Pay it forward and rethink the world.
http://antidote.posthaven.com/the-revolution-is-under-way-already.
The backstory is what’s interesting
Pay it forward and rethink the world.
http://antidote.posthaven.com/the-revolution-is-under-way-already.
Very interesting. A lot of things we don’t think about. Things sure were not easy for the old-timers
An interesting read... to remember what life was like in the past for so many!
It’s a mess out there now. Hard to discern between what’s a real threat and what is just simple panic and hysteria. For a small amount of perspective at this moment, imagine you were born in 1900. On your 14th birthday, World War I starts, and ends on your 18th birthday. 22 million people perish in that war. Later in the year, a Spanish Flu epidemic hits the planet and runs until your 20th birthday. 50 million people die from it in those two years. Yes, 50 million. On your 29th birthday, the Great Depression begins. Unemployment hits 25%, the World GDP drops 27%. That runs until you are 33. The country nearly collapses along with the world economy. When you turn 39, World War II starts. You aren’t even over the hill yet. And don’t try to catch your breath. On your 41st birthday, the United States is fully pulled into WWII. Between your 39th and 45th birthday, 75 million people perish in the war. At 50, the Korean War starts. 5 million perish. At 55 the Vietnam War begins and doesn’t end for 20 years. 4 million people perish in that conflict. On your 62nd birthday you have the Cuban Missile Crisis, a tipping point in the Cold War. Life on our planet, as we know it, should have ended. Great leaders prevented that from happening. When you turn 75, the Vietnam War finally ends. Think of everyone on the planet born in 1900. How do you survive all of that? When you were a kid in 1985 and didn’t think your 85 year old grandparent understood how hard school was. And how mean that kid in your class was. Yet they survived through everything listed above. Perspective is an amazing art. Refined as time goes on, and enlightening like you wouldn’t believe. Let’s try and keep things in perspective. Let’s be smart, help each other out, and we will get through all of this.
From Gabriel
Sent from Mobile
https://goo.gl/rGW5JA
Mitch McConnell
Traitor to the American people
Here is a teaser, but read the whole article, link below.
“Longtime lawmakers in both parties say that the Senate is broken. In February, seventy former senators signed a bipartisan letter decrying the institution for not “fulfilling its constitutional duties.” Dick Durbin, of Illinois, who has been in the Senate for twenty-four years and is now the second-in-command in the Democratic leadership, told me that, under McConnell, “the Senate has deteriorated to the point where there is no debate whatsoever—he’s dismantled the Senate brick by brick.” McConnell was the Minority Leader from 2006 to 2014. After Barack Obama was elected in 2008, McConnell used the filibuster to block a record number of bills and nominations supported by the Administration. As Majority Leader, he has control over the chamber’s schedule, and he keeps bills and nominations he opposes from even coming up for consideration. “He’s the traffic cop, and you can’t get through the intersection without him,” Durbin said.”
Pay it forward and rethink the world.
http://antidote.posthaven.com/the-revolution-is-under-way-already.
From Gabriel
Sent from Mobile
https://goo.gl/rGW5JA
Some strategies below...
I have been engaged in an ongoing discussion about possible subterfuge and Bernie Sanders’ upcoming strategy (and that of his voting supporters like me) with friends.
Since Bernie dropped out of the race, and officially supported Biden, my position was to hope that Bernie’s solid talking points would be incorporated into the agenda of the presumptive nominee, Joe Biden, and be supported by the Bernie Bros and all Dems. However I was missing a few details, and it seems there are a few cards for him yet to play! So have a read below.... it’s not over till it’s over.
Pay it forward and rethink the world.
http://antidote.posthaven.com/the-revolution-is-under-way-already.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Pity America
An incredibly brutal analysis of the United States on April 25th, 2020. This writer for the Irish Times nails it. It is long but a very chilling and worthy read.
Read it and weep, my fellow Americans. This is not US news that is commenting.
From the Irish Times
April 25, 2020
By Fintan O’Toole
THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT
Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.
