A Note or Two on The Election

I confess I did not vote this time around. Went to the MVD to get a handicapped parking permit -- finally; it's taken a month to do the paperwork -- and then across the street to the polling place at the community center. Well, I didn't see a line out the building, but once we got inside, it was packed and there was a long line snaking through the lobby. Man came in after we got in and said it was worse than when he tried to vote earlier. Election worker came out and said there would be a delay; they only had four booths, and there were so many in line, it would be a while... the line had stopped moving. I had to sit down on my walker -- as did a few other elders -- and so we waited.

Man who came in after me left. Others kept coming and the line didn't move. After a while, election worker came out and said that the lines were much shorter at other polling places, one about seven miles away, another about 20 miles.Some left to go to these other polling places. Most stayed and others arrived. 

After another 20 minutes or so with no movement in the line -- except it kept getting longer -- that was it. I said let's go. Not gonna vote this time.

I voted absentee last election, but didn't apply for an absentee ballot this time. Other things took priority. This is a heavily Republican county. I usually vote Democrat, but sometimes vote for alternative candidates if there are any on the ballot, and I'm still getting to know local candidates and will vote for Republicans if they're sane and competent. So far, that's been OK. 

This time around, the county results were interesting. They're usually about 70/30 Republican, but this time the results were closer to 74/22 with 4% going to the alternative candidate for governor, a Navajo woman who was running as an independent though she said she's Republican. I thought she'd take votes from the Republican candidate, but she didn't in this county. Nope. She took Democratic votes instead. Indeed, Republicans out performed their usual votes. Hmm. Makes me wonder. Is this county getting more Republican? Are Dems moving out? Possible I guess. I see people moving in all the time. Don't see people moving out.

One thing that bothers me. Trumpists have adopted displays of the US flag as their emblem after their displays of the Stars and Bars didn't go over so well. I don't consider the Trumpists patriotic. And their display of the flag is nothing if not hypocritical. That aside, the problem is that there is no counter to it. Nothing comparable on the so-called "left" that says "I'm a Patriot."

Patriotism exclusivity by one political faction is dangerous for it can easily lead to outrages like we have seen in our own history (genocide, lynchings, various "scares") and to horrors like the Nazi Holocaust during the mid 20th Century -- and has happened in other countries much closer to our own time.

What do we do about it? So far, nothing. It's as if this fragmentation, fracturing, is being allowed -- required? -- to happen as prelude to a "reset" or catastrophic failure of society.

Why? To whose benefit? We all need to think about these things, and I don't see much thought being applied to our broken political and institutional processes. I don't know where it leads in the end, but right now, it's not looking good.

The California Fires

Some truly outrageous wild fires have been burning through northern California continuing a pattern established over the last several years of drought and then a super-abundance of rain.

We didn't live in the affected areas, but we are certainly familiar with them. Santa Rosa, the Napa Valley, burned areas in Yuba Country (Loma Rica), Mendocino, Nevada County, Calaveras. Oh yes, all of them hold emotional connections either through people we knew or the many places we became familiar with.

They say 23 are dead from the fires, hundreds missing, thousands of homes and other structures destroyed so far, and there is no end in sight. For many, it's an Apocalyptic situation, one that has become all too familiar in this era of climate change.

To be caught up in it is almost impossible to imagine, though we haven't been spared firestorms in our area of Central New Mexico. The backside of the Manzanos burned spectacularly a couple of years ago, dozens of homes burned and many people left refugees. The fire scar is still slashed across the mountains.

When I was a kid, as I've mentioned, I would sit on my back fence and watch the slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains north east of Los Angelesburn almost every year, and one year, the fires came up the east side of the hills by our home, crested the hilltop, and were starting down our  side. Panic ensued, but the fire department arrived just in time to stop the progress of the fires a few hundred yards from the border of the housing development. I did a Google street view tour of the area not too long ago and saw those hills were now covered with houses. I thought, "Uh-oh" but people there didn't and don't much care about the intrinsic hazards of earthquake and fire I think. It just goes with the territory.

I remember my mother was horribly fearful of fire, and I never quite understood it until she told me that when she was just a little girl, three maybe four years old, she witnessed the family home in Indianapolis burn to the ground. She couldn't shake the memory and she was terrified of fire ever afterwards.

I don't have quite that fear of fire, but when she told me what had happened when she was a child, I understood her fear.

These visions of fires in California are disturbing, there's no doubt. Ms Ché is somewhat less disturbed -- more for the animals than the people, whom she refers to as "rich white people" -- which not all of those affected are by any means. But enough of them are that her sympathies can sometimes lie elsewhere.

Is this something like the Trump regime's disinterest in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands? I don't know. But for the most part, the "rich white people" affected by the fires in California can and no doubt will  take care of themselves while the poor black and brown folks in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands can't very well, can they?

They were mostly impoverished by colonialism to begin with and have few resources to fall back on. How many of us are actually in the same leaking boat?

I mentioned to someone the other day that we are one, maybe two, catastrophes away from the Apocalypse and there isn't a lot we can do about it.

I'm not into Doom Blogging, but..

It's always darkest before the dawn. Or something.

