one glaring fact: the Napoleans, the Alexanders, the Caligulas, the Attilas, the Hitlers, the Salazars, the Mussolinis, the Stalins, the Bolsonaros, the American white supremacists, the Xis, the Francos, the Uns, the Putins, and…the Trumps must be nipped in the bud and stopped cold in their tracks before they can dig their claws into their bid for eternal power–power fueled by their chronic hunger for greed, hatred, and delusion.

The DOJ is Not OK

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The Department of Justice was initiated in 1870 by President Ulysses S. Grant specifically to preserve civil rights. It began by fighting against domestic terrorists who had been using both violence and legal action to oppose the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. The newly formed Ku Klux Klan were the first group in their sights, and in Grant’s first term of office there were 1000 indictments against Klan members and 600 convictions. Members got relatively brief sentences but ringleaders were imprisoned for up to five years in federal prison. The result: a dramatic decrease in violence in the South.

Today, the DOJ seems downright timid in comparison. There have been prosecutions of rioters at the coup attempt on the Capitol, but no indictments against its ringleaders to date. There has been one case against voter suppression laws in one state, but no conviction to date and no actions against 18 other states. White supremacy groups are still able to operate without a domestic terrorism designation in seeming violation of the above mentioned Amendments to the Constitution. Mass current gun laws being violated or any pressure against gun shops approving the sale of assault weapons to those currently banned from buying such weapons in states that have laws against such sales or ownership.

Little has been heard from the present Attorney General Merrick Garland, except for a commencement speech at Harvard which the press has not even covered. He seems to be waiting for the House Committee Investigating the January 6 insurrection to conclude its hearings and send any recommendations for action to the DOJ. He is not bound by law to await the end of such hearings, but has refrained from investigating such ringleaders as former president Donald Trump, Roger Stone, former chief of staff Mark Meadows, a number of GOP Representatives, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Guliani, members of Trump’s family, and a multitude of other perps. No action, at least that we the public know about. No grand jury. No FBI investigations under way, apparently.

So what is the DOJ, the only reliable enforcer of the Constitution, doing? I’m not an expert, but it truly looks like nothing much at all. My wife tells me to be patient, that there are probably clandestine movements happening underground and out of the purview of mainstream, or any tributary, media sources. But most journalists today seem not be investigative in practice. They receive the news rather than dig for the news like Woodward and Bernstein in “those thrilling days of yesteryear!” So we can’t even depend on investigative journalists to help us understand what the DOJ is doing these days. We’re not far from the Russian propaganda system in that regard.

All of which I speak is of great concern to me, and should be to you. The integrity of our Constitution and its Bill of Rights is at stake. The very stanchions on which our democracy is built, those original documents and their preambles, are being applied to present day situations as if we were still in 1780. Originalists, the conservative Supreme Court Justices are called. But that’s absurd. The above mentioned Amendments refer to freed slaves alone but must also apply to all of us now or the democratic mechanisms of voting will continue to be torn to shreds by GOP-led state legislatures and the GOP in Congress. The Second Amendment has led to more guns in America than people, including guns that can kill hundreds in a matter of minutes. In 1790, it took a few minutes to load and reload a muzzle-loading rifle. Today it takes seconds to load a whatever bullet clip onto an AR-15 assault rifle. It’s insane that the Second Amendment can still be used to justify the ownership of such weapons and ammunition and make them relatively easy to purchase. Absolutely insane. Congress can’t even pass a bill to put a safety lock on these guns, a bill that if passed would probably be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court!

But the DOJ does nothing to right these wrongs, at least from my perspective. Why? Merrick Garland and Joe Biden are cautious men. Kamala Harris is a cautious woman. Chuck Schumer is a cautious man. Donald Trump is a dangerous man, as his niece, psychologist Mary Trump, points out. Many of his followers threaten death to those (and their families) who oppose their Dear Leader in any way, as the SS did to anyone who opposed Hitler in his occupied countries. Donald Trump has made no attempt to stop them. On the contrary, he instigates these threats! Are the Democrats in power intimidated? Perhaps.

Has the DOJ taken any viable action against these death threats? No. Just one or two prosecutions and convictions against those who issue a death threat could well deter others from the same verbal violence. But Garland and the FBI ignore these Mafia-like threats, and in ignoring them, condone them. Why has the DOJ done nothing about these threats and the other injustices I’ve listed above? Why is that?

And that is the question I will leave you with.

Why is that?

