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To list everything going on here and everywhere that's keeping us up at night and torturing us by day would inevitably leave things out--we so depend on MSM headlines and bylines that leave out so much. But even MSM lists are long.

Climate change, wars in Ukraine and elsewhere, climate-related crises, politics here and in the UK as well as China's looming takeover of Taiwan and Biden's threats--these top the limitless list. Add to that worldwide inflation and the tanking economy here.

So I know some people who have given up on confronting these horrors daily and sworn off reading and hearing MSM. One reports massive relief. I knew a family in Vermont who escaped into the green hills from wherever and ignored MSM many years ago. The grandmother, however, would sneak into the public library and scour newspaper headlines when she could.

Another weapon I've read about is to escape into a happy event in past life or find other sources of guiltless happiness once a day. That seems to be a good idea. I escape into my work on arcane and erudite peer-reviewed scholarly publications and into films on Netflix and TCM. Also Jeopardy for half an hour a day five days a week. I am daily disappointed when it ends, however many questions I can answer. Forget it when sports or pop culture are subject categories.

The rest of my waking time is spent worrying and feeling helpless. Even when I'm exercising. I read nonfiction, so no escape there. 

All of a sudden, the future is a huge question mark where earlier it was more of a given, though world wars were grim future deniers and covid still threatens. Younger generations mostly blame the boomers, not the billionaires and warmongers.

It will take a miracle to cure the blight of climate change and constant recourse to violence to solve crises. Then we can get to other issues, like world hunger and disease. Meanwhile, we must play the blame game and hammer those at fault until the miracle happens. If only they could realize their destructiveness and care about it. They can go far toward reversing it. 

Some say it's too late--climate change has already exceeded the tipping point. Xi says US, get out of our way into Taiwan, peaceful until it turns bloody. Russia won't turn back.

Imagine peace. Imagine a world with a shining future, a sunrise our youth walk into.

Ralph Nader
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"The GOP is about dread, anxiety, and fear.... [It is] messianic and driven."--Ralph Nader

There are few things more dreaded by elections experts than close elections, and these are expected as votes are cast for the 2022 midterm elections"four Senate seats and 28 House seats are rated by Politico as toss-ups. Alan Minsky of PDA specified that swing districts that will decide the election encompass 50-70 House seats in nine states. Poll findings deliver mixed predictions. Politico expects that voters will choose more Democratic than Republican governors, however. 

On September 18, the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) hosted a forum featuring the renowned outspoken environmentalist and progressive Ralph Nader along with his long-time ally Mark Green, a progressive activist attorney who was New York City's first Public Advocate from 1993 to 2001. 

Moderated by PDA leaders Mike Fox and Alan Minsky, the forum's focus was optimistic. In the fifty days remaining before Election Day 2022, plenty can be done to win Democratic victories across the board. Nader and Green based their presentations on their new webpage https://winningamerica.net, unprecedented outreach endorsed by Sen. Ed Markey and Representatives Hakeem Jeffries, Jim McGovern, Jamie Raskin, Carolyn Maloney, John Larson and Peter DeFazio, among others. The featured report/volume, Crushing the GOP, 2022, aims "to counter the early conventional wisdom that there was no way to stop a red wave in the 2022 due to inflation and the midterms jinx for the presidential party." The Democratic candidates must be made aware of ways to surge ahead in the coming election. Articles written by 24 leading experts focus on the economy, health care, crime and corruption, national security, and children, "Trump vs. Democracy," "War of the Words," race, class, and democracy, winning language on climate violence, and GOTV. 

Every election looks like the most important in history when it occurs but, said Green, the upcoming midterm is the most important offyear election since 1862 [and of course 1860] in that it could "overturn the collective values and assumptions of our constitutional democracy." For this reason, he and Nader, outspoken progressives, have turned to the more mainstream Democratic Party to uphold these principles. They also stress the many goals that most Americans share, regardless of party affiliation.

Inflation is highest since the Carter years, due to disruptions in the vital supply chain, the pandemic, Putin's war, and corporate market power. One problem is that a substantial percentage of the public, "five-minute voters," are unaware of the issues involved for many reasons ("vote with their gut, not their head"). Fully 120 million qualified voters haven't even registered. The GOP has been skilled in recruiting some of their own among this category back to the polls or even to the polls for the first time.

The Republicans are masterful at extremely catchy slogans--loaded words and phrases like "woke," "critical race theory," and "cancel," all of which Green dismissed as empty and without substance, but "a winning phrase can break through" and has led to stunning successes. "Their goal is to demonize Democrats and immigrants and make sure voters think about their enemies rather than their families." Democrats need to catch up with such effective outreach.

There is much that the people on both sides agree about, believe it or not in these troubled times, including safety for our children in cars and elsewhere, raising the minimum wage, cracking down on corporate crime, and "government-guaranteed socialism," which includes of course social security and medicare, as opposed to corporate socialism, Nader later added. "We all bleed the same color." There's far more uniting people than dividing them. The appeal is universal.

Our public is scandal fatigued, said Green; violence is now a weapon of the far right ("dangerous extremists") far more than the left--only one side tried to overthrow our government on January 6, 2021. 

