JackTReason

It was early 2017 when I saw a bumper sticker on a car in the parking lot of a business complex. It read: “We Can Finally Say Merry Christmas Again.”

We know who had just taken office that January in Washington D.C., and any doubt as to if the bumper sticker was sarcasm or not, was settled by the TRUMP/PENCE sticker beside it.

I admit that my mind reeled a bit over this, but then what should I expect from a country that elected that suit full of orange pus. It seems I live in a country with a massive percentage of people who are incapable of thinking at all, it seems, if the right emotional bone is thrown to them.

Did people really think someone was ever stopped from saying Merry Christmas? Or is this some sort of inside joke, like the folks who proudly donned the label of “Deplorable,” after Hillary Clinton remarked that half of Trump’s fan base was a “basket of deplorables”?

Note, they didn’t point their fingers at the other half of their party, but recognized themselves as the ones who owned that label. As if being deplorable was a badge of honor, if someone on the left didn’t like what they did or said.

There begins (to my eyes) the organization of Project: Own The Libs.

The basic idea was to mock anything that seemed even slightly different from their own cherished conduct and habits, and ascribe it to a mainstream practice among people on the political left – no matter how obscure the example. The ranks of the Demon-crats, as they would come to call them, were populated with furries and drag queens, communists and lesbians cat ladies, and the most evil of all – the Woke.

And then somehow the mere existence of these woke people brought harm to traditional conservatives. It was a puzzling notion that intelligent people dismissed as ridiculous, but people really were convincing themselves that they were harmed by stuff other people did even though it didn’t relate to them in any definable way.

How could two women in Seattle getting married possibly harm a man who lives in Texas? Especially since the Texan was completely unaware of the existence of the women before it was featured on his favorite conservative news channel, and became “harmful to society” in his eyes.

How could they earnestly suggest that allowing same-sex marriages would destroy traditional ones? They acted as if same-sex marriages were going to be required of all residents.

Any grievance they could think of became a cause, and any diversion from their traditional expectations became an attack on their own. They stopped simply disliking alternative views of the world, they treated them as if they were being forced to adopt these new woke policies.

From the outside it seemed absurd that someone could be so earnestly bothered by something that didn’t touch their lives in any tangible way. Absurd wasn’t even a good enough word for the job. Many of these folks acted as though they were the most put-upon people on the planet, and the rest of the country was trying to erase their traditional lives.

Never mind the fact that they could still do just what they pleased, and live the exact lives they wanted, so long as they abide by the rules we all agreed to: let others be, and mind your own business.

There was hollering and whinging; there was wringing of hands, gnashing of teeth, and rending of clothes; it was as if their children had been taken from them for forced sexual reassignment surgery, or their church being closed and the parishioners being shuttled to a mosque.

Drag queens reading books to five-year old kids in supervised libraries was seen as the left indoctrinating kids to think cross-dressing was okay. Never mind that the parents chose to bring their kids, and that no one had to. And never mind that there were virtually no incidents of drag queens abusing children, while there were seemingly weekly accounts of children being abused and violated by ministers and youth group leaders who the parents had left their children with, assuming their safety.

They never stopped defending their right to raise their children how they saw fit, while also trying to stop other people from doing the same.

The national causes included someone refusing to bake a cake for someone because the decoration included two mens’ names. And a government clerk who refused to issue the marriage license the law required her to provide, because she objected to a marriage between two people neither one of which was her.

The crowd that insisted we mind our own business when it came to their lives, were also the crowd that was very busy minding everyone else’s business.

It wasn’t just gender or marriage, it was anything that deviated from their comfort zone.

Vegans were a problem that was hurting the country. Men who painted their nails were destroying civilization. Thanksgiving dinners that didn’t include a turkey were offensive to the core of our nation. The country was being pulled down to hell by bicycle commuters, electric car owners, hip hop music, single women who owned cats, and anyone who didn’t like bacon.

Then came Happy Holidays.

Well, it didn’t just come. Happy Holidays has been a common phrase of greeting during the winter season for a very long time. In 1970 I was delivering newspapers with Happy Holidays incorporated in the banner during the last month of the year.

The term was used as early as the 19th century, even in print, and became common with businesses to cover (get this) both Christmas and the New Year (not someone else’s religious holiday).

Happy Holiday (the song) was written by Irving Berlin in 1942. Andy Williams had a big hit with the song when he paired it with The Holiday Season as a medley on his 1963 Christmas Album.

Saying Happy Holidays is traditional. Happy Holidays was a common thing to say before these angry snowflakes were born, and common through their whole lives.

But suddenly it got noticed. Someone somewhere muttered, “How come nobody says Merry Christmas anymore?” (Even though they do, a lot). And then someone posted a picture from Starbucks with Happy Holidays on their festive seasonal cups.

The poor victims of wokism melted. This was a bridge too far. A greeting that included awareness of holidays not referencing Jesus was more than they could stand.

It wasn’t just that someone said Happy Holidays, it was that they didn’t say Merry Christmas. The omission of those words was an attack on that holiday in their minds. Even while acknowledging that Christmas is included in the Holidays so happily greeted, they saw it had been demoted from its rightful place at the top of the holidays. Wishing someone Happy Holidays was an offense beyond the pale because it reduced Christmas to a mere equal with the Hanukkah, or worse, Kwanzaa.

It was an bizarre bridge to die on. But marshall their forces to die on it they did, with rounds and rounds of chatter in all the media, and conspiracy theories, and villains – globalists – trying to destroy America, and bumper stickers. It went viral in earnest, and then viral as a joke by others, who were indeed laughing at the absurdity.

And somehow other people saying Happy Holidays morphed into a ban on anyone saying it? Even though they still said it wherever they wanted? Explain this to me like I was five.

But that person put that sticker on the bumper of their car, and not as satire. This was the statement they wanted everyone who found themselves following them down the road to know about them. They were taking a stand against something so comically preposterous, as to arouse mocking laughter. Suddenly they were enjoying this new freedom that they already had, and which had never once been violated.

How much thought does it take to realize that you’ve never once not said Merry Christmas when you wanted to? That no one had ever tried to stop you, or complain if you did say it? But you advertise that you believe you were the victim on this particular issue until the last election.

MAGA (the people, not the anagram) are the meltiest, most victimized group of people ever, in light of the fact that their skin color has given them a free pass through most every checkpoint the institutions have erected. To be born advantaged, and then complain until their noses bleed about how others are trying to be acknowledged too, is bewildering to me, able as I am to see the facts of the matter.

They’re like a toddler, holding a candy cane while crying and stamping its feet because another toddler also got a candy cane.

It is treating the gradual egalitarian nature of freedom as an attack on their own freedom, as if one can only be free if others are not.

This past December I was corrected by someone when I wished them a Happy Christmas. “That’s supposed to be Merry Christmas,” they said. I told them to take it up with Clement-Clarke Moore, the author of the 19th Century poem, A Visit From St. Nicholas (commonly called The Night Before Christmas), who ended his poem with the witness describing the departure of Santa Claus with the line:
But I heard him exclaim ere he drove out of sight,

“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

And also Happy New Year.
And Happy Hanukkah.
And Happy Yule.
And Happy Kwanzaa.
And…
…wouldn’t Happy Holidays be easier?

The discussion about eating a meal for $3.00 was mentioned by US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins recently, when she expressed that people could get a nutritious meal for three dollars. She made the example of “a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla, and one other thing.”
There has been much ridicule toward this statement, mostly because of its austerity motivated sentiment (more on that later). But there are plenty of people challenging that it can’t really be done.

Well, it can. I eat three meals a day for under nine dollars a day. Actually, under eight dollars a day.

But I am not saying this to defend the Secretary of Agriculture, I am not. Before we use me as an example, let me explain what changes I had to make to reach this low amount.

The first thing I’ll mention is shifting to a whole food plant-based diet. I happen to exclude all animal products from my diet – and have for a decade – but this isn’t mandatory. What is needed is the whole food plant-based part. Processed food products take time and labor, they will always be more expensive to produce than whole foods.

It isn’t switching from ground beef to a plant-based substitute, it’s building meals from whole food, instead of prepared food. I don’t eat any meat, but if you do, eat very small portions, and use plants for most of your calories. Meat is expensive to raise. People need to quit thinking of cows casually grazing in otherwise empty grasslands, and then being herded off for slaughter when they get big enough. Most of all meat consumed in America is raised in factory farms. From beef to pork to chicken to fish, if you are eating it, it was probably raised in some kind of agricultural factory. These farms have huge costs, and are only profitable because of the scale at which they produce the meat, and the government subsidies provided to them and those who produce animal feed.
The needs of land, feed, veterinarian care, transportation, etc., make producing meat much more expensive than the vegetable equivalent. Remember, the animals eat plants, much of which humans could eat, or at least the land could be used to grow human food. And the conditions those animals are raised in produce many illnesses and conditions for which veterinarian services are constantly needed.

That leads to number two: make meals from scratch.

This is probably the most important factor: preparing mostly plant-based meals from scratch, or nearly so.  This takes a shift in use of time. More time must be devoted to this part of your life.

No matter who you are or where you live, nobody gets more than twenty-four hours in a day, or more than the number of days in the calendar. And regardless of what it is we do with our time, we are already doing something for all of those hours and days. If you want to do more of anything, be it exercising, reading, visiting museums, or cooking food, you must do less of something else.

When we wish to do more of something, we intend for that time to come from something of low value, like watching television or gaming, or some other pastime we may consider wasteful. But we were doing those things because we wanted to. More time cooking must mean less time doing something else, be it watching TV, working, sleeping, or whatever. We have to make ourselves spend more time managing our meals. There is no doubt that shifting more time to meal prep will cause you to miss something else. This is why people tend to fail in February the exercise programs they started in January. They can’t go to the gym and continue to do all the stuff they did before they made their resolution.

