Tag: white christians

Saturday’s Theme Music – Us and Them

Ashland, southern Oregon — October 31, 2026.

Another 30-degree night. White clouds overly the blue sky, creating a hazy white and blue sky. About 50 degrees high expected, I think.

Halloween has arrived in the US. At last. Decorations have been up for a while, and a casual topic of conversation, a filler. “So, do you have any fun plans for Halloween?” “Do you get many tricker or treaters?”

We have no fun Halloween plans. Going to a Day of the Dead party, but that’s on Monday. No, we don’t get any trick or treaters, and we’ve ceased buying treats because we ended up eating them all or freezing them forever.

I chuckled as a I dressed today. I’m wearing a sweater with a black tee shirt under it. I bought the sweater before moving from California to Oregon, so that’s over 21 years ago. But I recognized the tee shirt as one of the black cotton tee shirts with a chest pocket that I wore with my battle dress uniform in the Air Force over thirty years ago. I was in special ops for a while, and they required black tees. I still have three of them. Amazing how well they held up.

Trump says we’re getting richer. Economists say, um, no.

Gosh, if we’re getting richer, as Trump claims, I wonder what’s causing the soaring personal bankruptcies this year if we’re all ‘getting richer’? And if the US as a nation, why is our national debt so high and climbing, or that the budget deficit is getting worse?

I also wonder why so many people are complaining about the high costs of food, healthcare, and just about everything else. Besides increasing personal bankruptcies, personal savings are cratering in the US, and credit card debt keeps going up. Even farmers and ranchers, beneficiaries of Trump’s attempts to buy them off, are starting to say that Trump is a disaster.

Well, the truth to Donald Trump’s assertion is in his words. When Trump says “we’re getting richer”, he doesn’t mean We the People. Trump means Donald Trump and his family and peers like the wealthiest five percent of the nation are getting richer.

For Trump, it’s always about us and them. Trump managed to con a large portion of the population into thinking he included them when he said ‘us’, but they’re starting to understand that Donald Trump is a greedy, lying narcissist who is using his position to enrich himself.

‘Starting to’ is key to that. Many Trump supporters ‘sort of kind of maybe realize’ it but support Trump despite what it does to the nation because they like his brand of greed, hate, division, faux religion, and chaos. They approve of his ‘small government model’ because it means less regulation for business and more money and opportunity for them to get wealthier! “Everyone for themselves!” is their model, echoing the Founders’ intentions.

As everyone knows, it’s all part of the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all white men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Christian God with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Getting Richer, Screwing Everyone Else, and Doing Everything to Hold onto Power.”

Every school child is taught that early in American schools, especially private, white Christian schools paid for by vouchers made possible by poor taxpayers.

For as the old maxim goes, “We are only as strong as our weakest link, so we need to break those links and replace them with links like us. For in conformity is strength.”

Today’s theme music is by Pink Floyd. “Us and Them” was part of the album, “Dark Side of the Moon”, which was released in 1973. The lyrics are perfect for the Trump era, as he’s constantly dividing the nation, world, and even his own party under terms which call out us and them.

Sample Lyrics

“Forward”, he cried from the rear
And the front rank died
The general sat and the lines on the map
Moved from side to side

Black and blue
And who knows which is which
And who is who

Up and down
And in the end
It’s only round and round, and round

“Haven’t you heard it’s a battle of words?”

The poster bearer cried
“Listen, son”, said the man with the gun
“There’s room for you inside”

They’re not gonna kill ya
So like, if you give ’em a quick short, sharp, shock, they won’t do it again
Dig it? I mean he got off lightly ’cause I would’ve given him a thrashing
I only hit him once
It was only a difference of right and wrong, innit?
But really, I mean good manners don’t cost nothing, do they, eh?

Down and out
It can’t be helped
But there’s a lot of it about

With, without
And who’ll deny
It’s what the fighting’s all about

I hope you and me, and all our friends and relatives, have very good days and comfortable nights.

