DEFEAT FASCISM: READ REBUKE RESIST

 How do we know when we are rich? Does it occur when we purchase that home we’ve always dreamed of, or that automobile? Does it occur when we find we have the largest bank account in the neighborhood or that our children dress the best?

Is it when we realize that we have enough? Is it when we have plenty?

Apparently not: the richest man in the world, and his billionaire sidekicks have it all but still want more.

Perhaps the more proper question is: What does it mean to be rich?

My Sainted Mother once told me that the day she felt she might not be poor all her life was the day her family acquired an electric butter churn. Don’t ask.

A dear friend, born in El Paso, Texas to an Hispanic family told me of his memories as a young child when his family shared, with three other families, a fourth of the covered bed of a farm truck as they followed the harvest across America. He gestured to a modest home smiled and said, “And look what we have now.”

Is that being rich?

A man grew up in our county with barely just enough mental capacity to hold a job, marry, and raise a family. He was quiet and friendly and folks didn’t think about him much until they needed help with a minor task, assistance in mending malfunctioning equipment, or a hand in treating livestock. they might ask him for a ride to church or to pick up groceries for them. He was just a face in the community and easy to forget until he died of cancer.

That’s when those headed to his funeral found that, although they arrived early, the church had already filled to overflowing and the nearest parking spot was a quarter of a mile away. That’s when folks remembered him and a kindness he had once done them.

Ya’ll think whatever you want, but for me that man died a richer person than Elon Musk will ever be.

DEFEAT FASCISM: READ REBUKE RESIST

 Maybe the question isn’t why 77,302.580 Americans came to believe that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are exemplary beings who should rule the country. Perhaps a more suitable question is: how?

I’m certainly not smart enough to figure it out. There were signs, though. Had I been attentive, I might have noticed. For example:

Knowledge had outrun our ability to reason. We treasure, almost above anything, our cell phones. They developed from science and stole our minds and hearts. They didn’t help most, though, better understand how we evolved from blue algae to minds that created nuclear bombs and the Jupiter Symphony in a brief galactic period of less than five billion years.

It’s as if our minds are like buildings that soar hundreds of stories into the sky but rest on no foundation of bedrock.

Today's challenge: Read

DEFEAT FASCISM: READ REBUKE RESIST

 There comes a time when being nice won’t overcome evil. That time has come. I may become physically ill if I hear another person advise me to respect the opinions of others.

-          Should I respect the opinions of members of a cult that denigrates the heroism of John McCain?

-          Should I respect the opinions of members of a cult that mocks a disabled person on national TV?

-          Should I respect the opinions of members of a cult that calls my brother and sister veterans who died for this country “suckers and losers?”

-          Should I respect the opinions of members of a cult that attacked the United States Capitol, maimed police officers, and defecated on the floors of that national symbol of America?

-          Should I respect the opinions of members of a cult that is now destroying so many aspects of what made America great with a promise, to the deluded, that it will make America great?

No, there is a tipping point at which decent America must say:

-          Please, have you no sense of decency?

-          We will move toward the enemy until all are free.

-          Those children will go to decent schools.

-          A woman will have the same freedom with her body as a man.

-          Nice won’t get it. Nazi Germany fell not from having people be nice to it but by brave men assaulting the beaches with armaments made by their brave wives, sisters, and daughters.

-          The last vestiges of slavery ended not from respect for opinions but from the bravery of young children who marched into schools amidst curses and jeers.

One of the most popular books published in America on changing opinions was How To Win Friends and Influence People written by former salesman Dale Carnegie. In it he listed some 21 ideas to avoid conflict, from “Don’t criticize condemn or complain” to “Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view.” His readers have a attested to their efficacy for nearly 100 years.

It was long whispered, however, among the campfires of the faithful, that even Dale Carnegie sometimes joked that he might have included a final chapter that read: “When all else fails.”

The time has come to rebuke the acts of the unrighteous. To hell with being nice.

DEFEAT FASCISM: READ REBUKE RESIST

 Hope evades us in these times. Where do we find inspiration when the forces of darkness rule every turret?

Perhaps from sources near us.

How about our brothers and sisters of color? They have survived over 400 years of persecution. On that path, they excelled in every field in which they were allowed to participate. Take sports, for example. Their excellence now forces us to place an asterisk beside the name of any white star who didn’t face athletes of color.

Their music formed the basis of many of our prevalent styles of popular entertainment.

The literature they managed to leave floats like sparkles of gems on a sea of mediocrity.

They flew, sailed, and fought heroically for a nation that despised and abused them.

After the trench warfare of WWI, the invasion at Normandy, the Chosin Reservoir, and the Ia Drang valley, they weren't allowed to vote when they came home.