However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.
Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.
As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”
It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.
The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.
If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.
Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?
It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.
Abject surrender
What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.
Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.
In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.
Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”
This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.
It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.
Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.
The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.
Fertile ground
But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.
There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.
Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.
And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.
That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.
And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.
As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.
Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.
Face it: we cannot return to anything resembling ‘normal’. We are entering a challenging and terrifying new era of restructuring our world and now is the time to swipe left on corporate greed and manipulation, racism, lies, misinformation, Christian Right hypocrisies, hate, gaslighting, protective Republican political agendas, and self serving conservative values that keep the general populace down and uninformed, rather than lifting up society as a whole by giving back as much as they take.
Capitalism can’t and shouldn’t be dead, but it should not be the goal at all costs.
We all must pay it forward and our social actions will help shape the world we step into in the undetermined future, which is looking pretty bleak right now. If one could count on the better instincts of Humankind to take the ship’s helm with love and consideration, the future would not seem so dystopian, but we all know which forces have the power, money, and sheer egregious will to force their dominating outcome.
Now is the time to make a difference through all-important personal social sharing and awareness campaigns. Civilization can implode under external pressure and its own grave contradictions, or it can be reimagined and repurposed, but it requires just that: a sense of purpose. A rising tide lifts all boats....
Now that you have time to hunker down - stop wringing your hands or sticking your head in the sand- there is a lot on the line and one chance only to push the reset button.
Get fired up and woke by adding these true life Social Injustice video-on-demand films to your queue. I promise you won’t be bored, but you will be properly outraged and hopefully motivated to help shape our collective future. If the little guy does nothing, the bullies WILL STEAL ALL THE LUNCH MONEY ON THE PLAYGROUND. AGAIN.
Here are a few films to get you started, and don’t forget Michael Moore’s docs about GM and Flint.
DARK WATERS starring Mark Ruffalo - Watch corporate greed and obdurate tactics run amok at the expense of millions of lives
JUST MERCY starring Michael B Jordan - Watch bigots who run much of the western world in action as a world-renowned civil rights defense attorney works to free a wrongly condemned death row prisoner.
QUEEN & SLIM Watch what happens when a couple's first date takes an unexpected turn and when trigger happy police are feeling their oats
THE CORPORATION - Check out the Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
See how this has played out in history: ‘The Atlantic: The Revolution is Under Way Already’
https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/609463/
Be active with this brilliant solution!
See below... AND SHARE!
Gabriel Hasselbach
Gabriel Hasselbach
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Trump’s Defense of His Lies: ‘I’m President and You’re Not’
Donald Trump. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
It is remarkable — and perhaps praiseworthy — that Donald Trump gave a long and detailed interview on the subject of his being a pathological liar. The interview, with Time’s Michael Scherer, covers a wide range of Trump’s lies, and features many of his own justifications for them. The truly revealing moment of the interview comes at the end, when Trump gives up the game. “But isn’t there, it strikes me there is still an issue of credibility,” asks Scherer, referencing Trump’s hallucinatory claims to have been surveilled by his predecessor, which his own intelligence officials have refuted. Trump rambles through various talking points, and lands on this conclusion: “I guess, I can’t be doing so badly, because I’m president, and you’re not.”
This small line is an important historical marker of the bizarre and disconcerting reality into which American politics has plunged. Trump is not merely making an attack on truth here. He is attacking the idea of truth. His statement is a frontal challenge to the notion that objective reality can be separated from power.
Trump and his officials have been dancing around this notion since November. When challenged on almost any of their lies, they point to the election, which proves that the credibility of the crooked Fake News media is nonexistent, and theirs is beyond reproach. Questions about veracity are met with responses about voting in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Trump made the argument explicit: The only measure of his veracity is power, which he has, and his critics do not.
I once suggested that Trump’s most anti-democratic quality is his authoritarian epistemology. He tells repeated, brazen lies about matters large and small, in the confidence that his supporters have surrendered all independent judgment to him. That is not a democratic relationship between elected official and policy.