I managed to do this for years, but not as well as after I retired. Today I spend on average close to a couple of hours a day doing some sort of task related to feeding myself, be it shopping, preparing, or cleaning up.

This can be mitigated by using technology to gather groceries. Stores will do the shopping for you, and you can pick it up at the curb or have it delivered. But this is not the path to saving money. Nobody does your shopping for free, nor should they. It is labor that must be paid for, and jobbing out your chores costs money.

Next, you must become a storekeeper of your own pantry.

To effectively reduce your cost of groceries, you must be able to make the meals you want with minimal waste, from items you have on hand. This requires a different mindset, as it isn’t enough to decide what you want to have for dinner that night on the way home from work, you must have a deep knowledge of the kinds of things you can make and what ingredients you’ll need to make them. You’ll need to plan menus that make smart use of perishables, in particular fresh produce. It helps to understand the seasonality of produce, and which choices will be gentler on your wallet.

You’ll need to do batch cooking, as many meals are simply impractical to make as single servings. You’ll need to make meals that work well as leftovers, and stored for you to take with you to work – because you must plan for the meals you eat away from home too.

My budget per day was higher when I was working, though still atypically low because of my approach. The key here is to do the preparations yourself, which will drastically lower your cost. But it very much helps me to have more time.

So, eat all meals at home, preparing them from scratch (or nearly so), mostly from plants, using beans and lentils, along with rice and potatoes to build your meals around, and getting flavor in the combinations of foods, and by adding herbs and spices. Use expensive things sparingly, but be sure to include greens. The steak that sits at the center of your plate would be enough for a whole family in traditional Asian households, perhaps for more than one meal, instead of part of one meal for one person.

This can – with good shopping and food storage practices – get you under $3 a meal per person. Even less with careful practices.

This would not be a pragmatic approach for many, if not most people in America, and it would have knock-on effects to the economy at scale as any austerity-based program will.

But even if someone wishes to do this, there’s still a long learning curve.

The first is learning how to cook such meals. You can buy or borrow books, watch videos, follow blogs, and more, but you must practice anything to get good. It takes time to figure out what sort of dishes you like that you can prepare well, within the time and energy constraints you have. You need to learn what foods work together, what spices and herbs do to make plain food into gourmet meals, and the timing needed to make the various parts come together. A bowl of cooked spaghetti sitting on the counter waiting for the sauce to finish cooking will, in time, end up disappointing the diners.
And you need to do this every day, all year. As I mentioned before, you need to shift a considerable amount of time from something else you were doing to cooking, shopping, and managing your pantry, not to mention increased time spent cleaning up the dishes and pans.

The ease of picking up takeout, or ordering in prepared or semi-prepared meals, has changed our behavior over the decades, even though buying prepared food was always a thing for some. Fast food takeaway has replaced the diner in American cities, which used to feed great numbers of single people who had few cooking facilities.

That practice has shifted to more people, and more geography. Suburban and even small town people get far more food prepared for them, than they would have even a half century ago. But even then Americans were inundated with prepared foods, even if they needed to be heated from frozen. I grew up in the seventies eating frozen pot pies and TV dinners, having had peanut butter or lunchmeat sandwiches earlier. All of these include a premium for having the work done by someone else.

On your way to work some morning, notice the lines of cars at fast food restaurants waiting patiently for a fat-laden meal of fried food that they are paying someone else to make. And they are waiting in line as long as it would have taken to make it themselves – all the while burning fuel. Maybe you are in those lines many of those mornings?

A former coworker was grumbling about money, and I pointed out that his morning coffee and donut bill of $6.00 equaled $15,000 in ten years. That is half the cost of a car right there.

Cooking is something that has been waning over the years. More than a decade ago, Americans began spending more money in restaurants than in grocery stores. Accounting for the difference in cost, that still means people are cooking, but they are doing less of it by far.

Consider for a moment sewing. As a boy, most of the families I knew had someone who could sew, but most of them were in the older generation. At least one of my sisters made some of her own dresses. Today, sewing is a niche skill, with many people not even having a needle and thread to replace a button, and will pay money for someone else to do even this simple task. Or they simply replace the garment, as fast-fashion has become cheap enough and short term enough to not bother repairing the items. This is a disaster for the planet and still expensive for the individual over time, and should be addressed too.

Cooking has been shifting that way as well, as the convenience of jobbing out much of one’s meal prep has allowed us more time to do other things. But like sewing, paying someone else to do the task isn’t free. You might save a few dollars by having a seamstress mend a tear, or let out a dress instead of replacing it, but not as much as if you had those skills yourself. But even here, these costs are occasional, as nobody needs to have something sewn 21 times a week, like three meals a day equals.

A typical example of many contemporary people – including myself some years ago, would be to eat breakfast at home, perhaps some healthy bowl of grain-based cereal with added berries, or some avocado toast, or even some microwave breakfast sandwich; then get fast food for lunch, whether burgers, salads, wraps, or whatever; then pick up takeaway food on the way home, perhaps only an entree, and eat that with some rice or pasta made at home.

Breakfast $3.00

Lunch: $8.00

Dinner: $15.00

That’s more than $8.00 a meal. For one person. 8x3x30 is over $700 a month.
If you want to get your food budget under $3 a meal, or even under twice that amount, you need to stop paying others to cook food for you. You must do the work yourself, and figure out for yourself what activities you give up to make the time.

Stocking the pantry.
By keeping pantry staples stocked up you always have them on hand, and you can restock when items are on sale. But remember to rotate your stock, ensuring that the “best before” dates are arranged with nearest dates to the front.

Buying in bulk is another factor in keeping costs low. This means setting up storage at home to store this food. I use the word pantry, but this does not necessarily mean an actual separate room. My laundry/storage room holds some of my stock of staples, and I have more kitchen cabinets than others, even though I live in a small house. I prepared for this by prioritizing food preparation when I remodeled the house after buying it. Yeah, having a kitchen big enough to store food and cook meals comes from intentional choices.

Eating for under $3 a meal means having food storage and becoming good at being your own storekeeper. Being able to calculate your costs per calorie, and ensuring you get a broad enough range of food for a healthy diet.

*A note about healthy diets.

The evidence shows clearly that eating a diet of mostly plants leads to the lowest rates of the big killers, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, and all-cause mortality.
The dietetic associations of every advanced nation say that a well-planned diet that omits all animal products is suitable for anyone.
But even if not omitted entirely, animal products should be minimized for best health.

I am not here to advocate for veganism. I am here to address cost, and meat is expensive. As are the costs of healthcare related to the conditions eating meat tends to lead to. It is also unnecessary, so do not feel that reducing the amount will adversely affect your health – it’s actually the opposite. Remember “well-planned” when building any diet.
As a general note about information, don’t take the word of someone trying to sell you something. Advertisements from food industries promoting their products will often make health claims that do not match dietary science.*

As an individual path, I find great satisfaction in managing my dietary intake the way I do, but it does come with tradeoffs. As mentioned before, you must spend more time getting meals, but this also means less time at restaurants with friends, and fewer occasions of grabbing something tasty while out and about.
Picnics can be fun. Pack meals to take with you, so you don’t need to buy prepared meals.
Have friends over for dinner. You get the meal, you get the company, you probably get some help clearing and cleaning the dishes. And the tip you get is the savings in cost. Engage the whole family in making meals, it will build togetherness and instill good frugal habits.

Austerity.

But if everyone did this it would have a bad effect on our communities as a whole. Every restaurant experience, every takeaway stop, every prepared meal marks someone else’s income. The money earned in restaurants rolls through the economy as wages turn to purchases, which become wages for others. And taxes are extracted from these sales and incomes to pay for the common needs of the people. Economics show that each dollar spent has a multiplier effect as high as five to one.

And while it is good personal advice from my perspective, it is a terrible stance for a Secretary of Agriculture to take.
It amounts to austerity, and such programs typically begin a spiral into recession. Fewer dollars spent leads to lower employment, which leads to lower purchasing, and so on. More people out of work, means more people struggling to feed their families, and more people needing public assistance for help.

It isn’t troubling that someone should suggest an individual can lower their cost of feeding themselves and their family – you’ve just read me do just that. It’s troubling that a rich person in charge of a White House Cabinet is telling Americans they should spend less on food, while cutting food assistance to hungry people.

She is cutting off small amounts of food assistance from millions of people, and then telling them to be more frugal. A practice which will lead to more people needing that assistance. It’s cruel and harmful to us. And there is a near zero percent chance that she practices what she is telling the people to do.

It reveals the priorities of this administration. It is an intentional move to bring more poverty, which will bring more fear. The fear will allow them to take more power away from the People.

The truth is food costs are going up in direct relationship to policies enacted by Trump’s second term in office. Be it tariffs, cutting food assistance programs, or deporting the workers who pick the crops, the higher costs fall at the feet of the People, and the federal government’s response is to tell the people to eat less food.

Whatever one does with their own food budget, remember that the higher cost isn’t your fault. And rich people telling you that their bad policies must be paid for with your frugality is a reason to oppose them.

This isn’t about Oskar Schindler, but relates to what he did.

Steven Spielberg made a movie about the man called Schindler’s List.

The short summary is that Oskar Schindler used slave labor in his factory as a way of keeping them from being sent to extermination camps.

There’s a lot to the story, and the film is worth watching. But I highlight the man to draw attention to a horror that is unfolding in front of us today. It is a horror that draws comparison to the death camps and use of slave labor by Nazis in the lead up to and during World War II.

The comparisons are fair, because the perpetrators have followed the same game plan, used the same exact language, and even showed reverence for that 20th Century evil regime.