"We can capture the people who want to be mainstream rather than extreme." Democrats must win over 5 to 10 percent of "soft" Republicans or 5 to 10 percent of Independents to add to Biden's seven million-vote margin and victory in the House.

The biggest problem now is civic groups' exclusion from campaigns, with candidates too involved in politics and with the media, said Nader, next to present. Democratic ads and campaigns are "dull and repetitive," and "campaigns are tired." They turn people off and actually boomerang. Nader suggested that PDA break through into campaigns and not just be an adjunct. It's so hard to get through--"you can because you're half inside and half outside." With the Winning America guidelines, they can get through to all the communities and "arouse, energize, and connect" with the voters. 

"Why haven't the Democrats landslided?!" "We have by far the best policies and the worst GOP in history." We're proposing new ways and old ways of getting through to more voters. "The Republicans run on vague values because they can't run on their record." 

A list of "Twelve Kentucky Values" favored by a majority in that state was found to be unaddressed by Mitch McConnell. Moreover, midnight-shift workers feel excluded. They must be reached. You have a midnight campaign to celebrate their indispensable contributions to society: firefighters, EMTs, retail workers. This sort of activism appeals to the press. Other outreach must extend to low-turnout Democratic districts, who can be offered free food at the polls once they have voted. Two-sided, inexpensive cards distributed to voters can contrast the two major parties' positions on bread and butter issues. They must be very accurate and reach a large number of voters. The people persuade themselves, unlike the "five-minute voters" ("He's a nice guy"; "I like the way he talks about the flag"). The positive blue values contrasted with the negative GOP ones paint the GOP as a party of "dread, anxiety, and fear." The people must understand this--"they are ignored on inscrutable billing, turned down on health care; it's a nightmare constantly."

You must publicize the voting records in Congress. Senator Rick Scott's (R-FL, head of the reelection committee for the Republican senators) Rescue America program is so radical that Mitch McConnell was horrified and shuns any association with it. One part of it "sunsets all federal legislation for five years, including social security, medicare, OSHA, consumer protection, FDA," on and on. "But don't worry. Congress can just re-extend them." The press must reify this, must be very specific. 

Said Nader, language is of great importance in Crushing the GOP. Never say "white collar crime"; say "corporate crime." The GOP prefers "corporate power" over "workers," "taxpayers," "consumers," "patients," and "big agribusiness" against the farmers.

One thing that actually resonates is that taxpayer money goes toward sports arenas the people build and the corporations cash in on. Naming rights are sold to other corporations rather than granted to the people. Taxpayer money should instead go toward playgrounds and recreation facilities in neighborhoods. 

"Start asking opinions. Have worker gatherings. Have them tell you what their work life is like, what their economic deprivation is like. They're desperate to have a voice" and not just shake hands--both liberal and conservative workers. We must reach the Reagan Democrats who shifted to voting Republican. Give workers lawn signs and buttons--the Republicans are way ahead of us here. These are symbols.

People are still saying that they don't know what the Democratic Party stands for, and they are leaning liberals. Rural voters must be reached. Art Cullen, a rural newspaper man from Stormlake, Iowa, has written about why rural voters are turned off by Democrats and how to get them back. 

These things can be done fast, in the next 50 days. Republicans phoned leaning Republicans unlikely to vote and gained large numbers of votes. 

Why does the right wing have more energy than Democrats? They're messianic, driven. They tell their leaders what to do. They got rid of Boehner. You must up the energy level of potential Democratic voters.

In Winning America, there's a focus on beating back the phony charges from the GOP: critical race theory, defunding the police, the crime thing, they don't like community policing. They control the initiative and put the Democrats on the defensive. They're soft on corporate crime. "Grab the offensive immediately!" There is focus on a too few issues. Stacey Abrams is focused on abortion rather than expanding more broadly into freedom for women. "If you have 12 arrows in your quiver you don't use just three of them.... She needs to broaden her progressive economic agenda."

"The Republicans are anti-children in so many ways": They repealed the regulation of pesticide that was extremely toxic to children. It was about to be controlled. They're against daycare, paid family leave, all the Western country social safety nets. They've abducted the children into the internet gulag with all kinds of violence and violent games. They're pumping all kinds of fat, salt, and sugar to increase obesity epidemics and youthful diabetes and high blood pressure. "The Democrats are too piecemeal." There should be an umbrella focus on protecting our children, who are our future, our posterity. Talking about left-right issues. Parents are losing control over their children because of the internet, separating them from their families, nature. My sister's book You Are Your Own Best Children addresses children nine to twelve. A huge issue. That's where you want to hit. Both sides want the same things for their families: decent public transit, highways, bridges repaired, public schools that aren't broken down. All the money is going to empires abroad. Bring it back home. Our taxes should be used for us, not for corporate welfare, bailouts, handouts....

Nader called pollution "deadly violence." The environmental justice movement describing this must become more muscular. The worst pollution occurs where poor people live. Fully half of the population is poor or extremely poor, he said. Then there are people who are barely making it. You must connect these issues. They affect all the people.

"Democrats are at an advantage.... They must move fast with their eyes, ears, hearts, and minds." In the swing states particularly. "We are fighting for our lives."

