Society – Overwhelming Weirdness

The Lure of Dictatorship

To be a citizen of a republic really is a hassle. Seriously, I’m not joking. So much is expected of you. I mean, think of it. First, you are expected to stay informed about various issues that affect you, your fellow citizens, and your country as a whole. Not only are you expected to do this, but you are expected to make time for it on your own, and unless you’re one of those people who ‘works well without direct supervision,’ then it’s not going to happen.

Most people would not only have to be led to the water of staying informed, but they’s also have to be made to drink it, and republics that function on a set of democratic processes aren’t really set up to force people drink information. Republics of this nature are set up to make the water available for people to drink, but the decision to either drink the water of information and knowledge, or to sit, thirsty, in the parched dryness of ignorance is theirs to make.

Second, not only are you expected to stay informed, but you’re also expected to stay informed with the truth. That means that you’re expected to pull your face out of your algorithm directed social media apps for a few seconds (yeah, good luck), and look something up. Never mind that the pervasive internet and the evolving G networks everywhere make that the easiest task, ever. Forget it. People don’t care about the truth, because the truth sucks. The truth means they have to be truly awake in some manner, other than just walking through life with a fake smile on their faces, and see the world as it really is. If people do that, then, well, there go all of the smiles, fake or not.

Third, and this is the worst part, ever. Not only are citizens of a republic expected to stay informed with the truth, but they’re also expected to vote. I know, I feel like screaming and crying when I thank about that, too. “Voting? Are you serious? Nah, that’s not happening. Vote? Are you crazy? Don’t you know that Jesus died on the cross so that we could just hand all that shit over to god? Damned atheists and your voting!”

“Look, can’t we just get somebody in office that’ll just take care of all of this, so that I don’t have to worry about it? I mean, I don’t want to use the term ‘benevolent dictator,’ but… Well, hell, let’s just call a spade a spade and go there; say it out loud. Can’t we just get some benevolent dictator in the White House who will make it all happen, so I don’t have to worry about it?”

That short monologue, unfortunately, is all too common within the American electorate, and it is that attitude which may pose the greatest threat to this republic. Humans have a love of republicanism that functions on the democratic process, but don’t want to accept responsibility for their own governance. They don’t want to stay informed with the truth. They don’t want to maintain anything even resembling a meaningful understanding of the issues confronting their country and the world. They don’t even want to vote.

In the short term, individuals like trump come and go and their influence on this republic rises, then fades. Over the long term, though, it is dictatorship itself that draws people into its web, where it waits, like the venomous spider it is. The lure of dictatorship lies in the apparent ease of existence it offers the individual. Yet we all know that this apparent ease is merely an illusion; it is the veil of lies that conceals the evil that lies within. Fortunately, this veil is not opaque, and in fact, its transparency is its greatest flaw. Dictatorships have this lure within them, and yet its transparency of what it really entails for the individual and the nation, even those within the dominant racial/ethnic/religious/sexually oriented, and gender identifying group (dominant group), is what makes it so abhorrent.

To be the minion of a dictatorship is easy, it really is, provided, of course, that you are a member of the dominant group in your country. If you are, then all you have to do is nothing. Consciously and actively do nothing, even when you see injustice meted out to people of minority or marginalized ethnic, racial, sexually oriented, or gender identifying groups, do nothing. The state will take care to insure that you are cared for and protected against what it sees as anything infringing on your quiet, non-political life. For many people, this ‘doing nothing’ is easy, but for the rest of us it is incredibly difficult, and this difficulty is one of the factors that first lead to the rise of republicanism as a form of government in the first place.

Over time, all governments develop institutions that help propel their existence. This is especially true of both monarchies and republics, much more so than civil and military dictatorships. Monarchies develop institutions based around the blood line of a particular set of people, and if it is what is known as a ‘constitutional monarchy,’ then two parallel sets of institutions develop; one protects the privileges of the noble class, and the other protects the rights of the monarchy’s subjects. Republics, on the other hand, develop institutions based upon their body of laws, their nation’s constitutional rights, and the liberties and responsibilities of the individual.

