Stephen Altschuler

thoughts on environment, politics, health, life issues

Human nature

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.

When the Fox is guarding the henhouse

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So one of the cops on the scene of the Uvalde school massacre told Anderson Cooper that the cops chose not to enter the classroom when the shooter was in there because “they didn’t want to get shot at and get killed.” So the fox–the shooter–was guarding the henhouse while law enforcement cowered outside actively not doing their jobs. You see, the fox was shooting at the cops with weapons even the cops apparently didn’t have so the cops retreated, busying themselves handcuffing, pepper spraying and tasing the parents who wanted to go inside and save their kids from oblivion, then blamed the parents for resisting them for their inability to enter the building and kill the shooter (one mother actually did break away from the cops and did indeed dash inside, saving her two daughters from certain death!). These are the “armed good guys” that the Republicans–apparently just about all Republicans–claim are the solution to the mass murders that are rife in this country. The problem is the guys not the guns is their favorite catch slogan.

What absolute bullshit! What an abnegation and dereliction of duty! What ignorance! Allowing the the foxes to guard the henhouse and kill as many hens, aka innocent children, as possible while the cowards cower outside arresting panicky parents. Please Uvelde parents, please, sue the pants off these cops right up to the governor of Texas who so righteously praised them. And after you sue them, fire their asses, and hire some competent people for their police force. There are competent cops out there, believe me.

This whole miserable episode is representative of how sick this society has become. It started with Reagan and the GOP cancer has spread from him. I know about cancer. I’m recovering from stage four. It takes strong medicine to stop its spread. It took courage and wisdom for my oncologist to prescribe that medicine. She was a petite Chinese American woman who used words like “hit it hard” and R-CHOP. Strong action to knock out the poison.

Now we are needing just as strong political medicine to subdue this poison that has invaded our system of government. The Republican Party will not enter the henhouse to rid it of foxes, and that must change to allow civil rights to flourish. Of course, they’ve learned to use dog-whistle words like socialism and liberals and communists and immigrants and Mexicans and Moslems to scare a sufficient number of citizens, mostly white citizens, to go along with their cowardice, to hang back and let the foxes of opposition and obstruction create the Party of No, making it impossible to realize the principles of the Declaration of Independence that set our country apart from all others in the world at that time and even now. They took the Constitution and Bill of Rights and cherrypicked them to irrelevance much like Southern Baptist ministers do the Bible.

And we do have the right medicine to stop this poison. In our democracy, it’s called voting. One citizen of proper age: One vote. But like my Chinese American oncologist, we need our voters to have wisdom and courage. We need them to stop and consider the power of that vote and what that vote could potentially produce. Unfortunately, that wisdom and courage is absent in a large percentage of those voters.

These days, all you have to do is examine the voting records in your State Houses and in the U.S. House and Senate. What has each party, each candidate, proposed and accomplished for We, the People? From what I see, Republicans mainly obstruct whatever Democrats propose. This is not what our Founders wanted in a well functioning democracy. There can be disagreements, certainly, but there must also be common goals towards the commonwealth. When all is said and done, it’s the needs of citizens that take precedent, not the careers of politicians. Not sure what I mean? Imagine the car salesman who seems more concerned with his own bottom line than your needs around a car. I walk away from such salesmen and go to an agency that asks me about my needs in buying a car.

***

Reporters these days don’t ask enough relevant questions. I understand Gen Z and Millennial workers are quite burnt out. Some major ones I have are as follows:

* AK 47 assault rifles cost anywhere from 600 to 1600 bucks. Ammunition is about 38 cents per round. The killer in Uvalde had two such rifles and fired some 1600 rounds during his assault on the kids and their teachers. My question, which reporters so far haven’t asked: Where did an 18 year old boy, unemployed and in his last year of high school get the money to buy all that weaponry and bullets to pull off a mission that was able to repel an army of police for over an hour? And if he didn’t have the money, who bought this weaponry for him? Who taught him how to shoot it? Where did he learn to shoot it? This is not plug and play machinery. It kills innocent people as we have just seen.
* Where was the arsenal bought from? Did the boy buy it himself? Did he use cash or credit? If credit, how did he get a credit card?
* Did the arsenal belong to a relative? His grandmother? His grandfather? His mother? A friend? If so, did they give it to him? Did he take the guns from an unlocked box? How did an 18 year old get such an arsenal?

OK, I have more questions not asked by reporters who seem more like infants being spoon-fed instead of adult consumers, but that’s enough for now.