(Note to readers: This is a review; the previous blog entry was a preview.--Ed.)

One aspect of Greg Palast's latest harrowing investigation, as executive producer Martin Sheen says, is horror. This is a horror movie, replete with unfathomable corruption and the ghosts of hideous violence.

It is a dire tragedy--opening on the heels of Stacey Abrams' failed lawsuit to prove the lawless corruption of many electoral practices in Georgia, including the scrubbing of registration rolls that handed the 2018 gubernatorial race to Brian Kemp.

Another aspect of Vigilante is heartbreak: of the senseless repression of hundreds of thousands of innocent voters caught attempting to vote while black. Individual victims are interviewed crying over the abuse of their rights, including a first cousin of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., 96-year-old Christine Jordan, and Major Gamaliel Turner, this country's leading expert on warfare of the future. While he was stationed in California serving this country, he applied for an absentee ballot. When he didn't receive it, he contacted the registrar's office and was told that his vote had been challenged. He had to make the inquiry. No one told him. Once a Georgia vote is challenged, subjects must prove their qualifications, often residency, even if they've lived and voted in the same place for years. Turner was able to regain his rights. But the same thing is happening to countless others in Georgia who won't be told unless they ask about it. They must be warned. They stand to lose their votes--250,000 of them have already been challenged. To find out if you've been challenged, go to SaveMyVote2022.org.

Georgia history is a leitmotif in Vigilante. In one example, an armed Georgian militia in Civil War regalia is showcased early in the film. They proudly wave Confederate flags and their new solid white "secession" flag with a large red star in the center--red the color of Republicans or blood or both?

And red is the bright color of the dress sported by another corrupt interviewee, Pamela Reardon, her comfy home protected at the front door with an assault weapon. This ambitious GOP operative is convinced that election 2020 in her Peachtree state was stolen from Trump. Nonresident votes kept him from winning, she says. She alone has challenged more than thirty-three thousand voters, though she claims only to have sent out "letters" (caging postcards?) requesting proof of address. Challenged herself on this point, she loudly throws Palast out, swearing as he leaves, most unbecoming to a southern lady. He thanks her.

But the star of the film, if not the oppressed victims of repression time and again, If not Palast, is the vigilante, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who campaigned initially on his humble background and professed wish to integrate school--both lies. Palast traces his lineage back to the first importers of African slaves into Georgia before the Revolution. Get this: slavery was against the law in Georgia even then. Farmers objected to this atrocity in vain.

More recently, Kemp is the scion of a thriving construction corporation, owners of myriad acres of wooded land now a source of toilet paper pulp for Koch Industries among others.

We are treated to a brief tour of one of the plantation manor homes of Kemp's forebears. They'd smile with pride, though challenging voters originated with Gene Talmadge, a Ku Klux Klanner elected as governor of Georgia in 1945. 

Kemp revived this practice with the passage of SB202 in the immediate wake of the Georgia Miracle in January 2020 that swept a black minister and Jewish filmmaker into the Senate, giving the majority to Democrats.

Kemp's SB202 not only allows any Georgian to challenge an unlimited number of voters--48,000 have been challenged in Cobb County alone, one of the few Democratic strongholds in this swing state. It also criminalizes the donation of water and/or food to voters stuck in long lines at the polls"a felony, an act of "civil disobedience."

Palast delves into more Georgia history, including the lynchings whose ghosts cry out for justice. An interview with the Georgia Historical Society ends when the subject of the Hayes-Tilden 1876 electoral impasse comes up; the fear is that the board of directors, all moguls appointed by Kemp, would be offended.

Parallels are drawn with D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, which defends the KKK's denial of voting rights to blacks"portrayed by white actors in blackface.

The "KKK Act" of 1871 actually forbade the intimidation of voters.

"The South Will Rise Again"? Yes, the film concludes, not with reactionary fantasies but MLK's dream: "This too [the corruption] will pass. We're stronger and better!" "Spirits crying out for justice will rise from their graves."

Defending his own ghosts, Kemp is battling the ghosts of oppression--a horror story indeed. 

Lasting an hour, Vigilante is narrated by Rosario Dawson, directed by David Ambrose, and produced by the Academy award winner Maria Florio. To find live presentations, go to Click Here. To order the dvd, go to Click Here

Don't miss this warning of an already-metastatic cancer. It's about the future of democracy. It will anger you and provoke the activism and actions crucial to preserving it.

DVD cover of 'Vigilante'
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It's heartbreaking. Today on the weekly online edition of the Green Grassroots Election Protection Coalition, the well-known and hugely accomplished investigative reporter, author, and filmmaker Greg Palast discussed his forthcoming documentary Vigilante: Georgia's Vote Suppression Hitman.

Produced by Martin Sheen and Maria Florio, Vigilante exposes the new voter law In Georgia (the "Election Integrity Act of 2021," Senate Bill 202) that allows any Georgia voter to challenge any other Georgia voter. So far, one GOP operative has challenged 4,000, another 32,000, and altogether hundreds of thousands have come under this lethal fire. The voting year is crucial of course: there are both gubernatorial and Senate races pitting Democrat Stacey Abrams against Republican Brian Kemp [again*] and Democrat Raphael Warnock against Republican Herschel Walker and Libertarian Chase Oliver.