While in Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, it was the Jews who were persecuted and who suffered from genocide (Yes, there were others who also faced this fate), the 21st Century victims are Latinos (And yes, others will suffer too).

This may seem like hyperbole at first glance, especially if you aren’t following the steps that are underway. I will connect the dots for you.

The parallels between the language used by the Nazis toward the Jews, and the language used by MAGA toward Latinos isn’t just similar, it is verbatim. Phrases like “Poisoning the blood,” “Animals,” and “Vermin,” are identical. This is the process of dehumanizing other humans, which makes it easier to justify killing them.

These are phrases that both Hitler and Trump have used in their respective generations. Not to mention the affection for Hitler and his regime that Trump shows, as has been demonstrated over time. Here I will mention that his first wife said Trump kept a copy of Hitler speeches on his bedside table; and his former Chief Of Staff, General John Kelly related a story of how Trump told him he wanted “Generals like Hitler had.”

General Kelly reminded Trump that those generals tried to kill Hitler, but Trump doubled down, explaining that he wanted the unquestioned loyalty and willingness to follow any order that he believed those generals held.

This is Trump referencing what he perceived as unquestioning personal loyalty by military leaders to the Hitler, and how he wanted the same thing.

Why would Trump want such loyalty? I mean, in the history of the United States, we have been extremely successful at waging war with the military remaining loyal to the Constitution and the country, versus giving that loyalty to the President personally. The value to Trump is that he isn’t interested in national loyalty, or in democratic norms. He is interested in personal power.

The gradual capturing of the Federal government by Trump, and the authoritarian shift in policy has mimicked the same pattern as was used by the Nazis during the 1930s.

The same attacks against the media, the same attacks against political opponents, the same attacks against education, labor, and minority voices are mirror images under Trump as they were under Hitler.

Students of history can all see this, and they are screaming the alarms.

Now, when it comes to Latinos in America, Trump intends to (and is currently implementing) mass deportations of not only undocumented foreign workers, but also those who are legally in the US, such as people with work visas, people who are here under refugee status, and even natural born citizens if their parents were not here legally when they were born. More recently, Trump has repeatedly suggested that “home-grown” and legal citizens could be deported.

And while a horrific and nationally damaging practice mass deportation is, it is where they are often being deported to that causes the greatest concern. Many of these otherwise harmless individuals are being shipped to brutal prisons in El Salvador and South Sudan, places where abuse is common.

But it is here in the US that I need to address, for it is here that concentration camps are being built, and where these people are being incarcerated.

The most recent of these to get national attention is in Florida, where Trump has referred to it as “Alligator Alcatraz.” It is a rapidly constructed system of cages in the Florida Everglades, where any attempted escape might become a meal for an alligator.

Trump himself has made this “joke,” and one of his personal advisors, Laura Loomer, offered that these alligators might have 65 million meals. This happens to be the estimated total number of Hispanic people in the United States, including all natural born citizens, even the tens of millions whose families go back centuries.

This is a call for genocide, even if the call was intended as a joke. And frankly, I can’t say that it was a joke.

In my state of Michigan, there is uproar and division over the building of a concentration camp in Baldwin, where a lack of economic opportunity has many wanting the prison for the jobs it will create. (Baldwin is in Lake County, where approximately three-fourths of the homes are only occupied during the summer season).

There are many other camps being erected for the purpose of housing millions of migrants of Hispanic descent, many of which are not being processed for deportation.

Meanwhile, farmers across the country (most of whom supported Trump) are upset because they have lost their workforce. In some cases, such as in Nebraska, where the MAGA farmers didn’t think Trump would go after their migrants, the migrants didn’t take the chance, and left the state voluntarily.
And in Texas, where ICE raids on farms have resulted in crops being left rotting in the fields for lack of workers.

There’s a separate story here about how MAGA farmers thought ending DEI programs would force black Americans back to the fields to do the crop-picking, but that is worth its own post.

Here I am going to point out the obvious next step, which is these private prison complexes hiring out the prisoners back to the farmers as forced labor. If this seems unconstitutional, you’d be mistaken. The 13th Amendment to the Constitution prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime. This was how southern states populated chain gangs for decades. Convict a black man of vagrancy, public intoxication, or some other crime, and send him to a chain gang for a couple of years.

There is no reason to think the idea of profiting off of these prisoners has not crossed the mind of this corrupt administration, who already thinks of these people as less than human.

And what happens when you have millions incarcerated without places to employ them? Would these people who already view their prisoners as vermin get tired of feeding them at a loss?

How they would go about destroying these people is unknown, or even that they would. But the pattern is so similar, and the intentions are so similar, and every other metric can be seen today that was seen under the Nazi regime of the Third Reich, that considering it possible or even probable seems judicious.

Will Texas farmers let their farms fail to avoid using slave labor? What about the Nebraska farmers, or those in Kansas, or any other state? What about meat-packing plants that have been raided? Will they hire back those same people as slave labor, especially at a discount, or will they go under?

In Germany during the Third Reich, businesses accepted slave labor, and were happy to work them to death. And those that tried to protect the victims were so rare, that a future director made a film about one of them.

Don’t think it can’t happen here. And it is high time we recognized that it is happening here. We should not wait until gas chambers are being built before we stop them.

*Edit. As I prepare to post this, Trump has floated the idea of letting migrant farm workers remain on the farms working, but under the responsibility of the farmers. This sounds a lot like slavery. Remain picking vegetables, and return to your locked barracks at night.

The guy asked me why we needed to have a holiday for Juneteenth? Everybody is equal now, so why make a big deal out of what only benefited one group of people?

I knew the guy for some years, and I knew he didn’t think of himself as racist. But let’s be clear, those shoes fit him many days of the year. And he asked me this question because I’m as white as they come, with all of my ancestry coming from Europe, and most of that from the northern half of it.

I told him we have a holiday so that we can all celebrate this anniversary. Juneteenth is a celebration of us fixing a problem and making it right. This is great for all of us. It isn’t just that the last of the slaves were finally freed, it’s that we finally have a country where all are free. Why would we not want to celebrate this?

As a man I learned long ago that being right about something was only good if you actually are. And being wrong about something is only a problem if you don’t stop being wrong.

There are few things in life that are better than finding out you are wrong. Because we can all be wrong from time to time. We are all wrong about something, at some point. Think about being wrong and never learning that you are. Think about how much better it is to find out you were wrong, and then correct yourself.

It’s the most powerful thing there is. First, you get to stop being wrong, but more importantly, you now own your life in a way you didn’t before. You can make decisions about things from a much stronger position. Once you find out you were wrong – and change accordingly – you stop being captive to what other people tell you. You start seeing you can learn for yourself, and own your own future in a better way.

The nation is the same way. We have changed our Constitution twenty-seven times since it was written. Seventeen since the Bill of Rights. Each time we did that, it was a recognition of the country that we had been wrong about something, and found the national courage to own our error and correct it. That is a powerful thing. It is one the greatest things a country can do – admit a mistake and fix it.

We fixed slavery. No, we didn’t fix racism – we can’t really do that as a people. That change has to come to each individual. It should come to all, but we cannot collectively force a person to feel differently.

But the people are changing. Each generation is less racist than the last, and each generation sets their sights on finding the errors the previous generations made.

The founders of the nation got a lot right, there’s no doubt about that. They laid out a country where the power resided with the People. They formed a government built of representatives of those people, with checks and balances to keep power from concentrating. And laws for all to follow, and courts to try those who are alleged to have violated the laws, with juries of the People to decide the outcome. It’s a magnificent thing they did.

But they didn’t get everything right. A close study of the times shows they really couldn’t get some things right, like slavery. Because they wouldn’t have been able to get universal agreement, and the country would have never gotten off the ground.

But they framed the government – the Constitution – in a way that allowed the People to change it to fit their view of how things should be.

They set the bar high when they did this. It takes wide agreement to meet the requirements of amending the Constitution. A two-thirds agreement in both House and Senate, and that’s just to propose one. Then it needs to pass the legislature of three-fourths of the states. That’s thirty-eight out of fifty. A high bar.

Seventeen times since the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments)was adopted, the People met that bar and changed the Constitution. One of those times was to repeal an earlier amendment, so we know that even if we somehow make a bad choice, we can come back and fix it.

This is the power of the People.

We started this country with an original sin. And we had to fight a war with each other over that. But when we were done we changed the Constitution to reflect our achieved wisdom. We are better as a People because we recognized our error and we made it right. This is great for all of us.

So yes, we should have a holiday to remind us of our national greatness in this matter. We should be happy that slavery ended and all of the People are free. We should not ignore this date and just move on as if slavery didn’t happen. We should celebrate it, because it isn’t just a day when black Americans were all finally free. It is a day when America finally ended a bad deal, and turned our attention to working together for a better country.

(Shinrin-Yoku)

Shinrin-Yoku, which in English you’ll hear called Forest Bathing, is a practice of immersion in nature, and in particular in the forest. As one can see from the name, the term originated in Japan where the practice is a part of the culture.

Studies have shown actual physical benefits from forest bathing beyond the exercise of walking, and beyond the mental benefits and enjoyment of nature. Forest bathing has been shown to lower stress, boost the immune system, lower heart rate and blood pressure, and help one sleep better.

There is a park near my home where the township has recently blazed a series of trails around a couple of ponds, one of which is generously called Grass Lake. The park is still expanding (which I am helping with as a volunteer), and is open to hiking, biking, and trail running, as well as snow-shoeing and cross-country skiing during the winter.

No motor vehicles are allowed, and pets must be kept on a leash and cleaned up after.

