Are You Outraged?

Someone else wrote a blog titled, “Are You Outraged?” And I thought, am I outraged?

Let’s see. I was born in 1956, eleven years after WW II, but while the conflict in Korea was happening, and as the U.S. was getting drawn into Vietnam.

The Cold War was going strong. The U.S. and U.S.S.R. were ready to launch nukes and drop nukes at the slightest provocation.

1960 began strong, with John F. Kennedy getting elected. He promised to put a man on the moon. Meanwhile, protests and riots began. The 1960s were full of blood and smoke. Kennedy was assassinated; so was his brother. And Martin Luther King, Jr. Many blacks were lynched and murdered. Battles were fought over segregation, “Separate but equal”, and desegregation.

As races fought for equality, so did women, but the Equal Rights Amendment stalled.

The arms race sucked up resources and attention. Korean and Vietnam were ‘ended’ as conflicts, but more conflicts sprang up. War has not ceased in my lifetime, despite the fall of the U.S.S.R. Instead, it’s intensified.

As has the battle for equal rights and the ideal that skin color, sexual orientation, religious preferences, and genders should not matter, that we, as a nation, are only as strong as the weakest among us, so we must protect them.

The battle for the environment has intensified, too, and with it, the understanding that this is one world, and once again, in order to survive, we must survive together, and protect our planet, or we may all suffer, and many of us will perish, bringing our civilization to our knees.

These seem like self-evident truths, but instead, another war has arisen, this one about what constitutes truths, facts, science, and evidence. The way that numbers and words are spun to create division and distraction spins my head.

Am I outraged? Fucking yes. After a lifetime of this, I thought we’d be further advanced. But as I watch the police brutality and government response to the murders and protests, echoes of history reverberate. I’m reminded of the tanks in Hungary in 1956 as the Soviet Union crushed an uprising.

I’m reminded of the Watts riots.

I’m reminded of Tienanmen Square in 1989.

I’m reminded of the Berlin Wall.

I’m reminded of Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, and Detroit, Michigan.

I’m reminded of the American Civil War.

I’m reminded of the rise of Solidarity in Poland.

I’m reminded of Ferguson.

I’m reminded of the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

I’m reminded of Kent State in 1970.

I’m reminded of countless sit-ins and marches against war and for peace, against injustice and for equality.

I’m reminded of so many events that I’ve seen and read of in the narrow focus of my short life, and I’m reminded of so many who live in fear and suffer at the hands of those who are supposed to serve and protect.

Am I outraged?

I watch the news, play the viral videos, and read the articles this week and wonder why so many fight against others’ equality. I wonder how so many can be so cruel to fellow humans. The outright cruelty and disregard demonstrated as police officers spray, beat, shoot, and mistreat their fellow citizens, their fellow humans, horrifies me.

Am I outraged?

I am sickened. I am saddened. I am furious.

Yes, I am outraged.

June 5, 2020 1

Wednesday’s Theme Music

Back to life for today’s music.

Reading, hearing, and thinking about many black people’s comments yesterday and this morning, I realize (again, sadly) how often they live in tension and fear.

Yet, so many whites do as well – as witnessed by them recorded on videos calling police on blacks just because they’re black.

Blacks have a foundation for their fears; we’ve seen too many videos of police applying unnecessary force and violence on black people, or white people getting away with violence against black people, because, white…black.

As we watch and protest, counter-protest, or hold our breaths and wait, I thought about people and praying, and stumbled into Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On A Prayer” (1986). The song is about a couple who have nothing but each other, who are hoping to make it together. As noted many times, the song was written during the Reagan era as trickle-down economics were touted. As we know, trickle-down is a bullshit theory that enables the wealthy to get wealthier and provides a cop-out to others, permitting them to issue tax cuts to the wealthy without remorse. (Yeah, and it certainly worked during the coronaivirus in America, as the wealthier managed to increase their wealth while a huge swath of Americans struggle between buying food or paying rent/house payments.)

Anyway…

Seems like, with high-unemployment, a corrupt Republican administration, continuing police brutality and militarization, protests, looting, riots, and then natural disasters AND the novel coronavirus, many in the United States are living on a prayer.

And that’s why it’s today’s theme music.

June 3, 2020 0

The Dream Whisperer

It was late November in 2015, just a few days after Thanksgiving. Prompted by a dream, he sat and write. It seemed so outlandish and shocking, he shared it with nobody.

His dream said that Donald Trump would be the President of the United States. At that point, many were laughing at him and his crude, ridiculous bombastic declarations as he demanded President Obama’s birth certificate, and lied. It seemed impossible that he would be POTUS, but the dream whisperer said, “It’s gonna happen.”

In 2020, an epidemic would sweep the world, the dream whisperer said, forcing people to wear masks and stay inside their homes; businesses would shut down. “It’s gonna happen,” the dream whisperer insisted, continuing, that some, driven by the President Trump’s false promises, scoffing remarks, and refusal to heed the advice himself, would disbelieve and refuse to follow the science and medical advisors. The nation’s divisiveness would increase, shocking the citizens and the world.

The final nails would come from escalating violence, the dream whisperer said. As President Trump bullied, so his followers bullied. As he called for violence and to be tough and cruel, so his followers did as he said, acting under the umbrella of being Christians, while demonstrating nothing of traditional Christian principles.

So he saw in 2015, scenes in dreams that shock and dismayed him. Still, he’d written them down, mostly in amusement back then. Surely, it would never be that bad.

But one early June night in 2020, he had another dream. Driven awake, he pulled out the vision from 2015 and reviewed its contents. He’d not be able to believe it; it seemed so stunning and impossible, like a throwback to an earlier era of troubled times in the United States. Hadn’t they evolved past all of those things? Yes, he’d believed they had; that’s why the dream was so difficult to believe. Yet, here they were as a nation…

And now he had a new dream to write, one where he saw where they’d be in 2024. It seemed so different, so impossible because of where they were now —

But that’s exactly how he’d reacted in 2015.