In this context, Palast's not-for-profit Investigative Fund is nonpartisan; the bottom line is to make sure that the candidate that voters choose takes office. In 2018, among other investigations, he targeted the 2018 match between Abrams and Kemp, which awarded Kemp the victory by 50,000 votes, by exposing and litigating over the hundreds of thousands of other voters purged from the registration rolls who would have put Abrams over the top (see Click Here ).

In Vigilante, says Palast, "I concentrate on Georgia because that is where the vigilante hitmen are most desperate" and where the ultra-right takes its ballot box trickery for a test drive."

"If you can't win elections, arrest the people who are going to vote against you," is how Harvey Wasserman, co-convener of Green Grassroots Election Protection Coalition (a coalition of activists, journalists, and others concerned with free and fair elections), summed up the GOP strategy in Georgia.

There has been absolutely no national press about Georgia's SB 202, which also makes absentee and dropbox voting highly problematic; it is also a felony now to hand drinks or food to people standing in line to vote, even for hours under the hot Georgia sun.

Contrast the silence about SB 202 with the wide circulation of the film 2,000 Mules, produced by True the Vote, a GOP-empowered organization that militates against true election integrity even as it has coopted this term for its own purposes. 2,000 Mules has been viewed by millions all over the country. The focus is mainly on black male voters supposedly committing voter fraud by stuffing ballot boxes and being paid $10 per ballot. Palast compared this film to D. W. Griffiths's Birth of a Nation, which Palast called the "Elders of Zion of Black voting." Vigilante is meant to be an antidote to 2,000 Mules.

Vigilante also exposes lineage Kemp has labored to hide. A "scion of dynasties," he is descended from the families who first brought African slaves to Georgia and earned prodigious wealth descendants continue to enjoy. The text of SB 202 that Kemp signed contained a picture of a plantation. Kemp's family, owners of massive forests in Georgia, does business with Georgia Pacific, a Koch brothers company. Others are stepping into GOP activism as the Kochs withdraw: Paul "the Vulture" Singer, who has been a featured billionaire predator in Palast's previous publications,** and the Bradley Foundation, which has contributed $2 billion to fight against voting rights in Georgia and Florida, among other states. The idea of challenging voters originated with a KKK governor of Georgia, Gene Talmadge, who escaped the FBI by dying before they could indict him.

Kemp also signed a bill outlawing the teaching of critical race theory--against teaching history, as Palast specified. He has lots to hide. A cousin in Virginia openly acknowledges the family's past and is working on reparations.

How does the process of voter challenge work? Voters are supposed to receive a postcard, designed to look like junk mail (remember voter caging?), but they often don't receive one or mistakenly discard it, and hence don't find out until too late that they've been challenged--too late means that they simply cannot vote. And consider this: a voter may be challenged on Election Day. But if you know you've been challenged, you go to a county office, in person only, to prove at a hearing that you are you and reside where you claim to.

What is being done to fight back against this blatant discrimination? Are the Democrats challenging Republicans? Palast dismissed this possibility as worse than ridiculous. Activist organizations will litigate, and educate and otherwise reach out to targeted groups. In 2020, Palast credits attorney and activist Barbara Arnwine with having worked with colleagues to drive challenged voters to county office hearings, enough to have handed over Georgia's hugely contested presidential vote total to Joe Biden. Register and reregister, said Palast, who himself had to reregister when he found himself dropped from the rolls in Los Angeles.

Vigilante offers far more to a public that must be informed accurately about the machinations that so threaten democracy. What else can be done? Activism and support of organizations fighting back: Black Voters Matter, NAACP, SCLC, and others, including of course the Palast Investigative Fund. The film will be shown first in New York City on October 4 and subsequently in Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Order your copy and donate at Click Here.

""""""""""""

*Kemp was, by the way, secretary of state, that is, in charge of state elections, in 2018.

**And speaking of Palast's "horror role," another prominent figure from his previous investigations, Kris Kobach, of crosscheck infamy, is back in circulation running for attorney general of Kansas, after having lost gubernatorial and Senate races in his state. Less power to him!

---------------

(originally published 8/22/22 at OpEdNews.com, https://www.opednews.com/articles/Palast-s-Latest-Investigat-Georgia-Election_Georgia-Governor-Race_Georgia-Politics_Investigation-220822-850.html)

 

 

 

Christ the Redeemer
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Neil Mochrie, a prolific Scottish poet who lived from 1935 to 2005, has much to teach posterity. One hundred of his poems, some of which are written in Scottish, are collected in the posthumous volume Selected Poetry & Verse (published privately in 2018 and edited by Alison Clark). The following is taken from Clark's biographical preface:

"An early master of the standard poetic forms - sonnet, ballad, Burns stanza - Mochrie had an excellent ear for rhythm and rhyme... together with [a] quirky sense of humour and love of puns. [During his lifetime,] he published some pieces in school and university magazines and in The Glasgow Herald as it was then entitled. Some are included here.... Neil Mochrie wrote to seek to understand himself and to explore and express his thoughts and feelings on everything from the personal to the political. Poetry works best and is, paradoxically, more universal when it addresses the particular. When his poems focus on an individual person, a feature of the natural world or a particular relationship, Mochrie is at his most successful."