***

Finally, let me say that my heart is sore over these most recent mass killings in Buffalo and Uvalde. Unlike Trump’s cruel and misrepresented characterizations of Hispanics in 2016 and Blacks in 2020, the Hispanic Americans in Uvalde are hard working, family-loving, honest citizens just living their lives as any of us. The Black folks of Buffalo are the same: good, caring people, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, students living daily lives and doing harm to no one. They deserved better. They deserved better. I wish the families and friends of the victims my deepest sympathy and to somehow heal and continue forth in living their lives with some semblance of peace of mind.

Pro Life? Who are the real criminals here?

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Nineteen fourth graders plus two of their teachers were murdered in a Texas elementary school by an 18 year old crazed man who was able to purchase an AK-47 automatic rifle without a background check a few days after his 18th birthday before the shooting as a birthday present to himself. Meanwhile, 50 U.S. Republican senators have steadfastly refused to even consider a bill that was passed by the House to require such background checks. So these “pro-life” senators were anything but pro-life. Quite the opposite: They are pro-murder and have contributed to the death of innocent children in our public schools.

The background check bill does not take guns away from anyone, as the NRA fears, but only prevents someone with a serious mental illness or a felony on his or her record from obtaining a gun. Ninety percent of the American public agree with the bill, including 78% of NRA members. That would expose the senators to a completely pecuniary motive for their obstruction strategy. For example, the NRA gave 30 million dollars to Trump’s 2016 election, more than any other group. So the entire caucus of Republican U.S. Senators is trading the lives of citizens who are murdered by mass killers who are able to easily obtain assault weapons for NRA dollars that are helping to keep them in office.

Pro Llfe? Far from it.

And what of the voters who vote these Senators into office? Pro life? They may use the euphemism but no, they are not pro life. They delude themselves into somehow thinking they are pro life, but when you stratch the surface just a bit you see the rot beneath the veneer. They offer their “thoughts and prayers” after each massacre, assuaging their own consciousnesses and returning to their own empty lives, full of empty rationales, and empty excuses, and empty memes and slogans.

So yes, the senators are scoundrels but the people who vote them in and absolve them of responsibility are scoundrels as well. Maybe more so. A representative democracy is only as representative or as democratic as the people who permit the representatives to act against their interests. In this case, it’s as obvious as a fox in the henhouse.

The young killer in Texas was lonely, bitter, angry, and vengeful from years of being bullied and taunted because of his stuttering. He was a shy, sensitive boy who had a drug-addled mother whom he fought with constantly. He did poorly in school and complained that he didn’t want to be there because of the constant harassment by other students. He was not scheduled to graduate with his class as a result and did not participate in the traditional parade of the graduates at the elementary school the day before the shooting. He had posted pictures of his rifles on Instagram, expressing pride in showing them off. No one alerted no-one as to his postings. He had received no mental health treatment during any of his childhood bullying, nor were there any apparent actions by the school to allay such bullying.

On the morning of the school shooting, he first shot his grandmother in the face causing serious injury. The grandmother apparently was able to call police but the die was cast. The killer headed to the elementary school in the small Texas town in which he lived and where he himself had attended elementary school, entered a classroom and shot and killed 19 kids along with two teachers. Police arrived and killed the killer after breaking into the classroom.

Why? We will never know, but a look at his history and you can put the puzzle together. It’s difficult to stop bullying. It’s difficult to identify mental illness and provide the right treatment. It’s difficult to intervene in domestic disputes and turmoil. It’s difficult to provide adequate security at schools, including the ridiculous right wing solution of arming teachers. But it is entirely reasonable to have enforceable laws on the books to make it difficult for those who should not legally own guns to not legally own guns.

Anything less is actually criminal, at least in my eyes. Yes, the 50 Republican Senators in the U.S Senate are acting criminally. The NRA hierarchy is acting criminally. The Supreme Court is acting criminally. And the voter who votes for politicians who acts criminally is acting criminally, not to mention unethically, hypocritically, cruelly, and immorally.

How will you vote in the next election?

Heavy National Karma

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I hate to be a prophet of doom, but America has some pretty dark karma to work through–karma that started well before the official start of our country. Since that time we’ve fabricated myths to deny the realities of that karma, myths that are apparent to this day and that have created a polarized country that is, in effect, fighting another civil war. As in 1860 when half the country professed fealty to slavery and half the country was against the further enslavement of human beings, we’re now divided into Trump Republicans and Liberal Democrats.

Whether we proceed to enter a physical war remains to be seen but the two sides are deeply opposed to even talking to one another. The only thing they seem to be in agreement on is opposition to the war in Ukraine, although there are a number of Republican politicians who are against any further military aid to Ukraine and even lean towards supporting Putin. Their number one goal, amidst all the problems we have is apparently to make Joe Biden look bad so he will lose support in ’22 and ’24. Mitch McConnell has been obsessed with this strategy since Barack Obama was president. And with Manchin siding with the GOP on major issues and the Supreme Court taking an ultra conservative tack since Trump’s three appointees were confirmed, the Democrats busy themselves with defending against the baby formula shortage. It’s discouraging to see a democracy swirl down the drain without much attempt to plug the leaks in the tank.