And so, he began to write. History does repeat itself. Sometimes, some of it is good.

At least, that’s what the dream whisperer said.

June 2, 2020 0

Monday’s Theme Music

Today’s theme music is an Queen song from 1970, “Keep Yourself Alive”.

Keep yourself alive was my reflection to watching protests grow into riots as police and others escalate the situation. It’s been an ongoing mutter in my head as we deal with the novel coronavirus situation. Why practice social distancing, masking, isolation, and good hygiene? Well, to mitigate spreading the virus, to gain time to understand it, to gain time to allow our healthcare systems the chance to cope with it, and well, to keep ourselves alive until a vaccine can be found.

Thought it works well on this first day of June in the year of the riots and COVID-19.

June 1, 2020 0

Sunday’s Theme Music

Woke up this morning and after traipsing through the dreams, urged myself, come on, get up. Seize the day.

Not uncommon words. But my brain then latched on to other words, “One more time around might do it.”

I chased the threads while I did morning business, finally realizing that Soundgarden’s song, “The Day I Tried to Live” (1994), was trying to break through.

Singing, one more time around might do it
One more time around might make it
One more time around might do it
One more time around I might make it
The day I tried to live, yeah

h/t to Genius.com

How many times have I told myself, one more time might do it over different projects and efforts over my lifetime.

I don’t usually have such trouble getting out of bed. Cats generally don’t permit such self-absorbed dawdling.

I think it’s just a sign of the times.

May 31, 2020 0

Saturday’s Theme Music

Watching the riots remind me of my youth. Born in 1956 in the U.S., we had riots frequently in the sixties.

This month’s riot began when George Floyd, a black man, was apprehended by police, and died, allegedly for something involving forged documents.

Death by police officer is surely the response for such a heinous suspicion, right?

Watching police brutality in 1971, Obie Benson questioned what he was seeing. With Al Cleveland and Marvin Gaye, the thoughts were put into a song that became a Marvin Gaye hit. At that time, protesters were standing up against the Vietnam War. Police, demonstrating the restraint that we’ve come to know well from them, waded in, resulting in what became known as “Bloody Thursday”.

We’ve seen it many times; protests arise. Unless you’re white and armed (see Michigan this year), the police are gonna come hard. (Didn’t help that the POTUS (ever thoughtful and considered in his response) said, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” quoting the Miami police chief from the 1967 riots).

The government is by the people and for the people, until the people speak up against the government (unless, again, you’re armed and white in the woke United States) (witness the frequency of armed white males killers with automatic weapons being peacefully apprehended), then look out, people.

Marvin Gaye’s song says it well:

[Verse 1]
Mother, mother
There’s too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There’s far too many of you dying
You know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some loving here today, yeah

[Verse 2]
Father, father
We don’t need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some loving here today

[Chorus]
Picket lines and picket signs
Don’t punish me with brutality
Talk to me, so you can see
Oh, what’s going on
What’s going on
Yeah, what’s going on
Ah, what’s going on

h/t Genius.com.

BTW, this post was created with the new WP editor. Initial question: WTF did it need to change? Evolutionary improvements, I understand. I thought the other was an intuitive system. Now they want me to ‘insert blocks’, which include such common blocks such as ‘paragraphs’. Christ.

Their little floating block editor jumps in front of text, forcing you to navigate around it to see WTF is going on.

Grrrr.

Here is “What’s Going on”.

May 30, 2020 2

Friday’s Theme Music

Yeah, Trump retweeted the sentiment, “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.”

No matter what political party you are, learning that the nation’s President promotes such unreasoning violence and ideals contrary to the nation’s principles is, well, sickening. Is this how the country is united? Is that really the best course to promote as riots break out in cities over another black man’s death as he begged the police officer holding him down, as our nation passes one hundred six thousand deaths from the coronavirus, a time when we should be pulling together, where everyone insists, “We’re in this together?”

While I often hear screams from those on the right about how Democrats are not civil and should respect the President and treat him with courtesy, how can I — why would I? — when he’s encouraging murder against the political opposition?

So, the song by Badfinger, “No Matter What” (1970), arrives in my brain. No matter what is fused directly to getting Trump out of office; no matter what Biden does, I will vote for him, a position that I hate to take. Biden isn’t my first, second, or third choice. I grimace thinking about it, having my thought processes and principles reduced to that single point: vote Trump out. Sickening and infuriating. Biden, if elected, will probably do a decent job, but I really want to advance the nation and world past the status quo where we muddle from crises to crises, issue to issue, putting bandages on problems while rot spreads.

No matter what also comes up as I write my way through this pandemic. No matter what, I’ll write. No matter what, I’ll pursue my dreams.

No matter what, I’ll go on.

May 29, 2020 4

Thursday’s Theme Music

Yeah, reading the news, following the latest Trumpstorm (“Unfair! I’m shutting down twitter!”), and articles about states under reporting COVID-19 case numbers and deaths (in other words, let’s pretend it’s not so bad, and it’ll all be okay), and another senseless killing (George Floyd – so how was forging a check a threat to those four officers, and why did that fucker keep his knee on his neck when Floyd said, “I can’t breathe”?), with subsequent protests and rioting, while bots push the re-open buttons and people scream about rights (and mock about privilege), and we wait to see what the fuck is going to happen next, Ratt’s classic hit song, “Round and Round” (1984), plays on an endless loop:

“Round and round; what goes around, comes around, I’ll tell you why. Dig.”

Yes, definitely the theme music for today.