I have chosen a few poems from section 6 of the volume, "God and All That," admittedly my favorites [and in the chronological order determined by the editing] but difficult to choose from this outstanding collection that also includes sections on "Nature, Life and Love," "Family and Friends," "Thinkers, Seers and Poets," "Fun and Games," and "Ye Ken Noo." Thanks to Neil's daughter Mary Mochrie for sharing this wonderful collection with me.

CHRIST IN FALLUJAH: REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY 2004

- 2004 -

He moves between the sunlight and the shadows, 

staffed but stumbling down the shattered street.

His way is marked by traces in the sand:

the dark stains placed there by His wounded feet.

The pale tracks left upon His dusty cheek

mark sweat or tears " impossible to say.

Flickering in and out of time and space

gingerly He steps and makes his way.

A mother in a cluttered, doorless, doorway

hugs tightly with her one still useful arm

her infant daughter's small and stiffened corpse

still, to the last, protecting her from harm.

He stops and kneels down in the rubble,

gazes with love into her dimming eyes.

She sees within them as her vision fades

the opening gates of Mahmud's Paradise.

Above, the marshalled ghosts of honoured dead

hang down their heads in silence and in shame

that all they died for has drowned in the mire

of greed and power that's set the world aflame.

FACING CHRIST ACROSS THE TABLE

- 1985 -

I do not wish to be a sorcerer

Conjuring you up

Using my need for a spell

Out of the subnatural depths

Conjuring you up

Out of my broken fragments of imagination

Conjuring you up

To face me here across my kitchen table.

Sometimes you come unbidden.

Sometimes when I call in pain

Or in the dumb hurt of singleness

You come.

I am afraid that what I call

May not be you

But my own phantom.

I am afraid of my successful sorcery.

But sometimes you come

And seem more real than I am to myself.

On these occasions I reach to take

The hands you offer

And the love.

"Come to the table!"

I call to whoever may be in the house.

"The guest has brought wine and bread

And news from beyond the world."

You look deep into me

Saying with laughter

"All is well." 

CHRIST IN THERAPY

- 2001 -

He sits across from me and smiles:

he knows the vagaries of man.

He nods while I digress, and smiles:

all is unfolding as per plan.

I show my sorrows and my pains,

my tears, grimaces, trembling hands.

my passions lost and duty's gains.

He smiles and nods and ... understands.

"You loved your father but he wrought

despair and violence in your life.

Your mother loved you, so you thought.

Why did you never take a wife?

It's time to live now for yourself:

sufficient is the cure of one.

Leave others' burdens on the shelf:

life should contain a bit of fun.

You cannot answer for us all,

You cannot dry the whole world's eyes.

We each must stumble, trip and fall

upon our way to Paradise.

The halt, the lame, the blind may fail

and perish somewhere on the path.

The single-minded will prevail

and harvest all the aftermath."

He says my dream of sacrifice,

of self transcended by surrender,

is but the clumsy artifice

of an ingenuous pretender.

The power, the glory are not mine.

I'm free to come down off my cross:

my pearls are barely fit for swine,

my fiery words unkindled dross.

He sits and nods, another smile

that says he knows more than I can,

and thinks his trickster sleight and guile

are equal to the Son of Man.

SECOND COMING

- 2003 -

He did come back you know.

I met him at the turn of the Millennium.

We had been thinking about him a lot, I suppose,

And those who believed that he might call again

ere all stirred up.

I didn't pay all that much attention.

I admired his work and life of course

and much of what he'd taught.

We were brought up to do so,

although I found in adulthood

the gory details had been sanitised a bit

and no-one seemed to realise

we had recreated on a truly global scale

The kind of world he'd lived and suffered in.

I was walking the dog at the time.

He fell into step beside, almost like an old friend,

Asking me how I was and so on"

He seemed to know the family.

It took me some time to realise who he might be

And when I did, I stopped.

The dog licked his hand.

I asked him why he had come

And he said he'd never really gone away,

Only for the few days when things got really rough.

I wondered what he was doing these days.

He said he still looked out for people, like he used to,

and looked after his father's "many mansions."

"Collecting rents?" I asked.

"In a sense" he replied "and doing repairs".

I got caught up in the earthy reality of this exchange:

"New builds?" I enquired.

"Those too."

There was a long silence.

"What kind of people live in them?"

"Anyone who really wants to".

We were at the door of my house.

I hesitated, unsure what to do or say.

"Thanks for the chat" he smiled,

"Perhaps we'll meet again some time."

He continued on his way.

At the crossroads he half-turned and waved.

I wish I'd asked him in.

THE THIRD TESTAMENT

- 1993 -

Hear the god's truth, the bad news!

this is the gospel of wrath

that you had ignored or forgotten:

the unrevealed darkside of love,

the frozen blackside of joy!