There is good wildlife viewing, with a pair of Sandhill cranes making their seasonal home there, along with various other fauna, such as geese, ducks, wild turkey, various songbirds, deer, small mammals, several species of turtle and snakes, and numerous insect species. At least a handful of these different creatures are protected or endangered.

The flora is fairly diverse as well, with a secondary growth temperate forest with a mix of  deciduous and conifer trees. White Pine (the state tree of Michigan), as well as Red Pine, Red and White Oak, Beech, and others are well developed.

The entire upper-half of lower Michigan (and other areas) was extensively logged during the second half of the 19th century and the first decades of the twentieth century. Though many types of trees were cut, it was the dominant White Pine that was the lumberman’s target. The White Pine was tall, strong, and straight, and cut into dimensional lumber easily. It was this wood that built many cities in America, and rebuilt Chicago after the great fire of 1871.

The lumbermen who came after mid-century, found an “inexhaustible” supply of White Pine, which only took them approximately sixty years to exhaust.

This particular part of Michigan was cleared of pine during the early part of the lumbering years because it is very near White Lake, which joins Lake Michigan, and was one of the several lakes dominated by lumber mills. As the years passed, timbering moved farther and farther inland, following the White River as far as it would take them.

After they were cut, pines quickly seeded themselves and slowly began to regrow. Since the lumbering days ended in the early decades of the twentieth century, pines that had started to regrow in those early years, hadn’t yet grown large enough to be cut profitably. There are some of those of the early second growth White Pine, which are now among the tallest and oldest in the state. (Notwithstanding an area of old-growth [400+ year old] white and red pines which were withdrawn from timbering by the widow of a lumberman, who donated the land as a tribute to the lumbering era. The place is Called Hartwick Pines State Park, and it lies near Grayling, Michigan. It is well worth a visit to see what Michigan looked like before the lumbering era began.)

The ponds grow and shrink from year to year, with Grass Lake earning its name when water tables are high, and splitting into marshy areas with ponds when they are low – such as this year.

The park is very close to my home, which makes it easy to get to for both volunteer trail work, as well as personal access for enjoyment. Which is what I did this past Sunday morning.

Normally I go to the trails for a combination of exercise and natural beauty. I like to look at the wildlife and enjoy the smells, but I also want the vigorous exercise I get from briskly walking. You could say that I’m picking them up and putting them down as I hike along the trails – working up a light sweat, and increasing my heart rate.

This is good to do, of course. Studies have shown that seventy-five minutes a week of light cardio exercise such as brisk walking (3-4 miles per hour) will reduce your chances of premature death by all-cause mortality by twenty-three percent. That’s pretty significant considering the sedentary lives most Americans live. Seventy-five minutes is really not so much time. Less than a half-hour three times a week. So, get out there and walk, even if it isn’t on the trail.

But this Sunday morning I didn’t walk briskly, but rather the opposite. I spent ninety minutes on a trail just over a mile long. I strolled slowly around the Grass Lake loop, stopping to view the flora and fauna along the trail, examine the spider webs near the base of trees, glistening with dew in the mild chill of Spring. Noticing the lichens growing on rocks, studying the fallen trees as they gradually decompose.

I looked (unsuccessfully) for morel mushrooms, and found (accidentally) a wild turkey egg that was laying in a cavity of a fallen tree.

I stopped to view the wild birds with the binoculars I brought with me, and took some pictures and video of the cranes as they made their haunting prehistoric calls.

This was Forest Bathing. I was immersed in nature, and I slowed down to enjoy the moment, rather than enjoying the exercise. I wasn’t focused on the walk, but on what I was walking through.

During that morning in the forest I had no thoughts about the world of men. No thoughts about politics, money, traffic, or what chores were waiting for me at home. I didn’t check off the accomplishment of exercise. I thought only of what I saw and smelled, and how the earth felt under foot.

It was remarkable how pleasant this was. It was just the slowing down that engaged the spirit of zen. For that hour and a half there was no past or future. There was only the present.

If you know about zen and have tried to experience it, you’ll know how hard it is to clear your mind and stay in the moment. You sit and breathe, paying close attention to the feeling of the air coming in and out, and you try not to let other thoughts come into your brain. This is because those other thoughts are about what has happened (and cannot be changed) and what might happen (which cannot be experienced yet), which can bring stress and worry.

Not that some time must be given to reflecting on the choices we made and actions we took; and that some planning and consideration should be directed toward what we will do in the future.

We should do these things too. But those thoughts will constantly be with us, and they will overwhelm our spirit with the pressure of regret and worry over changes and what we cannot control.

We can only live in the now. It is only when we pay close attention to the moment we are in that we find real contentment. It is when we focus only on what is happening now, what we are doing as we are doing it, that we find peace and are in harmony with the world.

Forest bathing is a shortcut to that. Don’t go for exercise all the time. Don’t look for how many miles you can cover in your allotted time. Don’t measure the success of the moment by some accomplishment of completion. Just be there, and listen and watch for what nature is doing.

The success of my forest bath along that trail wasn’t in getting ninety-minutes of exercise, nor in completing a mile and a quarter of walking, nor in taking some pictures. The success was only in being in the moment for some time, and being truly aware of what was around me. Just being without a goal. Just existing. Just living.

All individual life is temporary. And perhaps all life will one day come to an end after billions of years. Maybe Earth will be demolished to make space for a hyperspace bypass. (Tips cap to Douglas Adams.) And perhaps life will start again some billions of years after that. (If the concept of years or billions even fits in that context.)

When the tree loses a limb, or when its roots lose their grip on the earth, it falls to the earth and begins its slow decay. It will continue to be food for other fauna and flora, from rodents and insects, to lichens and fungi – with its mycelium spreading out and connecting to the rest of the forest.

So to with us, or it should be. For though our consciousness ends when our brains stop functioning, our mortal remains can be absorbed by nature, and in so doing continue to be a part of life for as long as life itself goes on.

(Image by JeffreyGammon – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=158156832_)

Individual Sandhill cranes will live for thirty or so years, but they have been around for millions of years as a species. They are one of the oldest existing bird species by a lot. When I see them flying in pairs and hearing their chilling cries echo around me, it is easy to remember that they are descendents of dinosaurs. (As are all birds, but few others conger the images of pterodactyls so effectively.)

Each crane lives only so long, but the species is older than humans by many multiples. And likewise, each of our human life spans is limited, but the species has continued for three-hundred thousand years, after evolving from other homo sapiens before that, and will go on and will continue to evolve (probably, and that is partly up to us).

We live for today and also for the species and also for life itself. We share DNA with Sandhill cranes, as we do with all life. We are part of the whole of life, and when we engage with life in close and immediate contact, we feel that connection and can see in a glimpse the stardust of our origins.

Take a bath – in a forest near you.

(All photos by me, except as credited).

First let me say that this is a rhetorical question. I don’t expect anyone except me to answer this. And I am addressing this question primarily to white Americans, though I welcome anyone to read it. And for full disclosure, I am a white descendant of Colonial era European white people, as well as later white, European immigrants. I’ve got ancestry from Germany, Denmark, France, Scotland, Ireland, England, Spain, Sweden, Italy, and probably other countries.

Barack Hussain Obama was the forty-fourth President of the United States of America, and the first President who was black – African American as we now say.

I was proud of my country when we elected him, and proud of the eight years of his Presidency. I felt our country had turned a corner, and finally put a good chunk of our racist story behind us. I expected some backlash from the racists I knew were still here, but I didn’t expect Trump to rise to power and stoke that racial hatred for political gain, at least not successfully. He did, and they were emboldened, and here we are facing a national crisis and perhaps the end of the American democratic experiment. But only part of that can be credited to racism.

Of course Barack Obama isn’t all black. His mother was white. And in the bigger picture, race is a construct based strictly on physical appearance, as all humans are one species of beings. Humans are Homo Sapiens, the last of the genus Homo, in the family Hominidae, in the order of Primates, in the class of Mammalia, in the Phylum Chordata, and belonging to the kingdom Animalia.

We are Animals. We are Primates. We descended from the same ancestors as Chimpanzees and Bonobos. But what separates us from the other Primates is identical in all humans – regardless of skin color or body shape.

Race, as we define it by color, is immaterial in every way except the social  constructs we have formed around those apparent physical attributes, and the locality of the tribes we emanated from.

But when we talk about race, the difference in skin color becomes very important to people. Should it be? I’d like to think not, but we are a long way from seeing the distinction of skin color disappear from our global consciousness.

Now back to Barack Obama. His father was black and his mother was white. Yet most of the time we refer to him as black, rather than as multi-racial, or of mixed-race. Why is that? The reason is racism.

If we call Barack Obama black because he had one black parent, we could just as easily call him white for the color of his other parent. It can’t be because his mother was the white one, as we don’t call people white if their father was white and mother was black.

The reason we do this is because his whiteness is inconsequential. It is ordinary and unremarkable. Every previous President had a white mother. But they also had a white father. What matters is that some of Obama’s ancestry is black. Half of it, which is more than enough to make him black. I say more than enough because our racial history in this country (and elsewhere) defines just about any percentage of black ancestry as black. Even “one drop” of African ancestry made a person black.

This seems absurd from any viewpoint that doesn’t have standards of racial hierarchy. The one drop rule was supposed to represent any visible trace of African ancestry, yet someone whose blackness couldn’t be seen was said to be “passing” as white. So even someone who was outwardly white, could still be looked down on if it could be shown that somewhere in their past a black person was in their gene pool. An expression I heard as a teenager when listening to some racist questioning the ancestry of some person on TV said this in a most disgusting and denigrating way. “I bet somewhere in his family’s past there was a n****r in the wood pile.”

Terms like mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon were used to describe percentages of black blood.

