Life in the time of chaos

April 27, 2022 progressive living No comments

Arlo sleeps on whatever project I have in my lap. This helps keep me sane.

This is how I calm down at night. I knit, I crochet, I quilt, and I snuggle my cats. During the day, I do my best to work on the world. That gets more difficult all the time.

I can’t watch the news anymore, what with a former president and his cronies still trying to stage a coup, and the US Department of Justice still doing nothing about the leaders of the violent coup atempt on Jan. 6, 2021.

The country — no, the world — is being run by oligarchs, and we seem powerless to stop the slide into a global death spiral. The ice is melting, storms are becoming more severe. We have refugees streaming from war zones, who are being joined by climate refugees and the wealthy of every nation that can help are lobbying for closed borders. Their motto is “I got mine, get your own,” as they monetize absolutely everything.

This is late-stage capitalism. Privatize everything so it’s all owned by the few oligarchs and then keep everyone else in a permanent underclass.

If we don’t start taking the climate crisis seriously right now, we’ll be extinct in a couple more generations. Humans are clever, but not clever enough to breathe methane, which is being released into the atmosphere in increasing levels as the permafrost melts. Even the wealthiest can’t buy their way out of this.

It’s paralyzing. I look at all that’s happening — a madman ruling Russia and trying to bring the world to war so he can control it all, another madman trying to usurp power in the US and several of his co-conspirators still sitting in Congress, economic and ecological systems teetering on the verge of collapse, millions who refuse to believe the science of it all, and no one seeming to notice or understand.

My own “representative” has been caught trying to bring a loaded gun through airport security twice in just over a year, and has been stopped for speeding three times, and for driving with a revoked license. He’s been caught in dozens of lies and he was one of the insurrectionists at the Jan. 6 “rally” that preceded the attack on the US Capitol. As of today, he has faced no real consequences for any of his actions.

I’ve had a hard time even wanting to write about all that’s happening because I’m so overwhelmed all the time. I want to hide from the world and pretend everything is OK because that’s what everyone seems to be doing these days.

We’re going to have to find a way to work together, and we’re going to have to find a way to deprogram the people who believe the lies and propaganda of the extreme right. Even supposedly liberal news outlets and media platforms are owned by huge corporations or by oligarchs like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerburg and Elon Musk, so some things just don’t get the coverage they should. We know what they want us to know unless we know where to look for real information, which is getting harder to find.

There’s so much to do, and that leaves us feeling helpless.

But we all have to stand up and start working to overthrow the oligarchs and save out planet. We need to start talking again and stop letting right-wing media whip us into a frenzy.

Both of our political parties are owned by the oligarchy and our primary elections are set up so they can decide which candidates make it to the general election. If you see a candidate who stands for universal access to health care, a living wage, voting rights, taking real action on the environment, reforming elections … rest assured that candidate likely will lose in the primaries to a very well funded “moderate.”

It may be too late for us to take it back, but we can’t stop trying. We have to shake off this paralysis and work together. There’s just too much at stake to stop now.

‘Relax. Give him a chance.’ Nope. Done.

January 26, 2017 a world of progress, letters, media, progressive living, progressive media center No comments

It’s hard to know where to start and we’re only five days in.

Of course, those of us who stood against this man from the beginning knew what would happen, and here we go.

Two oil pipelines got the OK to be built through pristine wilderness and Native American lands, even as one in Iowa has burst and is leaking toxic oil into the environment.

We’re going to build a wall to keep out Mexicans — who, by the way, aren’t coming in such great numbers.

We’re going to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace Medicaid with block grants, then kill Medicare and offer seniors vouchers to buy insurance they can’t afford and that won’t cover what they need covered. Tens of millions will lose access to health care and hundreds of thousands of innocent people will die because their lives don’t matter.

People from predominately Muslim countries can’t come here anymore, even if they’re refugees and their lives are in danger. Their lives don’t matter.

The global ban on funding for any agency that even mentions abortion is gone. This means women’s health clinics will close and women will die because their lives don’t matter.

We will cut funding that helps save lives around the world and retreat from treaties we have signed. We will strand the United Nations, which depends on funding from us, because lives around the world don’t matter.

Just today, the entire top level of staff at the State Department abruptly resigned, leaving the nation’s fate in the hands of inexperienced, unqualified people.

We have stopped informing the public of scientific research that conflicts with the lies the 1 percent want us to believe. We have silenced the Environmental Protection Agency and cut off its ability to fund education and research.

The man in the White House has told us we need to get our news from him and not the news media and then he endorsed Fox News, making this the first time in our nation’s history that we have an “official” news source.

Social media accounts for the national parks have been shut down, as have those for the EPA.  Public phone lines into the White House have been shut off.

Journalists are being arrested for covering the news.

In case you don’t know history, this is fascism. This is real.

In less than a week, we have gone from global power to insular, xenophobic nation. We are seen by the rest of the world as selfish, sexist and racist, homophobic and Islamophobic.

Make America great again? In less than a week we have become small.