We need an Abe Lincoln with the courage of a lion and not a bunch of whimpering victims of a junior high bully. We need someone with the guts of Lincoln who could beat Trump and his Republicans like a rug on a clothes line.

But that’s not the main reason I’m writing today. I have a theory as to how we got in this mess and how we might begin to extract ourselves before we end up like the Holy Roman Empire, and everybody knows what happened to it. Charles Darwin showed us how animals evolve in reaction to their need to survive and continue their species. (Although even there, many Republicans don’t ascribe to Darwinism and don’t want it taught in our public schools!). Animals make changes over time in response to the changes and threats in their environment-changes that eventually become so ingrained that they solidify in their genetic DNA material generation after generation. Human beings, of course, being mammals, are no different.

The seminal epoch in the history of our country was the advent and continuation for several hundred years of slavery, a time when human beings were treated worse than animals and were actually tallied as three-fifths of a human being in the original Constitution. You all know by now how they were abused, bred, and murdered over those horrible years so I needn’t inventory it all in these pages. Consideration was given to enslave Native Americans, called Indians by the original white setters, but they resisted from the start, drawing inspiration from courageous chiefs and wise elders. Instead, they were banished from their ancestral lands and murdered.

So attention turned to merchants who were selling Africans as slaves. Despite any moral considerations, landowners in the South seized the opportunity to secure free labor and proceeded to become rich men with vast political power as a result. So from 1619 to 1863, human slavery was the law of the land. And from 1870 to 1964, brutal Jim Crow practices and laws, particularly in the South, but also in varying degrees in other parts of the country, essentially enslaved Black Americans further.

What effect did this have genetically on Blacks and Whites in this nation? I submit that hatred and suspicion are largely prevalent in both races to this day, directed towards each other. Due to how they’ve been treated over these centuries, Blacks keep their distance from Whites, live in their own communities, work at jobs friendly to minorities, bank where they can obtain loans without discrimination, and make friends mostly with other Blacks. Whites also live where mostly other Whites live, shop where Whites shop, work in White controlled businesses or corporations, and fraternize mostly with other Whites. Generally if a White sees a Black, particularly a Black man or teen, approaching them on a lonely street in a city, they will more than likely cross the street to avoid the confrontation. A Black person will not cross a street to avoid a White, but will avert their eyes, genetically remembering the consequences for looking at a White directly from millennia of cruel punishment for doing so in the American South.

Behavior is largely conditioned as psychologists have shown. And conditioned behavior usually translates to corresponding genes that get passed from generation to generation. The behavior of white slaveowners has also embedded genetically, manifesting in today’s conservative politicians, in hiring practices, in blocking civil rights legislation, in continued housing discrimination, in educational opportunities, in blocking internal and external infrastructure, in income discrepancies, in police protection, in health care advantages. The list goes on and on.

Laws have been passed to right the wrong, but conservatives constantly push against these laws, and the often conservative courts follow suit. Even our present ultra-conservative leaning Supreme Court has reversed long standing civil rights legislation, along with other established precedents. And GOP-controlled state legislatures have enacted voter suppression laws not unlike the laws that blocked Black voters and politicians just after the Civil War.

This last point is critical given the inbred nature of systemic racism. In order to change the societal genetic landscape, the government and the courts must support laws that right the wrongs of the past. Otherwise nothing will change, and the principles put forth in the Declaration of Independence will be for naught, thus furthering our moral and legal downward slide as a culture and a viable democratic republic where “all men/people are created equal.”

Presently, we are a divided country, racially, politically, and, seemingly, morally. That can only be sustained for so long, as we’ve seen historically. Discord devolves into turmoil. Turmoil devolves into anarchy. Anarchy devolves into dictatorship and fascism. And this kind of fall is a result of years and years of genetic karma–the word karma coming from the Sanskrit word for action–of the kind I’ve described. The Buddhists say the way to change karma is to hold past actions up to the light and make a conscious, enlightened effort to see the error of that action and change direction–with honesty, courage, fortitude, compassion, understanding, and wisdom.

It’s not easy to change the karma of a nation. In a sense, each individual of that nation must also look at their own past actions and make changes on that level. There must be a common goal, a common mission statement, of which the United States has two: the Declaration of Independence and the Golden Rule.

Let’s live by them, shall we!

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