They excelled in countless important achievements in America history for which they received no credit.

To teach youth about the acknowledgement of their many contributions is against the law in my state and forbidden in more and more instances at the federal level.

Their descendants today have grandparents who weren’t allowed to sit in the ground floor of a movie theater or enter the front door of a restaurant.

Ad nauseum.

Yet they have survived. As the darkness descends upon us, let us ask them how.

DEFEAT FASCISM: READ REBUKE RESIST

 America needs some heroes. These days remind one of an old western movie. You know, the one where the bad guy has no moral restraint and holds his pistol to the heroine’s head. Despite the potential consequences, the hero drops his gun and yields. Righteous heroes, the ones bound by morality, do that.

Justice comes nonetheless. Sometimes through what the ancients called a “deus ex machina,”  literally “a god from a machine,” or an unexpected solution to a problem or a contrived ending to a story.

-          The hero’s Quaker wife, who has lived a live free of violence and has never held a gun, shoots one of the bastards from afar.

-          The gun misfires.

-          A distant sidekick solves the dilemma.

-          The townsfolk converge to convince the terrorist of his doubtful future.

America stands on threshold of disaster now. The fascists who have pushed her to the edge have no moral compunction whatsoever against pushing her into oblivion. Their long-range plans lie far beyond the borders of a single country.

Those who would defend Democracy, only slightly less in number, stand paralyzed by their opponents’ lack of morality-based restraint.

There will not be a deus ex machina described in the history of our nation.

We need some good guys.

DEFEAT FASCISM: READ REBUKE RESIST

 Presidents Day. America has benefited from some great presidents. She has suffered, and now suffers, from some stinkers.

We attribute great events to great individuals such as presidents. Some thinkers, however, like Leo Tolstoy, didn’t subscribe to what was known in his day as, “The Great Man Theory.” Rather than the actions of one person shaping history, he attributed events to the combined action of hundreds of thousands of individuals.

Let’s look at perhaps our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln. During his term of involvement, the union was saved and slavery, one of the darkest spots in America, ended. He receives much of the credit. But what else happened that may have influenced, at least to some degree, these admirable things?

-          An obscure woman wrote a book called “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

-          Another obscure woman taught us the value of freedom by her work in the Underground Railroad.

-          A group of elderly men sitting on the United States Supreme Court ruled that American people of African descent enjoyed no benefits of citizenship.

-          Thousands of property owners in the American South performed such mendacious deeds on fellow human beings as to arouse the indignation of the righteous.

-          Over two million American men, for that many different reasons, donned the uniform of the United States of America to defeat insurrection and save the Union.

-          Thousands of leaders in Europe and elsewhere declined to support a group of rebels waging war against their mother country in order to preserve the institution of slavery.

And so it goes. Where does greatness lie?

Within each of us, that’s where.

DEFEAT FASCISM: READ REBUKE RESIST

 Useful idiots abound these days, unfortunately on both sides of the political spectrum. It is a term that originated with Russians Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, mega-madmen who raised mass genocide in the pursuit of power to a level not to be matched until Pot Pol arrived on the scene in Cambodia. It refers to those who help maintain power but aren’t part of the inner circle of actors.

A more apt descriptor might be “useful idiot” for we cannot assume these folks are stupid. Rather, they are sometimes quite intelligent enablers who do not consider the harmful effects of a given cause, political or otherwise. They attribute to a given cause its positive effects. They ignore the harmful, even disastrous effects.

The tragic aspect is that they exist on both extremities of rational behavior and can join hands to place pure evil into power.

On the far right, useful fools pursue the eradication of a women’s choice for abortion to the extent of supporting laws that subject a 12-year-old to the bearing of a rapist’s child.

On the far left, they respond to the actions of a renegade police officer by supporting the demolition of entire commercial areas of a city by mobs screaming, “Defund the police.”

Sadly, we have reached a point in our approach to universal problems such as inadequate health care, lack of housing, crime, and poverty that we now cling to the far margins of rational thought.

Imagine the process of addressing of cognitive thought to solving a problem.  Our workspace is a long spectrum of analysis allowing for major complexities. Take the issue of immigration, for example.

On one far end the useful idiots scream “open borders.”

On the other far end the useful idiots scream “concentration camps, walls, and machine gun nests.”

Any person advocating an approach lying somewhere in between based on logical thinking and compromises encounters vicious, sometimes career-ending attacks on their personal and professional stature. Moving even beyond the strictures of Mafia doctrine, even family members and friends lie within the field of fire.

Fascists love the strife and opportunity caused by this dialectic.

It has placed America in her current condition of impending doom and will get worse as we end progressive education and replace it with indoctrination based on loyalty to the forces in power (FOP).