DEFEAT FASCISM

 It appears that people who love America are in for some rough times. A missive (Project 2025) written for a dictator in exile is now the operating manual for our country. (Yes, the similarities are devastatingly terrifying.) Will these times make us hate America the way our current leaders do? They don't have to. Let us consider other groups that have lived through hard times. There are several.

One includes our African American brothers and sisters. They descend from those who suffered the unimaginable effects of raw slavery here from 1619 until 1865, and economic slavery until now.

Do they hate America?

No, they have served honorably in every one of our wars since the one that freed them.

They have contributed to every aspect of story of America's greatness, including science, work, service, art, literature, and sports almost always without the recognition afforded their Caucasian kin.

Role models exist for us as the darkness descends. Let us draw strength from their bravery.

DREAMS

 America has forgotten how to dream. I saw something like that in a quote and it started me thinking. My thoughts: Yes we have. No we have not.

It seems to me that we have forgotten to dream of the things that make our country stronger.

We once dreamed of eliminating poverty. Lyndon Johnson tried. It may have represented a classic example of applying the right solution to the wrong problem. Perhaps the problem wasn’t poor people in poor areas. Perhaps the problem was the exploitation of poor people in almost every segment of our country since 1619.

Ronald Reagan dreamed of accommodating poverty by enabling the rich to become richer and the poor to become ashamed of being poor. More wealth was to trickle downward from the rich to the poor and obviate the need for the ones he pictured as being like his “Welfare Queen.” Wealth, falling from the sky like manna from Heaven would enable those below to free themselves from the quagmire of poverty.

It may have contained a twinge of applying the wrong solution to the right problem. It is a characteristic of the rich that that last thing on earth they want is to share in their hoard.

Our poor still wait like hungry pets for the largesse to fall their way.

Oh, we dream alright. The rich dream of a pure capitalistic society in which they face no regulations or pay any taxes.

The poor dream of not having to make a choice between food or shelter.

Many of the rest of us dream of our state’s college sports team winning a national championship.

REASON

 Binary arguments plague us these days. These are situations which offer only two opposing sides or choices, often implying that if one is true, the other must be false. A form of "either/or" thinking, it is sometimes considered a logical fallacy because it may ignore the possibility of more nuanced or complex realities.

If I am a MAGA, I can’t say that I don’t believe in abortions, but health care choices should be determined by a woman and her physician, making abortions safe and rare.

If I am a far-left progressive, I can’t say that gender dysphoria is a medical phenomenon affecting less than one percent of the population who should be loved and cared for, but that some gender-selection advocates have pushed the extremes of thought to uncomfortable levels.

If I am a MAGA, I can’t say that regulations stifle the economy, but some are necessary to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the general population.

If I am a far left progressive, I can’t say that protection of the welfare is essential, but that America has become over-regulated when we fine companies for not placing "Do not stand." warnings on the top of stepladders.

We must, as in some Biblical admonition, choose whom we will serve and how we will serve them, never in the lukewarm, or rational, middle, but hot or cold.

 Increasingly, we don’t seek to serve the vast general public.

Increasingly, we avoid reason to guide our thinking.

Increasingly, we approach life from the extremes of thought.

That’s how we have ended up where we are.

YOUTH

 Sometimes I miss the America we are discarding.

Next door to our country grocery in south Arkansas was the shop of a man (long deceased) who did body work on cars. Each day, he would wander in when the delivery man for a local bakery and selected others showed up. They would gather around on nail kegs in the back of the store and solve the world's problems. The gatherings were genial, and what one might expect from a disparate group of southern rednecks.

Some were veterans of WWII. All were survivors of a devastating tornado in 1947 that killed 32 people in the community. All, to a man, were yellow-dog FDR Democrats.

Sometimes during deer season, they would all bring ingredients and cook a "Mulligan's Stew" on the old wood-burning stove. A FB friend is the daughter of the man mentioned above. She was a young girl, quite pretty as I remember, at the time. She says they used to tell her that the stew wasn't complete unless it contained an old sock.