Here is the terminal judgement

on man and on his creation

when the sole available counsel

is dead or gone off on vacation

and Justice, who sees all things clearly,

her blindfold untied, loose and fallen.

prepares to make up her own mind

since her scales are perpetually broken.

The lion has eaten the lamb

but experiences no satisfaction.

The hunter who dropped his prey swiftly

has turned his slow hand to slaughter.

He shoots, intending to maim,

his enemy's three year old son

who is toddling after a mother

who walks far too fast to follow

as she clutches a small loaf of bread

and a jerry-can half-full of water.

He starves without knowing or heeding

his bosom friend's teenage daughter

who nurses her crippled lover

unaware that her unborn child

is withered forever within her.

The oil-fired white knights of power,

their tanks painted pallid for peace,

confide to electrical ears

that this is not war as they know it.

The howl that comes over the aether

Is not merely a technical defect

but a voice from the Pleistocene past

crying out across the millennia

trying to shout very clearly

"This is what war is for."

Mothers in shell-shattered shelter

mix into some brown sewer water

the dry-as-dust denatured milk

of humanitarian kindness

for children who move and breathe weakly

but utter no noise, not a whimper

in the cellar's least insecure corner.

Here is the back door to Hell

in the alley which runs from despair

where the trash cans are thoroughly clean

and the rats and the cats and the dirty dogs

and the scabby dead donkeys are gone

and the fleas and the lice and the cockroaches

are looking for much better quarters.

Elsewhere a barking mad godman

yelping loudly above his white collar

makes one plea for peace on earth

and ten for a yen or a dollar

to buy Bibles in Serbo-Croatian

to be trucked to the scene of the conflict

or send missions to maltreated Muslims

offering baptism under slow fire.

This is the last wagon to roll

(we go as far as the Moon

but the stars are too far away).

This is the Last Chance saloon

try one last throw of the dice

put your stainless hands in your pockets

for discounted guns, bombs and rockets

or, if you want to be nice,

bandages, aspirins, rice.

This is the closing down clearance

these are the final reductions

this is the LAST DAY OF SALE!

Hear the Big O at the end

(Z is for zero my friend)

Look at the scroll rolling up:

here is God in the Garden

weighing his long pruning shears

gauging the tall Tree of Life,

there is the dead branch of Man,

leafless and fruitless in summer,

waiting on high autumn winds 

to know what He meant by the Fall.

(also published August 8, 2022, at OpEdNews: https://www.opednews.com/articles/You-Cannot-Dry-the-Whole-God_Poet_Poetry_Wholeness-220808-784.html)

(image from FLICKR)

It all started, this thought stream, when I put down the book on possible outcomes of the inevitable cataclysm and also put aside an invitation to a free barbecue at an upscale senior community recruiting new residents. One was too sad and the other bordering on cop-out escapism for a lifelong activist. 

Remember the energy, enthusiasm, and promise we all used to associate with youth? I thought. Have the Republicans and the super-rich successfully undone the dawning of the youth cult that began in the 1960s? When Kennedy beat Nixon in 1960, since Nixon represented a continuation of the Eisenhower era, it was a victory of youth over the old age that the vacation president typified. Ushered in by the second-youngest US president in history, the sixties proceeded to glorify youth in every way. But by the end of the decade, after putting a man on the moon, we were sending our youth off to die in Vietnam. Did the youth cult begin to die then? At the end of the decade that finally put Nixon, JFK’s foil, into office to prolong the Vietnam war, which youth vehemently protested against? Or did its slow demise just begin, exacerbated by the Powell manifesto and culminating in the prophesied cataclysm to be brought on by climate change and nuclear annihilation? How do we view our youth these days? After 60 years, do we pity them as those who will confront head on the cataclysm? Why is there such a gerontocracy in Washington? With the average age of members of Congress around 60 and the height of the pecking order largely around 80? Is it because youth are so held back by the constraints of a strangling economy? SCOTUS, despite the median chronological age of its “Injustices,” constitutes an ideological gerontocracy.

The death of most everything that youth used to imply is one symptom of a dying world, I guessed.  Al Gore, source of the quote in this article’s title, persists in holding out hope. Reduce the carbon emissions level to net zero by 2050, he says, and there is hope that the ultimate extinction won’t occur. He maintains this optimism “mainly because of young people all over the world now demanding change—including Greta Thunberg.”

Youth activism persists, then, reminding us of the sixties spirit. And people are still donating children to the population though the birthrates at home and worldwide have substantially declined. The children I know directly are being raised as if into the same world as I was, as my daughter was, taking a uniform future for granted.

And so, it seems, each time a wanted child is born, hope is reborn. I can’t put that aside, nor the dream that something will come along—an idea, a fix, to turn this all around. Destruction implies its inverse and I’ll never stop waiting for it to arrive.

 

Pro-choice and anti-abortion demonstrators outside the Supreme Court in 1989, Washington DC
(Image by Lorie Shaull)   Details   DMCA

Roe v. Wade has been overturned, in the wake of another life-affirming New York state law in the SCOTUS v. Bruin decision, and both debacles are contagious, as many conservative states have already demonstrated by limiting if not planning to eliminate the option to abort unwanted or impossible-to-accommodate childbirths.