The Freaks Who Rule Us

It's not just the constant pounding on the War Drums and the persistent low-level clashes around the world, it's the constant victim-blaming and the reversal of responsibility, the ridiculous levels of evidence-free accusations, the myriad lies, the falseness of the overall narrative of rule.

The protection of force means that any lie or action is acceptable as long as those in power are protected from the wrath of the People -- or from attacks by enemies. More and more, of course, the People themselves are perceived as the Enemy.

The corollary here is that when a powerful interest crosses another greater power,  all holy hell can -- and will -- be unleashed on the lesser power, no matter the consequences. This is the rule of warlords. This is the rule of chaos and misery.

There seems to be no way to prevent this descent into madness, no way to avoid the calamity that is sure to ensue. We are witness to the disintegration of sane governance and its replacement by ruin and rapine.

And somehow, we -- the victims -- are to blame ourselves for not doing something we should have when we might have, and for doing -- affirmatively -- that which we shouldn't have and wouldn't have if we had known what our actions then would lead to now.

Only thing is, I think that's wrong. The victims are not culpable for what the perpetrators do. Often enough, the victims have no idea what the perpetrators are doing until it is too late, and even then, the knowledge necessary for an intervention is often lacking clarity, and what to do in an intervention is ever a mystery.

For the past few weeks, we've been watching events unfold in Ferguson, Missouri, for example, that seem to make no sense, though they are all too familiar.

A young black man is shot down in the streets by police so often it's routine, and yet this incident was different. The callousness of the killing and its aftermath, the immediate sequestration of the killer (no one knows or is saying where he is), the barking dogs and assault rifles brought out within minutes to "control the crowds," the weeks of protest, the strange events surrounding the looting and burning of several businesses in Ferguson, the violent, uncoordinated reaction of the armored police, the media frenzy, the Celebrity Negroes hustled in to calm the situation, though Jesse Jackson was booed lustily when he tried to raise money off the crowd, all of that and more was more and more bizarre as it unfolded.

Something very odd was happening. It's still happening, though the events in Ferguson are dying down, the embers banked for the next time.

But we still don't know quite what it is, what is really going on.

We need to figure it out somehow.

What happened to get us to this point. What can we do to change things?

Or is it too late? Will the freaks who rule us simply run wild?

Often throughout the summer it's looked like there could and would be no end to the bloodshed, and then something happens to pull back from the brink.

This seems to happen over and over again in connection with the Ukraine. Episodes of mass death and destruction seem to be leading directly the nuclear apocalypse we've dreaded for decades, and then it doesn't happen. The bloody conquest of the Donbass falters and halts for a moment, and the freaks who rule us yell at Russia, then scratch their heads and try to find another way to achieve their objectives of surrounding, destabilizing, and eventually picking apart the remnants of Mother Russia. The death tolls continue to mount in the cities and countryside of eastern and southern Ukraine, but despite all the horrors unleashed, the toll is modest compared to what it could be. A few thousand dead, it would seem, out of the many millions who could have been exterminated. 

"It would seem," I say, because reports out of the region are sketchy at best. And they are often wrong or deliberate fabrications. We don't really know what's going on, except for the fact that it must be nasty, brutal, and cruel.

You would think the freaks who rule us have an accurate assessment, but given history, more likely they don't. They have their driven points of view, their creation of enemies, their fears and loathings, and that's about it. They see what they want to see. Nothing more or less.

We may have a better view than they do.

Meanwhile, in the other abattoirs mostly of their own making, they seem to think there is nothing to be done but ratchet up the bloodletting. That always calms the situation, no?

Monstrous.

This summer has been a grotesque gore-fest, and the future looks grimmer than ever. Without a positive sign of any kind, the freaks who rule us seem intent on precipitating catastrophe.

Oh don't ask why...

Getting Closer To Labor Day and the End of Summer

The closer we get to Labor Day and the End of Summer, the more apprehensive I become. It's a form of conditioning, I guess, driven by an understanding that the first week of September has turned into the pivot of the year, and what follows is often horror almost beyond comprehension.

Summertime events can be bad or they can be foolish, but after Labor Day, things get real. Real and often harsh.

This year seems to be soaked in the blood of innocents and the somewhat off-kilter. It's a matter of police killings by the great gross, one after another, all over the country, now well over 1,000 dead at police hands -- don't believe the "400 annually", it's a deliberate deception to make you think that "well, it's not so bad". But it's much more than that, too. The US has been engaged directly or peripherally in numerous bloodlettings in hotspots all over the world, pushing, pushing, pushing the edges of neo-imperialism in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, and (apparently) in the Americas as well. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, have paid for this neo-imperial expansionism with their lives and it looks like many, many more must do so before this phase is done.

What did we do to deserve this? "We" in the sense of the global non-elite, the ordinary people who seem to get blown up and blown away willy-nilly and who have little or no say in the march of this or any other empire.

It is not for us to say they tell us. Not for us to say.

As we get closer to the year's pivot, I become more and more apprehensive as there are so many potential explosion-points, far more than I can recall in any previous year. Many observers have seen parallels to the outbreak of World War I or the outbreak of World War II, and many have seen madness in the eyes of Our Leaders. They are careening out of control, and without some form of intervention, they will almost inevitably lead us into apocalypse and catastrophe. They seem to want it desperately.

The question is whether there can be an intervention before the end.

I don't know.

But I shudder to think where the madness is headed.