The self-propelling institutions developed by civil and military dictatorships are based upon and centered around a single, charismatic figure, and are designed to keep that person and their inner circle in power for as long as possible. Since these persons are rarely in power more than twenty years, thirty years at the most, the institutions designed to propel their rule find it difficult to take root in the national psyche. This is what makes North Korea such an anomaly; the institutionalization of the rule of the Kim family over the decades has come to resemble an absolute monarchy more than a dictatorship.

So there is this constant, dual, opposing, pull on the individual. There is the desire for republicanism and democracy, but a republic that functions on the democratic process requires constant attention of the citizens to maintain it in a healthy state. Dictatorship, on the other hand possesses its lure because of its myth of the easy life in which the individual doesn’t have to maintain the political system that governs them. The system, the myth says, is self sustaining. All the citizen has to do is nothing. Consciously, actively, and intentionally do nothing, because if any citizen attempts to intervene with the state on behalf of others, that person will find themselves to be a target of the state, and that will not end well for the individual.

The vast, vast, vast majority of those people who secretly long for the establishment of a dictatorship in the United States understand that such a dream neither can, nor should, ever become a reality, because they know that it would mean the destruction of everything they hold dear in this world in terms of their country and what it has tried to stand for in this world. They have these fleeting desires for the benevolent dictator when they see inefficiency and ineffectiveness in their government’s efforts to right wrongs. They dream, periodically, of the dictator because they see unintentional, yet unfixed, waste of the people’s tax revenue. They dream of the dictator because someone once told them that “Well, at least under Hitler, the trains ran on time,” and they believed it without trying to find out if it was true. They believed it and purposely hid from their own minds their internal knowledge of the suffering dictators bring with them wherever they go.

Then there are those people for whom dreams of a dictatorship in America are not fleeting, because creating a dictatorship in the United States of America is their dream. They are the people who actively seek ways to subvert our democratic institutions on a daily basis in an attempt to sweep our republic into the thrash can of history. They are the people who live within the realms of white supremacy, white nationalism, and white christian nationalism. They are the people who hoard assault rifles and study how to bring down large areas of our electrical power grid as they wait for the start of their “shootin’ war.” They have always been among us, but have decided, since the political rise of donald trump, that their time to come out of the shadows is now. They actively attempt to recruit our young people into their ranks through their right-wing media outlets, the algorithms of YouTube and other social media platforms, the right’s decades-long decimation of our educational system, and, yes, their sheer visibility.

These people are the greatest threat to our republic since King George III of England, and if you cannot see this, then you are purposefully blind. If you are purposefully blind to this threat of dictatorship, then you are, whether you realize it or not, within their ranks. You are, more than likely, a “Who, me?” racist, and an “I’m the one who’s going to heaven” bigot, and you represent an even greater threat to this republic than the people described in the paragraph above this one. You are the greater threat, because you will walk out of a republic and into a dictatorship secretly thinking that you will be the one who will benefit from it as you proclaim your innocence for its occurrence.

One day you will wake up to find this republic and its democratic processes gone and say “What? I didn’t do it!” Yes, you did, because you saw it happening and purposefully closed your eyes and looked the other way. Then again, it is not just you who will bear responsibility for the destruction of this beloved republic and its democratic institutions, but the rest of us as well, because really, we all see it coming, and if we all do nothing, we will all bear responsibility.

Peace to All

Niemand

A Pillar of Republicanism: Secularism

“The government of the United States is in no way founded on the Christian religion. The United States of America should have a foundation free from the influence of the clergy.”

~ George Washington

In order to speak about secularism as a foundational principle of modern liberal republicanism, I need to talk about the historical relationship between the church and the state, and how that relationship affects and relates to the nation and the individual. I must also offer a few definitions:

The church: An institutional entity that seeks to exercise control of people’s visions of the nature and will of god.

