Midlife Meditation

She was running for President because "that's what girls do." Ah, Elizabeth. We treated you so poorly. By "we," I mean America, a country that uses a complex algorithm that skews rural, white, and male to choose who will run for, and become, president. It's not always skewed in that direction, though, as Elizabeth Warren has learned the hard way. The 2020 Democratic primary has come down to a seesaw between pragmatic and idealistic voters, and neither camp chose the most articulate, nimble, talented person to lead the country away from the Trump nightmare. Black voters who are the southern backbone of the Democratic party read the signs of the times and went with Joe Biden, a tongue-tied old man with a big heart who they believed most capable of defeating Trump. Progressives, the other spine of the party, were already fixated on the steadfastness of Bernie Sanders. I'm growing tired of the sheer volume of defensive Bernie posts I'm seeing ...

Entrusting the governance of a nation to democracy is like turning a horse loose in a hospital: the best result that can be hoped for is that no one was severely injured. Reading the Constitution, it's easy to see just how skeptical the founders were of this system they'd chosen for the fledgling United States of America. They were in agreement of the principle that power should reside in the people, but they were unsure how to channel that power into governing authorities. Looking back on history, they could see that classical experiments in democracy had been limited to city states, and none of them had lasted long. For democratic government on a national scale, they had only Britain to compare themselves to, and that system's reliance on a hereditary monarchy was the very thing they had rebelled against. They'd also had several years to experiment with a weak central government, and the results had been so chaotic as to mandate a major revision of the ne...

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.--Winston Churchill They saw this coming. I've heard and read the many experts bewailing the gathering storm clouds of Constitutional crisis, wringing their hands and fretting over how the founders never imagined a populist monster like Donald Trump could become President, dragging the nation into a vortex of corruption and deceit that makes  House of Cards  look like a Disney cartoon. With the executive branch ignoring any custom, tradition, or customary practice that might impede its overarching policy of "order bad, chaos good," and hinting at the likelihood it will ignore rulings by even the Supreme Court, while simultaneously transforming the Immigration and Customs Enforcement force into a battalion of storm troopers, and constantly ginning up the racist fears of its small but rabid base, it does, in fact, appear that the founders should have built more safeguards into the Constitution t...

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”  --J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring It is a frightening thing when the real world surpasses not just science fiction, but epic fantasy. An enlightened, scandal-free Black President has been succeeded by a narcissistic misanthrope and his white nationalist allies. Power-hungry corrupt politicians are all too willing to jump on his fascistic bandwagon, just so long as it helps them realize their vision of a regulation-free, billionaire-friendly America. In Europe, interdependent globalism collapses to make way for similarly bizarre demagoguery. Meanwhile, global temperature records are broken every year. The populists are fiddling as the world burns. You could make this stuff up, but no editor would accept the ma...

By nature, I'm conservative. If you've read any of my previous 470 posts, I know exactly what you're thinking: wwwhhhaaaaatttt???? So just to be clear: I'm not talking politics here, or at least, not about any of the positions being taken by Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, or (shudder) the Twit-in-Chief. The conservatism of which I speak is fear of changing jobs--or, more specifically, fear of losing a job. My father was a Methodist minister. That meant a meager income and frequent moves--on the average, every three years--but it also meant there was never any fear that he would be jobless. Since the antiquity of the Methodist movement, its preachers have struck a bargain with the church: in exchange for serving in whatever setting the Bishop chooses, they are guaranteed appointments through retirement. This clergy tenure system kept even grossly corrupt, immoral, and incompetent ministers employed. Mind you, there was no guarantee the minister would like where h...

              This is what democracy looks like!                                           ....and so is this. It's the chant that makes you feel good just for turning out. Long before I heard marchers shouting it, I was thinking it: walking across the Burnside Bridge behind several young soon-to-be marchers who were excitedly waving their signs at all the honking cars that passed them; and at the same time, gazing south at the thousands of people streaming into Waterfront Park; the words were already in my head: "Show me what democracy looks like!" "This is what democracy looks like!" So yes, democracy definitely looks like large groups of people coming together to voice their opinion about some national issue. As I marched with those thousands, I saw a plethora of issues proclaimed on their signs: reproductive choice, an end to sexist d...

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time . --Winston Churchill We are four days away from the official beginning of the worst presidency in the history of the United States. Do I know this for a fact? Can I be absolutely certain that Donald Trump's administration will be a disaster from start to finish? That his minions will be able to sell off public education, Medicare, Social Security, the National Parks, the interstate highway system? That he will expel immigrants, close the borders, alienate China will cozying up to Russia, abandon Europe, invade Mexico, launch a nuclear attack on Iran? That he will force the American power industry to abandon alternative energy initiatives and revert to burning coal, the auto industry to m...

Unfortunately, it's actually "Yep." I thought I'd said all I needed to about how we're stuck with Donald Trump in the same way a public school teacher has no choice but to teach every student who comes through the classroom door: they're all my students, for as long as I'm at this school and they're attending it. I really thought that was a frame of reference I could apply to the unpleasantness of having this awful man become the leader of my country. Then I read that  Dylann Roof's mother had a heart attack at his trial. The name "Dylann Roof" may not immediately ring a bell, so here's a quick review: on June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel AME Church of Charleston, South Carolina, to attend a Bible study. At the end of the gathering, as the participants stood to pray, he took out a gun and killed nine of them. He did so for one simple, powerful reason: to incite a race war. All the victims were Black, an...

I don't know whether to be proud or aghast. There are many things I want to say about the Democratic Congresspersons "occupying" their own meeting chamber. This being an opinion essay, I'm going to reverse the "inverted pyramid" and start with the least important--which is, oddly enough, the issue that would be my acid test for a politician were I to be a single-issue voter: gun control. House Democrats staged this sit-in, disrupting the chamber's business and leading House Speaker Paul Ryan to take draconian, and futile, steps to stifle media coverage of the protest, in an effort to force a vote on the weakest gun control legislation yet to crash against the insurmountable reef of gun lobby influence: barring persons on the terrorist watch list from purchasing guns. Had this measure been in place, it would have done nothing to prevent any of the mass shootings that have proliferated since the Assault Weapons Ban expired. Should it ever see th...

Do a Google image search on "Bernie Sanders," and you'll get a whole lot of this: It's the quintessential Sanders, voice raised, hand up to emphasize the point he's making, hitting on the same points he's made hundreds of times in the last year about the inequities of American politics and economics. Of course, he didn't just start campaigning for these values in April 2015, when he announced he would compete with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency. He's been an activist for leftist causes since before I was born, and his message has never wavered: equal rights for all people; redistribution of wealth and power; socialism as the cure for all our nation's ills. That stubborn consistency singles Bernie out from the political class, who by and large succeed by adjusting their positions to match or at least work in sync with the shifting views of their constituents. It helps, in Bernie's case, that his entire car...

Quiz time! Who said it: "...Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And ... moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!" Well? Do you know it? And don't you dare take your eyes away from this blog to Google it. That would be cheating. Anybody guess it was Bernie Sanders? Don't be too embarrassed if you did; after all, he's built his campaign around positions that many in the United States consider extreme: breaking up big banks, making health care and a public university degree into universal entitlements, and paying for it all with redistributive taxation. And he's not shy about using extreme rhetoric. Here's something he actually said:  "We need a political revolution of millions of people in this country who are prepared to say 'enough is enough'!" Anybody guess Donald Trump? He certainly has said some extreme things, all of them related to defending America: waterboarding, targeting the families of suspe...