For racists Obama was a n****r. It wouldn’t matter to them if it was just his grandfather who was black, or even his great-grandfather. Remember, it’s the one drop rule.

And for black people it’s a point of pride. A pride that is shared by non-racist whites as well. I know I felt it. I felt pride for our country, and vicarious pride for our nation’s black population, as they were our traditional underdogs, finally getting their due and achieving visible equality.

It doesn’t matter that his mother was white, as having white people in power is the status quo, the de facto standard we established. It was his blackness that stood out, for the good or bad, depending on your own racial acceptance.

Now, and ever since Trump rose to political power, the racists have been restored and blackness is again a sin that demotes someone to a lower condition – a tertiary standard below white women, who are themselves below white men. And for these empowered racists, any black person in power or holding status is there because they are black, and not because they’ve earned their position. DEI is a bogeyman word. To the racist, it doesn’t mean the promotion of diversity, equality, and inclusion of otherwise qualified persons; it means the unfair placement of an unqualified person into a role that would otherwise belong to a white person. Barack Obama’s election to the Presidency was a call to arms for the racists. A clarion call to action. The time for them to save America for true Americans – white Americans.

We heard them disparaging DEI constantly over the last decade. I listened to a panel of triggered white men say they worried if they saw their commercial airline flight was piloted by a black person, because DEI initiatives had imposed unqualified people into the job. Never mind that the requirements to be an airline pilot didn’t change when airlines started embracing DEI within their companies. There is no black pilot who took an easier test, or needed fewer hours of flight time, or any other metric that standards established as the qualifying criteria. The racist white men were justifying their racism in a way so obvious, that they should have just pulled white hoods on over their heads.

Since the arrival of Trump 2.0 in the White House, his government has not only demanded that all sectors of government and even private industry stop DEI initiatives, they have also begun systematically erasing the history of black achievement in government. (Along with the history of numerous other marginalized minority groups.)

I don’t know how long this will last, and I don’t know if we will get past this point in history without another civil war. But I believe what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said about the arc of the moral universe being long, but bending toward justice. And I will lock arms with anyone, regardless of skin color, who wants to see that justice comes fully to our country and the world.

So, Barack Obama is considered black because that matters to us, even though it really shouldn’t; and not considered white, because that is inconsequential, even though he is that color too. And even though neither of those physical attributes should matter, we continue to define people based on this. This unimportant presence of melanin in an otherwise equal human animal.

The leap refers to people mentally crossing the gap between what we can know and what we believe without knowing. What we can reason out to be true, versus what we must believe intuitively.

All supernatural claims are leaps. In each case some assumption must be made that is outside of explanation within our natural world. Yes, we have learned that some of our explanations were wrong in the past, but we did so by finding the truth of some proposition, not by insisting we always knew the truth.
The leap isn’t an educated guess, or a hypothesis of how natural laws might explain something. The leap isn’t made by wondering if we live in a geocentric or heliocentric piece of space. The reality of our solar system arrived after observation and reason were applied. We see the sun at the center now because we figured out that it is, not by insisting that it must be.

The leap always crosses the line between knowledge and imagination. It is always imagination that creates the supernatural. The only evidence of the supernatural are claims made by those who believe in it. The only place we can find these claims are from the mouths and pens of humans. In each and every supernatural claim there is a leap made from what we can discover and infer from evidence, to what we must accept as real on faith.

None of the supernatural claims have anything but stories behind them. Not gods, not astrology, not reincarnation, none of them.

The apologist (regardless of which supernatural claim is made) has made that leap. They see no answer in nature so they insert one from without. It is a leap because we don’t know if there is anything from without – I mean from outside of nature.

The universe exists, and we continue to learn more of its depth of time and its vastness, but the universe is always within nature. Studying the universe reveals many answers, but the universe never reveals the answer to at least this one question: Why?

Whatever we discover about time and space and the cosmos around us, we never get an answer to why. On this the cosmos is mute. It is there that imagination kicks in.

The history of human existence is a history of humans being wrong about the answers to the questions that are beyond our knowledge. The lesson that should teach us is to stop making the leap from what we can know is true and what we wish were true.

When the apologist asserts their imagined truths, they are asking you to make the leap they made. But they have the disadvantage in that they presume a leap of some kind must be made. They do not understand the position of someone never taking such a leap. To the apologist there is the supernatural, and the only question is which supernatural claims feel more true.

They do not grasp the idea that if only the natural exists, then all explanations must come from nature. For each of us, the knowledge about nature and the explanations it offers can be divided between what we do understand and what we don’t. Here I use the universal “we,” as each of us cannot hope to fully understand all science, and each of us will differentiate between which parts of science we seek answers in. Collectively we have found many answers.

The thinking person makes their stop there. They don’t insert the imaginary into the natural to gain some closure for their finite mind. The thinking person can understand that we learn over time, and knowledge builds upon knowledge. The total sum of knowledge is beyond our capacity to learn, but collectively we have learned each of billions of truths over time. At no place did we stop seeking answers to that which mystified us. Except of course when people make those leaps.

The leap can be comforting. But only as long as that leap can be sustained. When a leap is discovered to be in error, the committed believer will often adapt their belief to sidestep the discovery (If it was earth’s plates moving that caused the volcano, then it was God who caused the plates to move. If thunder comes from friction in the air columns due to pressure gradients, then it was God who caused the pressure gradients. Etc, etc, etc). But this is little more than moving the goalposts. It is shifting the claim beyond the ability to falsify it.

Our curiosity compels us to seek answers. We all do this all of the time. Show me the person who never asks a question of anyone about anything. We all are learning. As we discover the answers within nature, it often conflicts with the imaginings we were raised believing.

Nature has shown the age of the earth and length of human existence to vastly exceed the thousands of years postulated by some religious groups. When this happened we saw divisions form.  There are those who recognized the frailties of putting belief before knowledge, and abandoned un-examined belief entirely; there are those who adapted their beliefs to allow them within the context of science (as exampled above); there are those who believe that science has got it wrong, and that they only view test results the way they do because they want to deny god; and there are those who refuse to believe the science, and insist that a grand conspiracy is underway and the perpetrators of science are lying in order to deter people from belief in god. That’s a heck of a leap.

To open one’s mind and abandon belief in these imaginary assertions of whatever supernatural claims are made requires no leap. It requires only the refusal to take those leaps.

This will put us in line with nature, in that nature (so far as we can tell) is not withholding its mysteries from us, nay it doesn’t consider us at all. As we are part of nature we affect nature. But nature has no conscious plan for us, no purpose for us. It has only the reaction to us in the same way we react to nature as it affects us. We are part of nature, and nature is (most probably – almost certainly) all that there is. New discoveries – that can be shown to be true – are still part of nature, regardless of what we previously knew.

We look to understand our lives, our world – all life and all existence, really. But all the prizes offered for discovery of truths are shared only among other humans in a universe beyond the scope of human importance.

Not knowing why there is anything is only frustrating to those who believe we should know the answer to that question. If there is no why (which seems most likely to me), then we can live contently in our pursuit of knowledge about the how of existence, without turning to our imagination for answers that only offer closure. The supernatural claim is an end to discovery and exploration. Once you plant that flag and declare it to be true, there is no more need to investigate the world.

What improvements to our lives have been made by such exploration and discovery? Can you imagine if the apologists were able to stifle the pursuit of knowledge in the dark ages? We might still be treating the four humors and flaying our backs with burning brands to purge demons.

But more importantly, we can turn away from belief in the imagination of others, who in each generation place new assertions on our table for consumption.*

*When acknowledging assertions of supernatural claims, we must understand the usefulness of such claims to gain power over others. Every person who claims special understanding of the supernatural is doing so to gain power or influence over others. Those who profess to only wish to save someone’s soul, only do so with dictates of how that should be done. Never do you hear them suggest that a person merely seeks out god in his own way, and in so doing save his soul. No, such offers always come with A prescription of method, and the requirement to obey the rules that they are assigning to them.

One may be so trapped in their belief that they can’t understand someone who will not make those leaps. But the path to wisdom is first recognizing that they have made such a leap. Then look for the countless leaps that have been made and later shown to be wrong. The volcano wasn’t an angry god, and the sun wasn’t pulled by a chariot.

When we recognize that our leaps have no more support than the leaps made by those who believed in Vulcan or Helios, we are on our way to understanding skepticism.

To be free is to be unbeholden to any supernatural claim. Freedom is found in understanding our limits. We are finite. We cannot (probably) comprehend the vastness of space in distance and time, but we have good reason to think the universe must comport with our shared reality.

We have good reason to reject all supernatural claims, and can be much happier rejecting them. No, this doesn’t mean there can’t be some supernatural being. I can’t know the vastness of time and space, so I can’t prove something doesn’t exist.

But why would there be such a thing? How could there be anything that isn’t part of our natural world? We can see and study thousands of years of humans assigning cause to the supernatural, and never once has such a claim held up to science – once science was developed enough to study it.

Demonic possession isn’t a thing, and bleeding people when they caught a cold wasn’t such a good choice.

At the top I mentioned using intuition as an alternative to reason. I don’t think this is a good idea. This is so evident to me, that I am surprised how many people would rather rely on intuition.

Intuition is programming. Nothing more or less.

We instinctively suckle at our mother’s breast when born, but this has been programmed in us over tremendous amounts of time. We react to some stimuli exactly as our ancestors did. The baby clings to the neck of its mother when frightened, though it never learned to do it in its short life. It learned to do it by genetic programming.

But intuition includes more than just what we carry with us genetically. It carries all the knowledge we gain as we grow, from the sound of different voices, the feel of different materials, the exposure to other people and what they do, and the incidents that happen from very early childhood, many of which we will carry no memory of to adulthood. The child learns the stove is hot from touching it, not from the instinctual awareness of generations of burnt fingers.