The state: An institutional entity that exercises civil governance over the people within a single society and also within a specific geographic area.

The nation: That group of people over which both the church and the state seek control within any one society and within their prescribed sphere of influence.

The individual: Any person who is a member of any nation within what is referred to as a ‘nation state.’

I believe, in large measure, that the interests and power of the state and the nation are always at odds and are thereby, in most respects, inversely proportional to one another. This means that as the power of one increases, the power of the other must decrease proportionally. Power between these two actors is a zero-sum game, and yet this does not mean that the two cannot both flourish within a society. If we find the proper balance between the two, both the nation, and thereby the individual, and the state can exist in a healthy symbiosis; each supporting the other and possessing an appropriate and manageable amount of power.

Also, under this scenario, the power of the state includes other institutional actors who seek control over the nation and the individual. For our purposes here, this other actor can be broadly defined as “the church.” More specifically, it means any society’s dominant religious sect, and in the United States, this group encompasses the multiplicity of denominations which broadly comprise the fundamentalist evangelical protestant church.

The power playing field between these actors has never been level, because it has always been two against one: the church and the state verses the nation, and within the nation, the individual. For centuries, the church and the state, in close collusion with one another, were able to completely subjugate the nation. The rise of modern, liberal republicanism changed that equation and may have actually leveled the playing field, because the nation, under the principles of republicanism, is generally able to resist the ambitions of both the church and the state.

From the formation of the most primitive human governments, to the kingdoms of post-Medieval Europe, the church and the state made war against each other over absolute control of the population. The conflict was bitter and physical, with kings finding themselves condemned to hell by the church, and the lands and assets of the church being seized by the state. A number of high-ranking officials on both sides lost their lives in this centuries-long war. All of this was for control of the mass of peasants, artisans, and all others outside of the nobility who comprised the nation; the ‘mass of folk,’ as it were.

Eventually, during the early Renaissance period in Europe, the church and the state came to terms, made peace, and split the spoils of social control. Instead of fighting one another for absolute, unlimited control, they joined forces and supported each other’s control over a more limited segment of the individual’s existence.

The peace they forged, as durable as it has been, has always been marked by an intense distrust and dislike of one for the other. The church and the state despise each other, and each covets what the other has. This, of course, begs the question “what, exactly, does each of them have?” The division was, and continues to be marked out in the following manner: the state has control of the individual’s life, and the church has control over the individual’s death. In colloquial terms, the state owns your ass, and the church owns your soul.

Unfortunately, for both the church and the state, this peace, and the division of power over spheres of social control which came from it (as unforeseen as it may have been at the time) led to the birth of secularism as a sine qua non of modern republicanism.

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Amendment 1 to the Constitution of the United States

“Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances”

The First Amendment to the Constitution begins with the prohibition of collaboration between the church and the state. It separates them, placing a wall between them. The church is not allowed to meddle in the affairs of the state, and the state is not allowed to meddle in the affairs of the church. In order to solidify this division, the state does not tax the church. The purpose of this practice is to remove the church from any interest in the the affairs of the state. Since the church pays no taxes to the state, it has no right to even attempt to influence the politics or policies of the state.

I understand that in the United States of America in the early twenty-first century, this separation is, at the very least, blurred, if not erased altogether, but that theory/practice dichotomy is not yet a subject of this essay.

The political philosophers of the Enlightenment to which modern republicanism owes it origins had an awareness of history and current events that seems to have been lost in the United States of America in the twenty-first century. Because of this awareness on their part, secular republicanism is meant to limit the effect that both the church and the state have on each other, and more importantly, the effect and amount of control each has over the nation and the individual. Secular republicanism is, in some ways, the practical expression of the victory of the individual over the state and freedom of the individual from the church.

