Tag: Vote

Why You Can’t Talk Facts and Sense to Trump Supporters

I want to use my own blog today to suggest you read an excellent piece by another WordPress blogger, anonnynonny. “GoodTrouble.” I hope he/she doesn’t mind my sharing their post with attribution. If so, just let me know, and I’ll remove it. The piece is titled THE CASE AGAINST DONALD TRUMP, and is on point.

https://goodtrouble974588398.wordpress.com/2020/08/08/the-case-against-trump/?fbclid=IwAR2Y-3-LIq1q-Dd1km4xbzqiGseuUSwU7dpwMDeimSS4sLye2WtPKbFSsA8

This is an excellent blog piece. It says everything I have been saying and writing about Donald Trump for four years, and of course I’m not alone. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve made the exact same points, but to Trump supporters nothing gets through to them. Ignorance is their game, and hypocrisy is their shame. I’ve reached the conclusion that Trump supporters generally fall into one of four very different but intertwined groups. In no particular order they are: 1- the wealthy, because he feeds their wealth and buttresses their power; 2- the racists and white supremacists, because he is one of them and feeds their hatred and ambitions; 3- the far right “Christian” extremists (Think evangelicals and southern baptists), because he feeds their twisted bibliocracy and vision of a theocratic America; —Groups 2 and 3 are also immensely tribal.— 4- The group I call the FIGS, the Fearful, Ignorant, and Gullible, who are afraid of change, intellectually limited, and ill-equipped to deal with complex issues. They who the hand-wringers who fear progress itself because it is the virtual definition of big change. They are unable to process and analyze issues for themselves (example: they have little understanding of what the terms capitalism, socialism, and democratic socialism actually mean), and as a group very (Christian) religious. They accept the ‘guidance’ of someone they look up to (their minister, their family leader (usually male), or some other authoritative, charismatic individual to tell them what to think and believe. Donald Trump gives them exactly that kind of person. Once he has his hooks into them, they are his. These four groups are also masterfully, powerfully manipulated by the Republican power structure, which over the past fifty years has evolved into the nasty group, a virtual Hydra, it is today. Today’s Republican party is founded on two foundational principles. 1- Pure Darwinism. Only the strongest shall, or should, survive. 2- Extremely weak federal government, controlled by extremist “Christian” theology centered on white people, pure capitalism in its most extreme version. The most ambitious and successful shall dictate the economy and the country for their own profit and empirically decide what the working classes shall receive for their labor. Refer back to #1 above, and think pure Darwinism enforced by the most ruthlessly ambitious. No, I’m not a Marxist, and this is not any kind of ‘insane socialist’ rant on my part. It’s actually what is considered the latter days stage of unrestricted capitalism. Latter days as in complete collapse of semblance of democracy.

Time for Bernie and Liz to come together

I’m going to keep this one short and very much to the point.

It’s time for a dual ticket.
It is time, I believe, for two Democratic candidates to come together and campaign as a president/Vice-President combination. Those candidates are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Liz and Bernie would need to reach an agreement with Bernie at the top of the ticket, I think, with Elizabeth primed to succeed him. I base this strictly on Bernie’s age.
Yeah, I know campaigning as a pre-set ticket ‘just isn’t done,’ but it’s time to change that. A fully-formed ticket would remove the Bernie vs Liz dilemma going into into primaries.  I think that if they came together like this, a Sanders/Warren duo would set up a powerful vision of continuity for America. It would could unite the supporters of each, and the entire progressive movement. I don’t think Trump and his corrupt Republican party could stand against it.

Could it backfire?  Possible. But here’s the thing. We have reached the point, in terms of a crumbling environment and insane level of wealth distribution  that the only way we can save both the planet and our society is with aggressive, unified action. Any move toward centrism is doomed to be too little, to slow and too late.

 

Abortion, Don Trump, & Me vs. the Right

   I need to clarify something.  I frequently tell right-wingers that they cannot escape responsibility for supporting Donald Trump by saying they voted for him for this reason or that reason, but don’t agree with every awful thing he does. This brings me to abortion, and my views on it.
   Abortion, and to a lesser degree birth control, are two very key reasons a lot of religious conservatives voted against Hillary Clinton and not actually ‘for’ Donald Trump, they say. I tell them “When you vote for a person, you vote to accept all that they are, and all that they represent. You have responsibility for their actions whether you want to accept it or not.” I stand by that. So I feel the need to be clear about my stance on abortion vis-à-vis my vote for progressive candidates..
  I believe that a woman’s body is her own, but that she has certain responsibilities in how she uses it in regard to her amazing facility to create life. I believe the same about men. Clearly, it’s much more complicated for women, because men cannot conceive. They do, however, provide half of the conception formula.  Sadly, a man who doesn’t care about his responsibility can walk away from the consequences of his actions.
   It’s a much heavier responsibility for women because they can’t just walk away. I understand that. Here are my core beliefs.
   1.  I do not believe in abortion for convenience. Abortion is
not acceptable to me as an alternative to exercising responsibility. Don’t tell me you forgot, you were just so overwhelmed by passion you (male & female both) couldn’t control yourself. If you have that little self-control, perhaps you shouldn’t live around other people.
   1a  I understand there is now, or soon will be, an effective ‘morning after’ pill for such situations. By all means, use it.
   2.  I believe in birth control, birth control, birth control. Don’t even try to preach to me against abortion and birth control at the same time. Sexual attraction is one of the most intense connections between people. If you deny both abortion and birth control, you are irresponsible and naïve. And don’t get me started, here, about how important birth control is world-wide, as humans continue to multiply and multiply. Guppies beware.
   3.  I believe in abortion in instances of rape, incest, and when the mother’s live is in danger. In these cases, the final decision MUST rest with the woman.
   3a  I confess I have no clear thoughts of how to proceed re cases in which the child is going to be born severely deformed and/or disabled. I can say this. This decision, again, must be made by the woman, and I hope with much loving, compassionate counseling.
   4.  I believe in Planned Parenthood. Every statistic shows that abortion, and deaths from abortion, are much lower thanks to Planned Parenthood.
   5.  Keep religion out of it. If you can’t make a good moral, responsible, constructive decision on your own, without looking at what some local community “prophet” claimed was “God’s law” two thousand years ago, I’m not sure I trust you to go for pizza. I believe in God (Goddess, Creator, the Force, however we refer to it). But I do not ascribe to neatly packaged ‘religions’ that love, above all, to proclaim that ‘their’ view of God is the only one. I think we are supposed to learn, to be responsible toward each other, the other life with which we share this incredible planet, and the planet itself, without passing the buck to page 71, or chapter 28, or verse 8 in paragraph 16 of section 49, etc. If we can’t practice decent morality and responsible and stewardship and kindness because it is in our heart, we are already lost.
   Summary:  Abortion for convenience, no, I don’t like that.
   Birth control, and Planned Parenthood, yes and yes and yes and yes again. Abortion when the mother’s life is in danger, or the child may be born severely disabled, has to be totally up to the woman. Competent, compassionate (as opposed to brow beating and bullying and religious book thumping) is vital.
   If you disagree, fine. That is your prerogative. But if you think your feeling on this particular issue justifies your support of a criminal, corrupt, authoritarian, anti-Constitution fascist Hitler wanna-be, of neo-Nazism, anti-immigration white supremacy racists, of a sick “nationalism” that spawned both World Wars, of treating women as second class citizens and virtual serfs,  of total disregard for the very air we breathe and water we drink and animal life with which we share this place, I probably wasted my time here, starting with “I need to clarify…”
   I think I can justify my feelings about abortion in the framework of how I vote, and still hold you responsible for your support of a man who is all of the above.