Some things we learn, and they become part of our intuition. This means that some of our intuition could be flawed, because it was built on false premises, or misunderstanding of circumstances.

Most people get religion from the earliest parts of their lives. Even if they don’t attend regular services, they are raised by people who have made the leap to belief, and who never knew it happened.

The knowledge we learn as babies, the deference to whatever claim your family group believes in, the near universal acceptance of supernatural intercedence in human affairs that most children are raised around; all combine to make belief in such claims automatic. This is the default position, and most people believe it at such depths, they cannot comprehend not believing.

But behind it all is nothing. Assertions turned into scripture, and scripture indoctrinated into the minds of the young. They are claims without connection to reality, and include the requirement that we take leaps.

There is only us, and we invent for ourselves whatever purpose we wish. We have purpose because we create purpose, or we accept the purpose assigned to us by someone else.

For the latter we can often thank religion. People adopting the beliefs of their parents, who had adopted those beliefs from their parents, their grandparents, and the stories attributed to their ancestors.

Any of these people can easily see the frailty of the arguments that come from customs and religions different from their own, but they cannot comprehend that they too might be indoctrinated.

But from these instincts we also learn that cooperation and empathy are beneficial to the survival of our species. So intuition isn’t bad, per se. But it is a poor means of determining truth claims. What “feels” right only reflects what you were programmed to be accustomed to. Beliefs must be questioned and examined.

Making the leap stifles curiosity. It ends discussion, and slaps on a label of permanence that must be adhered to perpetually.

We can withhold belief until such a time that good evidence can be provided. We do not know what we do not know. When our path to knowledge is blocked by lack of information, or lack of the correct tools of discovery, it is an error to assert knowledge to fill that gap.

For example, and to use an American sports analogy, I’ll offer this: If one was out for a hike in the forest – without any device to communicate with the outside world. Or perhaps sailing across an ocean, insulated from the news of the world. And this trip corresponded with, say, the Super Bowl (American football). Perhaps one might be setting up camp or fixing their position on a chart, and they begin to wonder about the outcome of that game. Assuming the outcome mattered to them, or that they had a preference to which team would win that game, they would be left only to guess, to wonder about the outcome. In this moment they would likely accept that all they could do was guess, and wait until they reached civilization or connected with the world in some manner to find out the result. They would wait until discovery of the facts could be ascertained, rather than insisting on the answer. They would be content to not know the outcome of the game until such time that the answer could be found.

In this way we demonstrate that it is possible for us to withhold belief until evidence is presented. We are not compelled to decide an answer without evidence, and would find it absurd if someone insisted they knew the answer when no possibility of discovery could be shown. And if one does guess correctly, they would be delusional to think it was anything but a guess.

It should be the same with all claims. The acceptance of a claim should be weighed against the ability to show evidence of such a claim.

If someone tells me they have a pet dog at home, I am generally safe to assume this is true based solely on their assertion. But if they tell me that this dog channels the spirit of Greta Garbo, I will withhold belief until it can be demonstrated. And that demonstration needs to clear a high bar before I would give it any credence, if ever at all. But in neither of these claims am I affected. I can assume the first is true and the second untrue without any further investigation. Neither matters to me.

Such is the nature of deistic claims. If someone says they believe in a god, I am in good shape accepting that they hold such a belief, without accepting the belief itself. Should the line be crossed where their claim begins to affect me, then I must insist on evidence, and that evidence must meet my satisfaction.

There’s a rub there, as I have no idea what evidence would satisfy such a claim.

If the supernatural can be evidenced, then it is part of the natural world, and not supernatural at all. It isn’t really magic we see on the stage, though it defies explanation within our base of knowledge. We accept the magician has completed a trick, and that he didn’t conjure something from the ether.

Apologists often fall back on personal revelation. But this is too frail an answer. All personal revelation does is express one’s acceptance of a claim – a leap.

Should some stranger present himself at your door claiming he has communicated with a god, who has instructed him to collect from you all your money, you would surely doubt such a claim. Even if you had a honed sense of deception and were satisfied that he was sincere in his belief, you would assume he was delusional. After all, any god that could give him such instructions could give those instructions directly to you.

But what if you received such a revelation?

Reason has an answer for that. If you can agree that this other man could be genuinely sincere yet deluded in his belief, then you must accept that you too could suffer from such a delusion. I would and must hold that even a personal revelation of the supernatural must be suspect, and that I should be skeptical. I am more likely to be suffering from a delusion (which we have ample evidence for in the natural world), than to be in communication with a deity (for which evidence remains non-existent).

Alas, no supernatural claim should be accepted at all, under any circumstance. As Arthur C. Clarke correctly observed, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Something we don’t understand might turn out to be true, but only through the examination of the natural world can we justify belief.

Just because we have no explanation for something, does not give us cause to assign an explanation. If we don’t know, we don’t know. We need to accept our limitations, and recognize that some questions may never be answered.

It’s in the shaker on your table next to the salt. Or maybe in a tall, wooden mill waiting to be ground onto a salad or into a dish. It is boringly commonplace, and often not even mentioned when people are listing the spices they use.  Pepper.

As everyone but me already knew, pepper (piper nigrum) is from the family piperaceae, cultivated for its fruit – the peppercorn. The fruit itself is a stone fruit (drupe) which is dark red and holds a stone with a single seed – a peppercorn.

The word pepper ultimately comes from the Sanskrit word, “pippali,” which means long pepper (not to be confused with Long Pepper, an alternative to black pepper). That the word comes from Sanskrit makes sense when we understand that pepper is native to the Malabar coast of India. And while it is grown in abundance there, the country with the largest annual production of pepper is Vietnam.

Its spiciness comes from the chemical compound piperine, which is a different kind of spiciness than capsaicin, the spice found in chili peppers.

Black pepper is the most traded spice in the world, and is ubiquitous in the diets of the western world.

That small, red peppercorn is briefly boiled, and then left to dry. The skin shrinks and wrinkles around the seed, and when dried is a whole peppercorn – just like those in your pepper mill. If you were to remove that outer shell, you’d have white pepper. White pepper is often used when making white sauces (who wants black flecks in your bechamel sauce?), though it does have a different flavor profile.

Don’t get pepper confused with long pepper, though it seems the ancient Romans did, referring to them by the same name (piper.) They can also be found in pink, green, and various shades of white and black.

But black pepper is what I am focusing on today.

Black pepper is the most commonly used spice, and its history goes back well into antiquity. Its use and cultivation is recorded more than four thousand years ago, and it’s safe to assume it predates recorded history.

Being used in some cultures and places as a medicine as well as a food spice, peppercorns were found stuffed into the nostrils of Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II as part of the mummification rituals.

As a spice it spread through the Greek world and then into the Roman world. There, its popularity exploded. In the first century BC, Roman natural historian Pliny wrote:

It is quite surprising that the use of pepper has come so much into fashion, seeing that in other substances which we use, it is sometimes their sweetness, and sometimes their appearance that has attracted our notice; whereas, pepper has nothing in it that can plead as a recommendation to either fruit or berry, its only desirable quality being a certain pungency; and yet it is for this that we import it all the way from India! Who was the first to make trial of it as an article of food? and who, I wonder, was the man that was not content to prepare himself by hunger only for the satisfying of a greedy appetite? (Wikipedia)

The cause of my writing this exploration of pepper was my pondering the same question Pliny had asked more than two millennia ago. Who first used this?

As I have noted elsewhere in the past, the harvesting of grains for human food goes back tens of thousands of years. Archaeological digs have revealed lentils and wheat residue that had been ground and cooked on a rock in the pre-pottery neolithic. Our “caveman” ancestors were eating meals that we’d recognize today. And I would be surprised if they didn’t seek various plants for seasoning and flavor enhancement.

When Pepper? I don’t know, and I doubt we can know, but the discovery of pepper and its use preceded record keeping. Maybe when writing was first developed, pepper was so ubiquitous that they forgot to write it down.

Forgetting about pepper isn’t unusual. Way back in my early days as a merchant sailor, a ship I sailed in ran out of pepper in the middle of an ocean passage. These were the white and red cans of ground pepper that are ubiquitous in just about every commercial kitchen in the world. The mess steward went to the pantry to get a fresh can to refill the table shakers, and none were to be found.

This happened because an incompetent chief steward simply copied the food provisioning order the previous steward had used, rather then actually inventorying, and pepper hadn’t been on that list. If you think pepper is boring and unimportant, climb into my head and watch the reruns of irate shipmates threatening violence upon the man, and grumbling for the rest of the passage as we passed around the one last shaker of pepper amongst the 34 of us, all the while everyone challenging any excessive use by others. (Rumors had it that the officer’s ward room had pepper, but no one wanted to face the wrath of the Captain if caught stealing any).

The most asked question during that entire voyage was, “How can you run out of pepper?”

More recently I was looking to add more greens to my diet and picked up a large bag of kale. This worked well stuffed into soups and potages, but in trying to eat it alone I arrived at steaming it until tender, and then seasoning it with salt and pepper, along with a little lemon juice. It was quite delicious. The pepper chiefly stood out, and it made me wonder about the question above: Who tried it first?

Had prehistoric humans tried to eat it like a berry? Were the first pots ever made used to boil the drupes as preparation for drying? Were they chewing the seeds while green?

What was that like the first time some ancient cook pounded the peppercorns into powder and sprinkled it on his pita sandwich?

But it is easy to picture the others trying it out. That first bite of what was formally some plain meal, like lentils and wheat berries. “MMMMM, Thag. That good flavor! Very pungent!”