What, then, are some of the practical applications of secularism as a pillar of republicanism? I have identified three very important aspects, or rules, regarding the relationship between the church and the state in a secular republic on which I will elaborate below

Rule number one: The state cannot favor one religious sect over another. It cannot favor Islam over Judaism, just as it cannot favor any sort of polytheistic, or animistic religions over Christianity. The religions chosen by human cultures to help people weave their way toward salvation and some form of personal nirvana are as numerous as the cultures themselves, and the state cannot discriminate between them.

This is not to say that the state cannot place limits on how religions practice their belief systems, but these limits must be very, very circumspect. The state has the right and the responsibility to protect people from abuse by others, whether the abusers be secular thieves, religious leaders, or other devotees of the individual’s faith, but it must always cast a wary eye on creating and enforcing various limits on religious practice.

Consenting adults have the right to voluntarily subject themselves to all sorts of strange and bizarre acts in the pursuit of almost anything. It doesn’t matter whether the goal is to bring them closer to god, or to orgasm, the state must stand afar and not intervene. However, when the circumstances move from consent to coercion, then the state may, and should, step in to protect the individual from such abuse by anyone, especially the church. This is because any religious sect can and will, if allowed, exercise incredibly intense forms of control over the individual.

Rule number two: The state cannot use the nation’s tax dollars to support the endeavors of any religious sect. This act immediately violates rule number one, as the state cannot afford, unless it seeks to tax the nation into absolute poverty, to support the religious endeavors of every church and/or religious sect operating within the society over which it has governance. If the state uses the nation’s tax revenue to support the endeavors of the church, it will inevitably favor one sect over all others, and this favoritism will then, inevitably, lead to collusion between that particular religious sect and the state, which will then, inevitably foster animosity between religious sects, which will then, inevitably lead to people hating one another.

Financial support of the church through use of the nation’s tax revenue not only creates tacit, if not blatant support for that religious sect’s belief system, but it alters that sect’s dogma so that the church begins to support and validate the actions of the state as an extension of the will of god. Before too long, the nation will find itself saddled with a hybrid government that is no longer a secular republic free of religious interference, but one that is a partnership between the wealthiest secular interests in society, and a theocratic support system that subjugates the nation into obedience under a non-democratic state.

Unless you are completely unaware of twenty-first century American history, you know that this rule has already been violated by the United States government. When President George W. Bush announced that the United States government would support humanitarian endeavors of various Christian denominations through what were called “faith-based initiatives” with the tax dollars of the American nation, I was appalled. This was a clear violation of one of the most important foundational principles of modern republicanism; the separation of the church and the state.

Likewise, if you think that there is not clear competition between religious sects in any society, then you have not eyes to see, nor ears to hear. Each devotee represents an increase in the profitability of that sect. Any religion (what I have also referred to as sects) which has the financial backing of the state gains an immediate advantage in the acquisition of new devotees over other sects. This financial association gives them not only the freedom to spend their revenue on increasing the size of their congregations, but it also allows them to advertise their sect as preferred by the state, and tie their dogma to hollow, populist patriotism.

Financial support of the state for any religious sect, will invariably affect both the dogma of that religious sect, and the politics of the state so that they move ever closer to a single unit seeking control over the nation and the individual.

Rule number three: Secularism is an essential principle of modern republicanism because it protects both the church and the state from each other. I mentioned this earlier in this essay, but shall elaborate on it here.

Patriotism and faith are two elements of the life of any individual that should never be intertwined. When they are, the result is a state that will begin to claim that its rule is derived from the will of god, and a church that will give ecclesiastical support to the worst imperial tendencies of the state. When this happens, no republic can long survive.

Republics are always under pressure from non-democratic forces in this world. The secular forces of totalitarianism, and the totalitarian forces of religion are always attempting to undermine the rights of the nation and the individual, thereby subjugating both to their will. We must remember that in no religious sect’s vision of heaven is that place a democracy. In fact, heaven is the most totalitarian realm ever created in the human imagination. A god does not put its decisions before the committee.