Mass Murderers are All of a White Supremacist State of Mind

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Think of the 18 year old murderer at the Uvalde elementary school facing 9 and 10 year old children with an AK 47 high capacity rifle and consider his state of mind at that moment. He was apparently not a white supremacist, per se, but I submit that his state of mind was no different than the state of mind of white supremacists (aka fascists) the world over now and deep into the past. Consider:

* The Crusades. At the pope’s orders, we assume, on the way to the Holy Land, crusaders detoured to villages along the way and slaughtered all the Jews they could find, lumping them with the infidels they were out to slaughter in the Holy Land. They saw these Jews as not human beings but as infidels who didn’t believe as they believed, and killed women, children, infants, adolescents, men, elderly, disabled, clergy, all without remorse, without compassion, without guilt, without consideration, without any feeling whatsoever, without thought except identifying who was Jewish and the satisfaction they would feel as if they were eliminating a nest of rats in a cellar hole.

* The Inquisition. Throughout the Middle Ages, the ruling Catholic Church institutionalized the torture and murder of millions of non Christians, particularly Jews, demanding they renounce their religion of birth and adopt the Catholic faith under threat of severe punishment that included torture, lengthy imprisonment and death often by immolation. They felt entirely justified performing this religious extortion, feeling no guilt, remorse, or blame. On the contrary, feeling they were doing the work of God. In 1492, all Jews were banished from all regions of France and Spain, triggering a diaspora that sent them fleeing to all parts of the globe, some retaining their Judaism but many adopting the Catholic religion out of self preservation.

* Czarist Russia. All Jews throughout this vast empire were eventually herded into a huge territory know as the Pale of Settlement where they were treated as lesser human beings than Christians. Young Jewish men were often conscripted into the Russian army and sent as cannon fodder to the front lines of insane wars of conquest. But even more lethal, were periodic pogroms where the Czar’s cossacks would attack entire villages and kill as many Jews as they could find, the last one happening in 1905, prompting my grandparents to flee the Pale (now Ukraine) for the United States.

* The Bolsheviks. And after their 1917 Revolution, more pogroms, more deportations, more Jewish harassment, more genocidal pressure on the Jewish population, prompting many to leave for Israel, if they could still escape.

* The Nazis. Needs no further explanation.

* Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, NRA, and most Republican Party members. Through relentless lies, misinformation, shaming, extortion, and death threats from cult members they continue to plot the overthrow of our democracy to be replaced by a fascist, white supremacist government.

* Domestic white supremacists. Their goal is country that is white, Christian, straight, with subservient women under a patriarchal family structure. They are gun carrying, highly aggressive, and often resort to violent demonstrations, and mass shootings of the minorities they detest, particularly Jews and Blacks.

The Uvalde mass murderer had no criminal record, had no contact with the mental health establishment, had never been expelled from school, was a loner who never participated in such activities as group school photos, but who posted violent intentions on social media. He was a loose and hidden cannon just waiting until his 18th birthday so he could legally buy weapons and ammunition to “shoot up an elementary school” as he texted a young woman in Germany just before he did just that.

After entering the building and entering the classroom, he pointed his AK 47 semi automatic rifle at the face of the teacher and said, “Goodnight” before shooting her and her co-teacher to death and then 19 little children with over 1600 bullets. Crusaders, Cossacks, Communists, Nazis, Putin’s soldiers, American white supremacists, 9/11 hijackers, ISIS, 1/6 insurrectionists, and Trump death-threatening cultists did and do just the same.

The only defense against such people is to reduce the possibility of their obtaining firearms. As a retired mental health practitioner with 35 years experience counseling people with severe mental disabilities, I can tell you that increasing mental health services will not solve this problem. Increasing security at schools will not solve this problem. Trying to decrease bullying will not solve this problem. More active shooter drills will not solve this problem. Arming teachers will not solve this problem. Because as I write, there are thousands of loose cannons like the Buffalo and Uvalde shooters out there like pressure cookers waiting to blow.

There are only two reliable solutions:

* Place a metal detector with two armed officers at the entrances of every vulnerable building in America.

* Make it near impossible to purchase military-style assault weapons in this country.

Of the first, I tried to push for a metal detector in the State building I used to work in but was told the cost, which included salary and full benefits for the two officers, was too prohibitive even for just that one building, and so, request denied.

Of the second, Republicans in Congress, lobbied by the NRA, will not even approve of laws that require safety locks on guns or locked gun cabinets so children can’t accidentally shoot their siblings let alone a total ban on military-style assault weapons.

So the mass shootings will continue as our country continues its slide towards fascism.