Thag: “Glad you like it Dad, now can I borrow the wheel tonight?”
Drok: “Sorry, kid. The wheel won’t be invented for another thousand years.”

Whether running out of pepper or trying out new dishes, pepper is a welcome and wanted spice, even if we sometimes forget about it.

It is hard to express my concern for America in the coming years. The election of Donald Trump to a second term as President comes with enormous peril for many.

Here are some thoughts about what we can and should do:

First, we need to support those institutions, groups, and individuals who have the resources to fight this fascist agenda in the courts, in Congress, and in the public sphere. Whatever mitigation can be done in advance will be done by these groups.

Since we care about others, we need to try and protect the vulnerable. This includes maligned groups such as the LBGTQ+ communities, as well as women in general.

This also includes ethnic minorities, and immigrants – legal or otherwise.

Then we need to do what we can to mitigate the harm that will befall our economy.

Part one: Organizations that are going to fight this out in advance.

This will include Democratic members of Congress, as well as many state power structures, like those in Michigan, plus local power structures, like those in Muskegon County.

This will also include NGOs such as the American Civil Liberties Union, whose sole purpose is defending the Constitutional rights of Americans.

Next: Protecting the vulnerable.

We like to think in terms of how things should be. But we now face the reality of how things are.

There was a time in this country when the minority groups I mentioned needed to hide their nature to avoid harm. This will depend on where one lives. A gay boy in Holton is at greater risk than one in Chicago, for an extreme example.

Individuals must be prepared to hide their nature from those who would harm them for it. It isn’t right, but it is practical.

The next thing we need is unity. We need to build groups that will help others, and offer shelter for those who are threatened.

This means making safe spaces for those who are at risk, and minimizing their contact with the evil that is emboldened by this election result.

At risk individuals need to stay in groups, and those groups need to include the rest of us. We all, especially mature adults, need to make ourselves available to be around threatened groups to diminish the threat from others. Whether it is giving rides, opening spaces in our homes, or organizing community centers.

The how and where and when are details I haven’t worked out, but the idea is basic. Make it hard for bad actors to confront targeted people, by sheltering those we can, and by camouflaging where necessary. This means going back in the closet for many.

One major risk going forward is women’s rights. Especially reproductive rights. While Michigan and many other states have protected reproductive rights in their Constitutions, many other places have not. And while Donald Trump ran his campaign promising to leave it up to the states, it is probable that the Christofascist forces behind him will not be satisfied with that.

Although it will take some time, years even, to move their full agenda forward, we should expect some national abortion ban to emerge. We should also expect restrictions on access to birth control, beginning first with minors.

The most effective thing that can be done in this matter is to work to reduce the number of unintentional pregnancies. You don’t need an abortion if you don’t get pregnant.

We need to massively increase the community engagement about pregnancy, and educate women (and men) about reproduction. This must not be limited to birth control devices and medication. It must also include rejection of sexual intercourse whenever pregnancy is a possibility.

It isn’t fair, and it isn’t right, but it is the moment we are in.

On this line, efforts need to be made to educate men about the risks they face. Too many men feel they needn’t be concerned about birth control because the onus is on women to keep themselves from getting pregnant. It is time to change that.

We need to lobby our government at every appropriate level to raise the burden on men who do not take steps to avoid unintended pregnancies.

Again, I am speaking in general terms, and I do not know exactly what would be most effective and practically possible. But this may include state funded paternity tests on demand, and strict enforcement of financial obligations. Perhaps this could extend to parents of male minors.

When it comes to rape we must take an all-effort approach. We must keep women from getting into risky situations. This means women pairing and teaming up to minimize their vulnerability.

We need to use the law to reduce rape. As bad as things get, I doubt anyone is going to legalize rape. The problem that most women face in court is proving the rape itself.

Until these men come to their senses, women should not put themselves in a position where rape is possible.

Some amount of rape occurs because of excessive drinking, or because of date-rape drugs.

Women need to guard against this by changing patterns of behavior. This may mean only double dating during early stages of a relationship, and avoiding being alone and in compromising situations.

Again, this isn’t how it ought to be, merely how it is.

And then we must use technology to our advantage. This isn’t just to protect against rape, but assault of any kind.

We should look into widespread use of body cameras whenever the situation warrants. I am not well-studied on the subject, but I remember hearing about apps that automatically upload video to sites so that victims can prove their claims against abuse of authority in traffic stops. This could become common wherever needed.

Men are much less likely to force themselves on a woman, or assault a trans person or minority, if they are aware that evidence is being collected.

The group that is most likely to suffer the soonest are undocumented immigrants. There is little doubt that Trump will immediately begin arresting people who cannot prove their residency, with the goal of deportation.

This becomes complicated very quickly, and could lead to devastating consequences. To deport someone you need to prove where they originated from. The countries in question are not likely to want millions of extra people to house and feed, and may well refuse to accept them. How, for example, does Mexico know this person came from Mexico? If someone left Columbia because conditions there were intolerable, they might claim Mexico as home to avoid being sent to Columbia.

For this I will mention a dark chapter of human existence. The Holocaust.

Hitler’s early plans were to deport the European Jews. But since they were actually from Europe, no country could be found that would accept such numbers of immigrants, especially during the Great Depression. The Nazis even worked up plans to ship European Jewry to Madagascar. This would have been tantamount to genocide anyway, as those Jews wouldn’t have found infrastructure or resources to sustain them. But in the end, even this was impractical because of the numbers of ships that would be needed.

The Final Solution (death camps) was what they decided after they couldn’t make deportation work.

I don’t know that today’s dark forces would proceed to such an extreme answer, but Trump openly and publicly referred to much of our immigrant population as “vermin,” “animals,” and “criminals,” along with other horrific and dehumanizing terms, and his new border “czar” was the man who crafted the family separation policy that Trump implemented the last time he was in office.

The possibility is that millions of humans will end up in internment camps, while efforts to oust them from the country continue.

This bodes badly, and may well become the humanitarian crisis of our time.

For those who are citizens, and those who are here under the protection of immigration laws, it is time to ensure that you can prove it, and carry that proof with you at all times. As unthinkable as it was to me all my life, we’ve entered the “show me your papers” phase of American life.

I recommend getting a passport and passport card. The passport card can be used to cross the borders by land, and will definitely help replace your passport should it be lost or stolen while abroad, but what is best is that it can fit in your wallet. You can instantly prove citizenship without carrying around naturalization papers of a birth certificate.

For those who are undocumented, it may be best if you left before Trump takes office. At least it would be on your own terms, and you could avoid the horrors of an internment camp. I do not mean to treat this lightly. Nothing about this is good.

I cannot advocate that Americans shelter undocumented people. This could put you in jeopardy. Though I imagine there may be some religious institutions who can arrange some protections for them while fighting deportation. But for the time, underground railroads should be off the table.

I wrote a letter to the State Department suggesting that countries south of the border work out arrangements to take these people, along with some money and resources to house and feed them. This might be the best way to prevent massive suffering and even death. Though to be sure many will still suffer.

I also suggested that they speak to the companies who have hired these undocumented workers, and encourage them to move their plants and factories to wherever their workers are sent. After all, they are hiring them because there is a labor shortage in the states.

If you can’t move the workers to the jobs, move the jobs to where the workers are.

When it comes to workers and production, the loss of so many workers will create shortages of products, which will drive prices up. This, along with the proposed tariffs Trump is planning, will put a huge crimp on our economy. I cannot stress this enough. We will see great shortages of products, and what we get will cost us more.

The way to address this is threefold. First, we must plan to reduce our consumption, second, we must find ways of bringing down the costs of what we do need. And third, we should stockpile as much as we can to help us weather the storm that is coming.

We should all plan on gardens next year, if we can, and share the produce with others. We can set up produce-sharing networks through social media, so that the excess each of us grows can be exchanged with others for their excess.

We should develop cooperatives to buy in bulk and divide the shares.

And we should lower our general consumption.

We need to be careful about protesting. There is a strong probability that Trump will pardon the January 6 insurrectionists. They, along with paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys, Three-Percenters, and others will become Trump’s jack-booted thugs. After his inauguration, Trump will be looking for any excuse to rain violence on those who oppose him. Protests in the street, regardless of how peaceful they are, will be met with violence. That is the America the majority voted for. That is not a fight we want. At least not yet.

When it comes to force and repelling it, we should organize our own force structures. Not to project power, but merely to defend. Perhaps this can be done through the county and state authority. Perhaps it needs to be solely the creation of our own.

And lastly we must organize and work together. Strength comes in numbers, and by building community.

We have some established groups and institutions, both social and political. We need to join them and form new groups to implement the suggestions I’ve made, or perhaps better ones that are presented.

I still believe that most people want a peaceful and just society. Let’s make sure we give that a chance by meeting with people and discussing the subjects.

Abraham Lincoln famously said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

But you can keep right on fooling a lot of the people again and again if they never hear that they’ve been fooled.

We have work cut out for ourselves, and the whole world is at stake. And though none of us wanted to be in this position today, at least we are alive to do something about it.

Old Or New Republican?

I was canvassing for elections last weekend, and a man told me he was a Republican. I asked him which one, the old or new Republican?

He got quite angry at the question, and called it sarcastic, along with a lot of other words that a paper wouldn’t print, before ordering me off his driveway (I was actually in the street).
My question may have seemed cheeky, but I think it is legitimate.

Political parties change over time. That’s a fact of history. I can’t think of anything more contrasting politically, than the change from the Dixiecrats of the Jim Crow south, to the Civil Rights Democrats of today.

The Republican Party was started as an abolitionist party, founded by former Whigs who were upset by the lack of effort to find an end to chattel slavery in America. Abraham Lincoln was only their second Presidential candidate. Within a decade the Whig party was no more, and the Republican party dominated much of the country for decades.