Both the church and the state possess within themselves the worst drives of the human animal; the lust for power for its own sake, and this is true regardless of your personal opinion of either of these two institutions. Since I have placed that statement in this essay, I feel I must remind the reader that I am not speaking about the deep and sincere faith held by any individual, but the disingenuous propaganda of any institutional church that directs the course of that faith. When the subject is god, people are about faith, churches are about power.

Because of this, republics must be secular in nature. This doesn’t place the state in a position above the church, it places the state in a place completely separate from the church. It allows both the church and the state to conduct their business without interference or influence from the other. Secularism, as a foundational principle of republicanism, is not only supposed to prevent favoritism of the state for one religious sect over another, but it is also a mechanism designed to prevent the church from favoring one political party over another. Therefore, the state cannot offer financial support, nor even comment on the righteousness (or lack thereof) to any religious sect’s dogma for any reason. Likewise, no church has the right to speak in favor of any candidate for public office, or allow its facilities to be used for any political purpose, even if that link is somewhat tenuous.

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Each of us is aware that the principle of secularism, of a strict separation of the church and the state has been under attack in this country for at least a couple of generations, and even though it is the forces of the the political right and their “conservative christian” allies that have sought to erase this separation and thereby establish their “free market theocracy,” we are all responsible for allowing it to happen.

Every time a person speaks of the good of bringing god into the political life of this nation, and another person within earshot who understands the true nature of patriotism doesn’t immediately confront this person, the wall of separation between the church and the state is torn down just a little bit. When someone speaks of such things, it is the responsibility of each of us to remind them that their faith is their business, and since we all have the benefit of living in a secular republic, it has no place in the political life of this nation, or in the life of any other American.

Every time someone says that “we need to bring prayer back into the public schools,” a place where prayer has rightfully never been welcome, and another person doesn’t confront this assertion in the strongest possible terms, the wall is demolished a little more. Tell me that there is a Christian who calls for prayer in our public schools who would support a multi-day regimen of prayer in which Christian prayer is observed on one day, Muslim prayer is observed on another day, Buddhist prayer on yet another, and so on down the line, until all of the world’s religions are represented in this exercise. I tell you that if such a person exists they would be excommunicated from their church forthwith upon discovery of such a rational and blasphemous opinion.

I maintain an acceptance of the ancient dictum that money is the root of all evil; I accept that as truth. I also maintain, perhaps even more fervently, that religion is the root of all hatred. It is the father of all intolerance and the mother of all bigotry.

In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is error alone that needs the support of the government. Truth can stand by itself.”

~ Thomas Jefferson

There may be no more important thread upon which our republic hangs than the complete and total separation of the church and the state. More importantly, there may be nothing more intensely tied to our daily freedoms, liberties, our constitutionally guaranteed rights, and the right to worship as we choose, free from unwanted interference than this separation. This is, of course, because both the church and the state have a propensity to overstep their boundaries in all matters of social control, and if we allow them the slightest collusion, the fate of this republic, and the principles of reasoned enlightenment upon which it was founded, may be doomed to an early grave.

It’s Not About Policy Anymore

This essay is the result of more than three and a half years of corruption, incompetence, and most of all, a betrayal of the American ideal; the likes of which this country has never seen. I remember my reaction the day donald trump announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States. I said to myself: “What, does he think he’s going to do, waltz into the White House and be CEO of the United States?” That answer, as we all know now, is “yes,” that’s exactly what donald trump thinks he should be able to do.

I recently had a short conversation with a good friend about the plans for this essay, and her reaction was that her concern is not so much for the preservation of this republic, but for the damage being done to mankind’s hope for building a world called for by God and His Christ, and for, as Jesus taught us to pray, bringing the kingdom of heaven here. This was proper, because she is, I feel, at the core of her soul, a godly, spiritual creature. I, on the other hand, am, at my core, a political creature, and my concern is for the preservation and survival of this republic, and the chance to realize what this great American experiment in self-governance can be; not only to America, but to the world.