Women's rights and human rights have been violated. In the first instance, the Supreme Court has opened the door to every variety of underground illegality and untold dire consequences to women's health and lifestyles if not lives themselves. It has welcomed in a new Salem witch hunt, turning neighbor against neighbor, Or is it McCarthyism reborn? 1984? Or something even worse? 

The largest number of victims of this heinous repression will be, as usual, indigent people of color. Opponents of Alito's decision can predictably study the outcome after a measure of time. Affluent people will have channels to eliminate unwanted pregnancies. There will be few other abortions to count, actually. Prisons will fill up with "murderers." Again, read "indigent people of color."

Could the ERA, if enabled--it has already been passed but very belatedly--be effective in counteracting the five reactionaries? The deadline for enactment was 1979 [perhaps 1982] and this has yet to be updated, even if belatedly, triggering more litigation, ending up with the same SCOTUS. All new appointees are young enough to stalemate the Court for generations.

Today's SCOTUS decision will be chain reactive, leading to even more repression including elimination of birth control devices. Vasectomies will become illegal. So I can't summon men into the palliative picture unless they can be required, by the Court, to behave responsibly once they've impregnated a woman. And what of the "pro-life" society that insists on bringing children into the world whom parents are ill-equipped to nurture? Will they set up adoption services? Foster parenting? Do they forget about fostering life once it leaves the womb? Are they really "pro-pre-life"?

What if sexual intercourse becomes illegal except when performed to procreate? You know whose lives will be ruined.

I once asked an anti-choice proponent, a middle-aged woman, how many crack babies she was willing to adopt. She said she would adopt, not specifying how many, but later adamantly changed her mind with words along the lines of "It's a rotten stinking world we live in!"

As far as legalizing the carrying of concealed weapons in public places, the Senate passed a counteractive law yesterday making some gestures toward mitigating this headlong rush back to the days documented by John Wayne movies. Some gestures. How many of the fifteen Republican Senators who voted for this measure will be reelected? How many of the 14 Republican Members of Congress who opted to support it this afternoon?

Gun violence has been condoned and women's rights violated. Is it a gender thing? More men than women own guns in this country--40 percent of men and 22 percent of women. And women are victimized by the overturning of RvW [along with the responsible partners who stick with them].

Joe Biden was searching for possible executive orders to counteract SCOTUS this morning. The latest headlines indicate that he didn't succeed.

 

Harrington & Richardson Model 900
(Image by CapCase)   Details   DMCA

More innocent schoolchildren have been murdered. Mass gun murders are becoming an everyday headline. Do some people simply say, "Get used to it"? Some must, at their kitchen tables if not elsewhere.

In a discussion the other day, when I was inveighing against guns, a friend offered the scenario of a farmer being accosted by a herd of feral pigs. Wouldn't she need a gun to save her life?

Too bad we can't be sure that gun owners will behave responsibly.

I tried to imagine what it would have been like to go to school dreading possible gunfire. School was the safest place on earth when I was a child. Sources of fear were bullies, mean teachers, and air raid drills. Does anyone remember those? Loud sirens, unique sounds unlike the late bell would go off and we'd run to line the hallways, sitting against the walls with heads in laps, arms over heads. No, don't run. I never wondered what that would accomplish in the event of a nuclear strike. Remember those school kids in Scotland who ran to hide under their desks when that mammoth mudslide hit and killed so many? What else could the teacher have told them to do? They saw the avalanche heading toward them out the window.

As an adult, I met some wonderful people, liberal activists, who told me they protested against air raid drills by staying outside in broad daylight when those awful sirens went off. No one arrested them though. I was amazed at their defiance. That would never have occurred to this all-American schoolgirl who recited the Pledge of Allegiance so proudly every day. And said the Lord's Prayer also and was chastised the one day I whispered another prayer instead when my grandfather was sick.

"Someone isn't saying the Lord's Prayer," said the teacher when we were done with it. It was an accusation. She was a devout Catholic. I stared down at my desk feeling like a sinner but had some vague thoughts about being forced to pray. A classmate once asked me what I really say during our Lord's Prayer minutes. "Something in Hebrew," I lied to her respectful silence. Respectful. And we were around 10 if that in a very parochial era.

It was scary to be singled out as if I had sinned. Scary to hear those sirens amid the years we so feared being buried by Khrushchev. But nothing like fearing for your life every day when your parents take you to school. Does anyone walk to school anymore the way so many of us did back in the olden days? That was so safe also.

Pity the parents sending their kids off to school each day. Pity the sight of armed officials guarding schools now. They can be gunned down too. Is anyone safe when owning guns may as well be legal?

Pity a culture that won't take action and instead condones the slaughter of innocence. It's happened before. It's called war. I guess that until we do away with war deranged people will be able to own guns. At least in this country.

A friend of mine in South Korea tells me that there guns are illegal and no one gets murdered. Well, maybe one person a year. One too many, of course.

Millions and millions too many innocent people die by condoned violence. That's the ultimate tragedy ridiculing the values we are taught in elementary school if not religious school if not by our parents. But meanwhile, let's narrow down and get rid of guns. Then we can make violence illegal altogether.