Cheers

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Sunda’s Wandering Thoughts

I baked for the Independence Day festivities. I’m not usually the house baker but my wife thought I should bake as a blow against the patriarchy. So bake I did.

My baking was the modern kind: a brownie mix, egg, oil, water. Everything except the water was purchased at a store. The water came from my faucet, part of our city’s water and sewage systems.

I made circular brownies with M&Ms in a silicon baking pan created for that job. We have a gas oven with a timer and all that. I added the ingredients into a bowl per directions, preheated the oven to the temperature they told me to use, and doled the rich concoction into the waiting little cups built into the silicon ‘pan’. Then, see the timer for the time the instructions recommended, wait, watch, and test to see if they’re done, using the honored toothpick test.

The process allowed a lot of free time thinking. And that becomes my point. Baking has been around about 10,000 years. The earliest evidence of baking comes from Egypt, and not the United States. While it may have started around the Meditarranean Sea, it grew. Many peoples, cultures, and societies contributed to its growth and the lessons learned in what works. Then they passed it on. People took it up, tweaeked and refined it, documented it, and passed it on. People from many religions and ethnicities had a hand in it. Men and women, along with people of less certain genders baked, regardless of their sexual orientation, regardless of nationality or religion, until we reached this point that baking is a well-refined and understood process, simplified enough that even a neophyte like me can gather stuff and bake.

Here is my real point, something the Trump Regime and its half-assed backward, racist, sexist supporters want to dismiss. We live in a world of developments built on the shoulders of others. We’ve stacked advances and helped consolidate, perpetuate, and spread the gains. Name an industry and explore it, and amazingly, you’ll probably discover that it wasn’t all done by white Christian American men. Now the Trumpettes want to pretend that no one except white Americans did anything worthwhile, especially in the United States to deliver the success we’ve achieved as a nation, trying to bestow as much credit as possible on men and Christianity, even if they need to lie to make their case, which they do.

America First! Hell, the United States wouldn’t exist without immigration — and shall we talk to the peoples who lived in North America before the waves of explorers, settlers, and armies ‘discovered’ the land mass? America First! Our form of democratic government is derived from other nations, as is our mercantile system, which also depends on other nations for success.

Trump’s willful, deliberate ignorance won’t stand, although it will do serious damage. Progress comes from unforeseen developments as much as planned advances. We don’t know who will make a critical, game-changing insight. Trump is trying to pretend otherwise. He can successfully fake it for a while, but eventually, his willful stupidity will bite us all in the ass.

As always, time will tell when and how. Meanwhile, we grit our teeth and resist his ignorance as best as we can.

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The Play’s the Thing

My wife and I watched a fascinating and troubling film called Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy. This documentary answers those questions so many of us wrestle with about why ‘christians’ embrace and support Donald Trump.

This is about poseurs claiming to be patriots and freedom-loving Americans setting out to tear down the nation as it is and its ‘liberal institutions’. Their ideal for freedom, the pursuit of happiness, and liberty is for you to behave as they want, full stop. Democracy and the Constitution aren’t important in their minds; it is about their religion and their false ideas that the United States was founded as a christian nation. The polarization we’re experiencing is a deliberate and coordinated cultivation of wedge issues. Donald Trump is not one of them; he’s a convenient tool to advance their agenda. The two sides made a deal. He agreed to supply the SCOTUS justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, and they agreed to support and promote him as the GOP candidate.

These are cynics who will lie to support their goal of a theocratic America, users and abusers who have declared war on anyone in the U.S. who is not part of their movement. They’re indifrerent to Trump’s morals, dishonesty, rapes, lies, and criminal convictions because he’s just a tool and works fine for them and their needs.

And after you watch Bad Faith, watch the Lincoln Project ad about Donald Trump and Project 2025.

Voting in 2024 is about saving democracy in the United States. That’s not just a slogan. A war is beng waged against democracy in the U.S. and Donald Trump is the tool we always suspected. We just didn’t realize how deeply organized and cynical the machinery behind him is.

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