What I remember, since our kitchen connected with the store, was when my mother would notice that the conversation had suddenly gotten very low. She would lay an iron aside, look at me and say, "They're telling jokes in there now, ain't they?"

I don't think things like that go on at the local Walmart.

DEFEAT FASCISM

 A sad misconception these days is that there is a "depravity bottom." There isn't. When Donald Trump ridiculed a disabled reporter on national news, and his base expressed no concern, the word went out.

"We can get away with anything."

Later days proved it was true. The filth. The lies. The deaths from Covid 19. The felony convictions. Nothing moved the needle.

Now we see folks still in hopes that, somehow, he will perform a deed of such baseness that the ground will swell and burst beneath him. A "tipping point" will occur.

Ain't gonna happen.

There is no bottom.

"But the Epstein files," you say.

Truth is, if the Epstein files, once opened, contained a verified video of him abusing a 12-year-old while she screamed for her daddy, would he lose one vote from his extreme right-wing evangelical base? Would one Fox entertainment pundit suddenly have a "John Newton Moment?" Would one ultra-rich supporter cease donating? Would one right-wing think tank alter course. Would one hate-pod influencer shut up?

Sadly, possibly not.

He is their "flawed messenger," the one who brings them power and torments the ones they hate. The ends they seek justify the means he uses. Fear, hate, and greed sell better than grace, compassion, or good government.

We are stuck with him. Nations, like people, choose poorly at times.

DEFEAT FASCISM

One observer of the American experience believed that the “… the main reason for the quiet sway of religion over [America] was the complete separation of church and state.” This was Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1800s.

A modern writer believes that the current instability of our government derives from the meddling of a powerful religious cult—right wing evangelicals—into politics. This author, Tim Alberta, examines the cult thoroughly in “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism."

The book details the movement of vast numbers of so-called “Christians” who moved their emphasis from spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ to spreading the power of a political party. It was not the Democratic Party.

No, in fact Alberta points out that one of the results of the right-wing evangelicals was to make the Galilean the “mascot of the Republican Party.’

Another delicious observation rests on how the cult achieved “The Christianization of Donald Trump.”

That was the trick of all political tricks. It rested on the mythology of “the flawed messenger.” They are quick to use King David as an example citing that even though he sent his best friend to die in battle because he, King David, could hook up with his friend’s wife, he nonetheless became a famous religious icon.

We should overlook the flaws of one who achieves  the goals that we seek.

Oh, so that would apply to President Bill Clinton as well, considering his dalliance in office while balancing the national budget and reducing the national debt.

“Oh no,” the evangelicals cry,” the flawed messenger” tribute only applies to Donald Trump among our presidents. Others can go to hell.

This is not the first book written about “the scorched-earth spirituality” of modern evangelicals. What makes it different is that the author is, himself, a born again evangelical. He mourns about what the right wingers have done to his church, crediting them with doing more than any group in making some Americans distrust Christianity and others despise it.

America is not the only institution in danger these days.

DEFEAT FASCISM

 If you aren’t concerned about the future of America right now you aren’t paying attention. You have to remember the Reichstag fire on Monday, 27 February 1933, precisely four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Some say a Communist set the fire. Some say the Gestapo set it.

It really doesn’t matter.

What matters how the Nazis benefitted from it. The day after the fire, at Hitler's request, President Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree into law. This law suspended most civil liberties in Germany, including habeas corpus, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the right of free association and public assembly, and the secrecy of the post and telephone.

The event, some say, gave birth to the horror that was Nazi Germany.

Those in power in our country now have already started initiating the suspension of civil liberties mentioned. Will we allow the event in Los Angeles to accelerate the process?

Probably. America has entered a dark phase, and the forces of darkness are out-maneuvering the righteous.

It is time to begin finding hope and comfort in the beauty of a sunset.