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Monday, September 30, 2019

FELLOW BOOMERS, OUR RECKONING IS UPON US!

This post is especially for all my fellow-Boomers so enduringly proud at calling out the sins of our elders in the days of our youth. Payback time for us is now here. It started to take shape in the wake of the Parkland shooting when students at the Stoneman Douglas High School roared, “Enough!” and started to organize for an actual state of sanity where firearms are concerned. They are still organizing to that end and this aging Boomer cannot shower enough cheers, blessings and other aid on them rapidly enough.
Then Greta Thunberg came along and, while it’s a bit early to state this for certain, at least started to put the capstone on our time to stump up for our payback!
After being (let’s be honest here; we really didn’t do much of the heavy civil-rights lifting) a minor player in that mighty struggle for equal rights, some of us were more central players when the struggle expanded (or re-incorporated, depending on historical opinion) the fight to end discrimination based on sex and, for the first time, based on sexual orientation as well. And nearly all of us except the New Victorians (many thanks, Rene) and incels who mostly hid behind hollowly religious virtuous talk, were enthusiastic participants in the Sexual Quasi-Revolution.
And many of us were honestly opposed to the war in Indochina because some of us saw whence this had come and where it could lead. But I won’t give up on brutal honesty here, so let’s admit that many opponents of that war really only wanted to save their precious skins. I’m looking straight at you, P.J.!
And some of the war’s opponents also ‘greened’ into the Earth Day/Ecology movement, now needed more than ever by all of us. Then, three years later, in the wake of the Yom Kippur war, came Energy Crisis I.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t recall that crisis giving the great push to the ‘Greens’ then that might have been expected. When I look back, I sort of wonder why not and I have to shake my head over what might be a large lost opportunity.
Mind y’all, I was only a high school senior then even if I was one of my school’s current events/political wonks. Apart from the fossil fuel companies already knowing what was going on and their part in it, I don’t know a whole lot about how much was scientifically known then that we know now. I remember Watergate was also in full swing and ol’ Milhous actually tried to take that ball and run with it! Anyone remember his speech on ‘energy independence by 1980’? Carter tried to push that program forward and was greeted mostly by Congressional snores, as I recall. At least until Energy Crisis II which came in the wake of the Iranian revolution. And there was much more ‘grab the oil!’ talk among those who would become the ‘neocons’. As a neocon and a Boomer I do blame Elliott Abrams for his part in this, not to mention a bloodthirsty trench-dodger. Bad back, Elliott? Yeah, right!
While I can’t blame the rest of us for that mess, what I can and do blame most of us for is: when, the next year, we were faced with a choice between 1) politics as usual, which Carter was not making look very good, 2) a truth-teller in the person of John Anderson who said honestly that this would be a long, possibly hard, slog but it would prove worth the effort and 3) a Grade B actor essentially selling us Dr. Feelgood’s narcotic, most of us chose the third choice. And with that choice the chance to catch climate change while it was still early on evaporated for the most part.
I will never forget my dismay when, on the night of November 4. 1980, I saw which way the country was going. A TV had been set up in what was then the main room of the Christian Association on Penn campus.
And so much for what I thought about how informed a citizenry we had. I had actually believed that we Boomers might have a longer-term view and choose a way other than the GOP’s lying promise to take us to, yea that we could all live in….Disneyland!
The current usurper of the Oval Office is (I certainly hope so, anyhow) the culmination of that lie with the added virtue (I’m serious here; bear with me) of not lying about who will be allowed to live in that Disneyland. In the end, no one is welcome there aside from straight and propertied white males and all their slaves and helpers — but only as slaves and help! And we Boomers owe that to ourselves.
I admit that part of the climate change problem is the vastness of it and the difficulty of ‘getting a handle’ on it, but I can’t get away from that, when faced with the choice between something difficult and fruitful and something which allowed our adolescence to continue, most of us opted for the latter. And now our children and, in some cases, our grandchildren, are present and telling us where and how we’ve fallen short. So be prepared for it, and let us not be ‘wise in our own eyes’, to use a Scriptural admonition.

Saturday, September 28, 2019

CHAPTER ONE

At last. An impeachment inquiry is beginning. The crucial ‘straws’ appear to be Trump’s attempt to strong-arm a phony scandal our of the Ukrainian president concerning Joe Biden, generally conducting foreign policy like a racketeer — and, perhaps, that Biden is a figure venerated among the establishment. He represents those who either actually believe (God help them!) all was well before Trump and if we can only get back there, all will be well again, or those who know that all was not well for most of us, but since they were doing so well, want those days back again.
But a possible phony scandal involving such a Respected Figure such as Biden and the blatant quality of Trump’s misfeasance seem to be the two factors which seem to have tipped the fence-sitters and Blue Dogs over the line with Speaker Pelosi leading from the rear. Some of us think that it’s the coverup that was the last straw (and to paraphrase Billy Joel, they may be right). After all, that’s what brought ol’ Milhous down. When I mull that over, it seems to me that the coverup is the maraschino on this toxic sundae, true, but I’m not sure if the sundae itself, if it was less toxic to this particular aspect of government and person long involved in it, would have had the crashing weight of the actual scandal to those who now see the need to impeach.
Make no mistake here: for the sake of any future for the rule of law, democracy and our Constitution as a living document, Trump’s impeachment is (and has been almost since day one) an absolute necessity! It must be made crystal clear that no one, not even a sitting POTUS, is ever above the law!

But the above is only chapter one. I do not expect the formerly ‘Republican’ party to purge itself of the probably (and, to me, hopefully) terminal degree to which Trump has brought corruption already long festering in that particular party.
Trump is not the bringer of corruption; he is the culmination of such corruption which is bigoted against just about anyone who is not a property-owning white, straight, nominally Christian (and, probably, the more nominal his Christianity is, the better they like it!) male with plenty of money with which to buy political slaves who offer themselves with sickening eagerness. This disease is present in the Democrats too but, praise be, nowhere near terminal as the Democrats have antigens to such corruption. They are known as progressives.
So much for the former GOP. The Executive Branch, if not the whole federal government (not to mention many a state government) will also need a thorough cleansing. And that will be up to you and I to see to. It’s our government, folks; it’s up to us to give it the cleaning-out it badly needs. That will be chapter two. Subsequent chapters will deal with the necessity of making an ‘eco-nomy’ that works for as close to everyone as we can get on this planet and for as many species as we may still have with us once the great Anthropocene extinction is over. Such a system is will be far less consumption-driven than is currently the case.
But those chapters are for another time. While we press forward with impeachment as the absolutely necessary first chapter, let’s just remember that it is only that. Other chapters must and will follow.