Epiphany: Are these clouds rising away from the sun or descending to conceal it?
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It's been just a year since that endless nightmare began, the arguably initial battle in a new civil war--or, if you prefer, the continuation of the old one. This shot heard round the world was fired by a president whom the people fired several times via impeachment--this man who became notorious for firing others decisively on his show, The Apprentice,wouldn't take the order himself.

I have just read that 70 Republicans sitting in elected offices participated in the attempted coup that never received the decisive name that 9/11 did. I wonder why? It was a 9/11 for democracy. It was never named "1/6," for example. Perhaps the country was more unified over the horrific connotations of 9/11. Objections might have been raised over pejorative associations with anything the highly accosted majority might have named it: Capitol Riot, Attempted Coup, Fascist Coup, and other expressions used in the media.

So the epiphany, now that the Christian holiday has been so accosted itself, was of hordes of very unwise people visiting violence on individuals they disagreed with, but also on democracy as a whole, an icon of sorts, an ideal worshipped in the countries that reach toward it [reality is so hypocritical] as well as those who long for it. I'm trying to turn 1/6 into the opposite of Epiphany. There's even a witty joke that has swept the media about how three wise men (people?) cannot be found in Washington {but many asses: a reverse-creche, if you will]:

(quoted from Google:) "The Supreme Court has ruled that there cannot be a Nativity Scene in Washington, DC this Christmas season. This isn't for any religious reason, they simply have not been able to find three wise men and a virgin in the Nation's capitol. There was no problem, however, finding enough asses to fill the stable."

We experienced on 1/6 an event that has and will continue to defile governments across the world, headline fodder most of us never imagined could happen here, though the stolen election in Florida 2000 was named a coup d'etat by many. 

Now, for many of us, elections mark moments to dread . The concept of Election Day has been blighted partly because of fears of intimidation and bullying at the polls of likely Democratic voters (read: people of color, especially Blacks). It used to be a jolly, folksy time. One year I leafletted in front of a small-town polling place joking around with the Republicans who stood with me, in total camaraderie.

Will those days ever return? Will we be able to find wise people in Washington beyond Bernie Sanders and a few others? There are some from all partisan persuasions, but certainly not enough Republicans, the brave ones fighting against the destructive hordes.

I don't even remember watching last year's monstrosity on tv as it happened, but am in awe of those who had the courage to video record it. I can't stand to watch the reruns, the desecration of an Ideal if not a reality--an ideal that the Christ child would certainly have espoused over fascism, an ideal that exalts those who he prophesied would inherit the earth.

And I'd be surprised if any of the assailants on 1/6 did not identify as Christians.

 

The Trenton railroad station is a place extremely hard to find amid a maze of narrow highway exits and small, nearly hidden signs once you do truly exit, belying its function as an accessible public facility. Once you get there, parking facilities are insufficiently marked--you don't know there's very short-term availability so that you can walk the passenger in and help carry luggage and hug/kiss good-bye.

     But once you know the place, it serves its purpose. There is a high crime rate in Trenton and so the following anecdote brings the station to life as a hospitable place, if not a nurturing one.

     First, I went there alone at night, when I could still drive at night, to pick up my daughter, who had two large suitcases in tow. We carried them out to my car, which was parked in the short-term area, and loaded them up, so I thought. Now Route 1 North is extremely easy to find so we were soon on it.

     Then I discovered we'd forgotten to load the second suitcase. A U-term followed. We assumed rapid theft. My daughter kindly reassured me that only routine jeans and tops were involved, nothing earthshakingly indispensable.

     When we got back, the suitcase was indeed gone. What do do but report the theft, admittedly abusurdly? I phoned the station and was told there were no police there.

     No police? In Trenton at night in a place I stereotypically considered dangerous? I hurled some objections but gave up and called the Trenton police, who corroborated the absence of their officers.

     And so we just sat down on the pavement of the empty lot, waiting for an officer to show up. Again my daughter reassured me it was no big deal. But we waited.

     "You're the best daughter a mother could ever have," I told her, amazed that she wasn't upbraiding me for my negligence.

     After about ten minutes that seemed a lot longer, a police car pulled up. I approached it. So did an older woman. We let her go first.

     "Officer, I'm just an old lady," she said. "Waiting to meet another old lady who is extremely upset because the train is late. I parked in that illegal spot." She pointed to a space slightly out of the way, in the pitch dark. "She's really upset."

     "I won't ticket you,"said the officer good-naturedly.

     We were touched. Then I repeated our plight to him, the missing suitcase, and assumed he'd file a theft report. We followed him back to his car and he opened the trunk.

     There was my daughter's suitcase!. We were both ecstatic. I gave him a bear hug that embarrassed both of us. Somebody had to, my daughter later affirmed, to my relief. No criticism of my abrupt spontaneity.

     Then back to the car we went, dragging the suitcase.

     I think back often on these unremarkable events, cherishing them both in the context of mother-daughter high points and the good feelings traded in a surprising environment.

     The vision of the suitcase left behind in the empty parking lot says so much to me, as does its rescue.

     Trenton at night had become just any folksy small town, as all such places can be.