Dread

This is not a good day. Plus, I plan to boycott tomorrow. That's when we lose one of our best presidents and get saddled with a narcissistic pathological liar. For 4 years. And he will have the assistance of a reactionary bunch of sycophants who have been chomping at the bit to dismantle what is best about this country.

If you've been paying attention, and aren't one of those "I don't follow politics but..." smug multitudes, I shouldn't have to list all the impending losses. It promises to start with the free press, the ones who are too ratings oriented or cowardly to speak truth not only to power but to the people. Cynical me says that's no great loss, given their track record for the last several years, but there's nothing big or powerful enough to replace them.

That's totally chilling.

Trump is not a side show, a circus act, an entertainer. He is not how he's been presented to us by "the media". He is a threat to our economic system, our peace and safety, our rights, our environment including possibly the whole planet's environment. Soon we will know, if there are still truth tellers with loud enough voices out there, if he can add "traitor" to his list of "accomplishments". You know, up there with con man, denigrator and assaulter of women and raper of underage women, failed businessman who can manage to go bankrupt owning a casino (seriously, how does anybody manage that? The house always wins!), and on and on. I don't even give a shit how goldenly kinky he is. That's not going to damage our country.

Maybe one of the most positive signs is that he thinks Presidents get to take weekends off. It might minimize the harm. Of course, that leaves the country to the tender mercies of a selection of rich white men who almost uniformly believe in exactly the opposite of the tasks of the jobs they have been nominated for.

How did we get  here? Part of it was outside manipulation, sure. Tell yourself that when you need to find a scapegoat. But the real culprit was us. WE grew complacent. WE got too "busy" to pay attention. WE found celebrities of more substance than our laws and rights. WE didn't bother to do the real work needed to find out the actual causes of our economic downturns because it was so much easier to blame whichever group of "THEM" was put before us. WE let "taxes" become such a dirty word in our collective greed that WE never stopped to think who really could/should/had been paying them and what they were actually properly used for: buying civilization.

TANSTAAFL! There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!

We want to drive on perfect roads, promptly cleared of snow and ice, passing over bridges that never need to be upgraded, and get wherever ASAP. No inconvenience. No safety issues. And no taxes. We want clean pure water but again, never want to pay taxes to get it and keep it. We put down teachers who try their best given yearly shrinking salaries, higher class sizes, and fewer class options - how are the arts programs in your local public schools these days? -  because, hey, no increase in taxes!

Or should we just say No Brains?

Remember, an ignorant populace is a malleable one, one that is kept too busy trying to stay alive to pay attention to what's really going on. And never ever doubt that ignorant and stupid people are very confident of how highly smart they are.

We don't want the very rich to have to pay estate taxes because they've been renamed "death taxes" and we're too stupid or lazy to find out that they don't even apply to us,  just to the very very rich who want to keep on being very very rich because the poor just aren't worthy. Of anything, apparently.

We don't want to inconvenience the business gods with regulations like the ones that try to ensure food safety, clean air and water, equal opportunities  and living wages for their workers, because the business gods whine about the horrible burdens they have to put up with in order to comply, and their profits might drop a bit from the billions they are used to hoarding.

We coddle Big Agriculture who wants a perfect yield with no pests stealing a single grain or crowding out a single leaf for sun, so we allow then to use chemicals that may well soon destroy the bee populations that actually produce the edible parts of the crops they grow. Then what will we eat? Or is this a sneaky way of getting population control in a way the Churches haven't thought to deem immoral yet, before it's too late?

 We let Big Pharma charge outrageous prices to produce medicines that were actually developed using funds provided by the federal government, even passing laws that forbid us to bargain those prices down. Just like this country has passed laws that forbid us to study gun violence statistics so we can know how many people get shot every day/week/year. They want us all afraid. And armed. The NRA is in bed with the gun manufacturers way past the point of sense, and every new boogyman who is pointed at stirs us up again.

So how did we get here? I think Pogo said it best, many years ago. "We have met the enemy, and they is us."

Don't ever doubt it, when things get bad. WE did it.