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Sunday, January 15, 2017

JANUARY 15, TWOTHOUSANDSEVENTEEN

January 13, 2017 Another Debacle

January 15, 2017

Reading and writing on Facebook is preaching to the choir. Not that that is such a bad thing.. Most of us reading about art and the danged politics that has our country in turmoil as a fateful day .. the day of inauguration.. approaches..  we mostly agree that the debacle of the election is a real issue. It is viscerally an issue.  Democracy eviscerated?  Will we fall into fascism? How can this be prevented? Where are our saviors? 

An impending doom is not an overstatement.  I've decided to start writing here again in the hope that someone, somewhere, a middle of the road person?, our  savior?. will find an answer that will stop this feeling of doom.  Doom..  

This dark song by Shel Silverstein came to me when I was  typing 'Doom.'  Bob Gibson and Hamilton Camp sang it in the sixties. 

"
Boom, ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom
Twelve riders in the gloom
Seven showed red and the rest are dead
But the first battalion's home

Boom, ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom
You can hear their hoofbeats boom
The drums are low and the pace is slow
But the first battalion's home

Bridge:
So run to your homes Virginia girls
Fix your hair with pins
Give them wine and kisses
But don't ask them where they've been

Boom, ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom
And Richmond is their tomb
There's a hundred dead at Richmond
Three hundred dead at Gettysburg
And a hundred more they never found
But the first battalion's home"

The loss of the election to the electoral vote is troubling because our country is now like the dog being wagged by its tail.  It's the "Law.."  our tradition that may have made sense in the past, but no longer does.. with Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote by over 2.5 million votes puts our country in a divided state that echoes what was happening over a hundred fifty years ago .. There was a Civil War.  

With civility the furthest thing, evidently, from the mind of the winner of the electoral college vote, fear is palpable in educated and intelligent people.  Hateful jeers that I have personally encountered by those who voted not necessarily FOR the republican, but against Hillary Clinton are base and uncalled for. But.. they may reflect what's coming from those empowered by an election that is now under more and more scrutiny .. but .. where is our savior? Where is the President? What power does he have to reach out to stop the impending doom?  Where is the Democratic Party? Where is the Supreme Court?  

I really don't like politics.  Really and truly. I keep myself ignorant from the days when I was friends with a high school hero whom I ignorantly emulated from time to time when a question of "What would Tom do?" might come up.  It was never the right choice, but I was naive.. and probably still am, but learned that lesson too late.. My hero, two years my senior,  whose wonky analogies made him feel right and his ability to lead the unsuspecting me down the garden pathway to being wrong was naive of me...  He voted for the man who would be king.  

I have reluctantly divorced him and ending a life long friendship is not an easy thing to do.  But, it's like being in the middle of a deep lake .. treading water... and not being able to get back to the boat because of the dear dear anchor around my neck.  Dropping the weight to save my life?  Well. it's a wonky analogy.  Swimming with an anchor around one's neck has its problems.

We..  all of us who seem aligned in basic thought.. need to find a way to harmony and to embrace others whom we may even despise.. though I have a feeling that 'they' are the ones who are capable of despising.. We may be naive: those of us who strive for harmony and seek to find a kernel of good in anyone with whom we may disagree just to stop the rancor.. stop the meanness.. just please stop it and come to reason of some kind.  

Thank goodness for Saturday Night Live!  This is the antithesis of my plea in that last paragraph.. because Alec Baldwin and his skewering of the president elect just feels so good.  It's like the first time you may have seen The Producers and watched Springtime for Hitler.. Mel Brooks' masterpiece of skewering .. from a Jew.. just feels good to even remember it.   

And, so..  we must find a neutral space and as ironic as this reference may be from Lyndon Johnson..  "come, let us reason together..."  

The election debacle gets officially solidified in five days. The fate of the United States hangs in the balance. This is not hyperbole.  People much more intelligent and educated than I must find a way to mitigate the damage that we have done to ourselves and to literally save our nation.  

Reaching across an aisle is difficult for most of us.. but I would welcome any idea to do something that will stop this whole thing in its tracks and reason it out not so that my side would win, necessarily,  but that the coming trainwreck that we can all see happening be brought to a grinding halt.  

What is the matter .. not with them.. but with us? How did we come to this?  Evidently, about half of the eligible voters in the United States (and I now use this term "united" loosely) did NOT vote.  There's one problem.. and the voters who supported other candidates as a protest.. Wow.. and. now, January 20, 2017, a day that will 'live in infamy' and perhaps the collapse of our American democracy?..  looms.. 

Boom ba ba Boom ba ba Boom.. 

January 15, 2017
michaelsheehan
glendale, california

 

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