The most progressive President of the early 20th Century was Republican Theodore Roosevelt, who broke up monopolies, busted trusts, forced industry to negotiate with striking unions, and championed the rights of working people. A Square Deal is what he called it.

I grew up with a Republican party that professed fiscal discipline, strong national defense, and an unwavering opposition to authoritarianism – particularly regarding the former Soviet Union and then authoritarian Russia under the dictator Putin.

That Republican party reached out to all groups, and sought to build a “big tent” for the variety of different people in the country.

I didn’t always agree with that party, but as I considered myself a “blue dog” Democrat, I often saw overlap with Republicans on how to move the country forward.

Trump has changed the GOP. There’s no way to dodge this reality. The traditional Republicans of old didn’t change. It was the party that moved away from them. And it moved in a dark direction.

The old GOP members are not behind the current Republicans and their candidate for President.

By numbers that seem unbelievable, traditional Republicans are denouncing Donald Trump and endorsing the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris for President.

Stalwart party members like the McCains and the Cheneys, along with many, many more, have endorsed Harris. Even most of the Republicans that served in the Cabinet of Trump during his last term are refusing to endorse him, or have made it clear he is a threat to America.

We see traditional conservative Republicans forming groups to oppose Trump and support Harris. There is the Lincoln Project, Republicans against Trump, Country First, The Bulwark, and many more, who are actively campaigning against Trump.

Even arch conservative columnist Bill Kristol has endorsed Kamala Harris.

These folks didn’t change their economics, and they didn’t change their support for a strong America that leads the free world.

They are motivated by allegiance to the Constitution, and to the democratic principles we were founded on. Our founders sought a “more perfect union,” and said so in our Constitution.

These traditional Republicans remain behind those ideals. And are concerned enough about the direction of their party to endorse and campaign for a Democratic candidate.

They see Kamala Harris’s experience as Vice President, as a Senator, as the Attorney General of the most populous state in America, and before that as District Attorney. They know Harris is tough on crime, and they know she is tough enough to stand up to the world’s dictators.

And they know that when Harris leaves office, be that after four years or eight, she won’t try to stop the peaceful transition of power like we know Donald Trump did. (I should mention that hundreds of members of Congress also failed this citizenship test, by joining his false claims of voter fraud and trying to help him steal the election).

And they can see that Trump is far too easily manipulated by Vladamir Putin. Again, this subject could support its own letter.

Economists – most of whom are fiscally conservative, are also endorsing Harris. The policies she will pursue are better by far for our economy than anything Trump has offered. And frankly he hasn’t offered much at that. Little more than sloganing and disparaging others. He spends most of his time attacking our fellow countrymen, and pretending that he is the most important man in the world.

When we see his behavior most recently, it is impossible to believe he is mentally stable at all.

His most significant accomplishment as President was a huge tax cut that mostly benefited the wealthiest people and large corporations, and he has promised to do more of that.
He mismanaged the worst pandemic we’ve seen in a century, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands more Americans than should have died.

Trump could have led the nation through that pandemic by leaning into best practices, instead of trying to force the economy to stay stable. It didn’t work, and wouldn’t work. Down in Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro tried to force the economy to stay open, but so many people got sick or died, and business collapsed anyway.

His tariff plan is preposterous, and would lead to a massive recession and drive up the cost of living. (Economics 101, folks).

Simply put, tariffs are taxes on imported goods. They are paid by the importer, and the costs are passed on to the consumer – always.

Further, he recently offered the 1890s as an example of tariffs being widely used. Comparing today to America 130 years ago is foolish without the other side of the story.

Mark Twain called that period The Gilded-Age. The extraordinary wealth accumulated by the top percent of the public, had caused massive poverty and deprivation for huge underclasses of mostly immigrants.

Those immigrants were flooding our shores, and they needed jobs to support themselves.

The Robber Barons exploited those workers in sweatshops, factories, mines, and other places, and they discouraged foreign competition by lobbying for tariffs against competition.

And since the burden of tariffs lands on consumers, the wealthiest paid little or nothing to support the country they benefited so greatly from.

Two differences are glaring. The first is that we have a manufacturing surplus and a labor shortage. There aren’t the workers to fill more jobs if those factories were built in the first place.

We need more immigrants already. And Trump is mostly against immigrants, chiefly because the bulk of those wishing to emigrate to America are non-white. And white people are doing pretty well everywhere in the world, and often better where they are now. It’s the exploited peoples of the world that are seeking the opportunities available in America.

But that process has gradually changed the demographics in the land. The melting pot that is America, is producing different shades than it had in the past.

This white-nationalism appeals to a large minority.

So Trump can’t bring massive immigration to fill the newly built factories without upsetting his cult, leading to point two:

There won’t be a consumer base to purchase these products. There will be no need to hire anyone, because the increased cost of imports will mean fewer purchases. Without an increase in earnings, higher prices means less purchasing. People have to cut back on spending to afford the increased prices on imported goods. And where they cut back is on services in their own community. They eat out less. They reduce their entertainment budget. This hurts local workers. Workers who all now have to pay more for goods because of the tariffs.

This will cause inflation, as well as a recession.

Trump has no plan to help Americans get health care, nor afford the health care they have.

After repeatedly advancing bill after bill to terminate the Affordable Care Act as President, he finally admitted during his debate with Kamala Harris that he has no plan to replace it. After almost a decade of complaining about it, he has only the “concepts of a plan.” And yet he spent years trying to end it, and leave millions of Americans without health insurance.

He has no plan to bring down the costs of insurance, or medical care, or prescription drugs.

Donald Trump used the power of his office to stop the peaceful transfer of power. Perhaps because of a weak ego, he couldn’t accept that the American People rejected another Trump term and chose to move forward with new leadership.

He beckoned his followers to come to the Capital on January 6, 2021, where he fomented unrest and anger, making numerous lies about the election he lost. And then he directed that angry mob to the US Capitol. Next he sat in the White House and watched on TV as a huge violent mob attacked the Capitol, threatened to kill members of Congress, and even to hang Vice-President Mike Pence, while Trump did nothing. He took no action for three hours, while his own Capitol was under attack.

This has been corroborated thoroughly. Numerous members of his staff and Cabinet approached him about ordering the people to stop attacking the Capitol. They asked him to make public statements directing people to go home. Instead Trump inflamed the crowd with tweets.

There was no peaceful transfer of power in America for the first time. Trump did not provide a transition team for incoming President Biden. He did not attend the inauguration. And he never acknowledged that he lost.

In fact, after the failed coup on January 6, he continued lobbying Congress and other bodies to remain in power.

When he left the Whitehouse, he stole mountains of classified information, much of which was highly sensitive, top secret information that could expose American agents to death, could give tactical advantages to adversaries, and could harm the national security of the United States.

The long and arduous efforts to get those records back has yet to result in his prosecution, and we have no assurances that all such records have been returned.

Trump kept communicating with Vladimir Putin after Trump left office. It was reported that Trump spoke personally with Putin at least seven times after he left office. And much of this time was while he had possession of those classified documents.

Trump is so deeply submissive to Putin, that many suggest that he is being blackmailed. He cannot be trusted to operate in America’s best interest, but rather only in his own interest.

When so many traditional conservatives step away from their party and endorse the opposing candidate, any sensible person should take a pause to look at why.

And they should see that following Donald Trump into the madness he offers for our future is wrong. It would be a catastrophic mistake.

Trump is a chaos agent. He has spent the last year trashing the country, and making absurd claims about the state of our nation. He’s made racist claims about other Americans, and even more about those immigrants who are coming to share the dream that has brought so many millions before them.

He refers to other humans as vermin. He says they are “poisoning the blood of our country.” This is the language of fascists.

Trump has repeatedly said that as President he will use the military to arrest his political opponents. He has said he will federalize the police (that would make us a police state) to attack Americans who protest. Don’t think he’s bluffing. As President he did order the tear-gassing of peaceful protestors in Lafayette Square so he could pose for a picture holding a Bible (upside down).

One of those with him that day on Lafayette Square was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces, General Mark Milley.  Shortly after this incident, Milley made a public statement to the press stating that he didn’t know what Trump had planned, and that it was a mistake for him to attend such an event, and that he regretted having done so.

More recently, General Milley has told reporters that Trump is a “fascist to the core.” A sentiment shared by other senior members of Trump’s Cabinet. Former Secretary of Defense General James Mattis agreed with that characterization. As did Trump’s former Chief of Staff, General John Kelly.

40 out of 44 hand-picked Cabinet members of Trump will not endorse him. This includes his own Vice-President. These are (or were then) Republicans.

So, when someone asks you whether you are with the old or new Republican party, it is a fair question.

If someone is on the Trump train, there’s little I can say. Psychologically it looks like cult behavior. It looks like they’re responding emotionally out of fear. It looks like they have stopped thinking for themselves.

I don’t know how to break through that but I sure wish I could, because we need all Americans to work together to continue on our path toward a more perfect union.

But if you think of yourself as a traditional Republican, you should join the millions of others like you, and support Harris/Walz for President. And since every Republican down ballot – right down to State Representative, are election deniers, you should recognize that your party has left you and headed down a dark path.

I don’t know if the Republican party will survive this, or if they will go the way of the Whigs. It is possible that a decade from now the Republican party will no longer be a viable political party. Or, they may save themselves by ousting the election deniers and xenophobic reactionaries. In either case, America needs those citizens to step up now, and put an end to this authoritarian nightmare.

We seem to do best in America when there are two functioning parties committed to bipartisan efforts to move the country forward. But we should not support the party of a cult leader who is bent on vengeance and retribution.

Vote Democratic like your country depends on it.