The American republic, my dear readers, is under attack and we, as citizens of this republic, are secretly sworn at birth to “defend it and the constitution against all enemies, both foreign and domestic.” We all know that there are foreign enemies of the United States, but the most dangerous enemy, and the one that is the greatest threat to our republic now is the president of the United States.

Spreading Our Legs

In the summer of 2018 Donald Trump traveled to Helsinki, Finland to meet with the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin. This meeting was, essentially, the event that laid before the American people exactly how unsophisticated and uninformed Donald Trump really is concerning the complex nature of international relations. This is particularly true regarding the ends which Putin seeks for both the United States and the world.

I find it difficult to fathom what Donald Trump could have possibly hoped to have accomplished in his two hour and ten minute, one-on-one, unrecorded meeting with Putin, other than compromising an entire treasure trove of classified US intelligence on a host of subjects. Thankfully, most of the facts uncovered by the highly sophisticated and informed US intelligence and law enforcement communities regarding Russia’s successful operation to secure victory for donald trump in the 2016 American presidential election are not known to Donald Trump, as they are part of an investigation into his criminal collusion with a foreign power to secure political office in the United States.

As payment for Russia’s assistance, the trump administration refuses to act upon the evidence laid before it regarding Russia’s attacks on the American republic. They refuse to assist in securing future elections against foreign interference and, in fact, have threatened to remove the security clearances from those within the intelligence community that have been the most vocal critics of the administration’s lack of willingness to protect the American people and their democratic institutions from the likes of Putin and his gangsters in the Kremlin.

Donald Trump is spreading our legs before the insatiable sexual-political appetite of Vladimir Putin, and his cowardly enablers in the republican party refuse to step in and put a stop to it. As cover for their collective cowardice, they claim to see the issue as one of policy and not the survival of the republic. They are also, for some ungodly reason, scared of donald trump..

In March of 2018 the Department of Homeland Security and The FBI issued an alert with the following title: “Alert TA18- 074A: “Russian Government Cyber Activity Targeting Energy and other Critical Infrastructure Sectors.” The message of this document is that the Russian Government continues to target strategic American infrastructure (this includes our oil and electrical systems, and nuclear facilities), as well as both governmental and non-governmental institutional and organizations.

Neither the republican-controlled Senate, nor the White House has acted on this information. Why is this? The only answer can be because the republican party is now no longer the party of fiscal conservatism, but the party of trump and his ‘they’re stupid, so say anything’ populism. Republicans the country over are now somehow beholden to him and his base. They feel they are beholden to trump as we know trump is beholden to Putin. trump and Putin are the same; each of them cares only for themselves.

I realize that many Trump supporters and apologists will be offended by my last statement, but the evidence is too compelling. Aside from Trump’s subservient and borderline traitorous performance in Helsinki, the following incidents lay Trump’s pro-Russian–anti-American agenda bare before the American people and the world.

However, before I outline these incidents, I want to offer a few bare, numerical statistics which are very relevant to the situation in which we now find ourselves. The numbers below are pre-pandemic:

The US annual GDP is approximately twenty-two trillion dollars (US) in goods and services produced.
The EU annual GDP is approximately nineteen trillion dollars in goods and services produced.
The Russian Federation’s annual GDP is approximately one point three trillion dollars in goods and services produced.

What these numbers make clear, in a nutshell, is that Russia has absolutely nothing that the United States needs or wants; they produce no products that can compete in our domestic marketplace, and they have no domestic consumer marketplace for American products. The European Union, on the other hand, not only has goods and services which the American consumer both needs and wants, but it also has the domestic consumer marketplace that desires American products in vast quantities.

Now I shall review several incidents introduced prior to that information:

First, before, during, and after, trump’s important meeting with our European allies, which preceded his personal humiliation in Finland, he continually harangued and insulted our closest allies and largest trading partners in the world. He actually went so far as to call our closest European allies our “foes” in an official statement delivered through his Twitter account. All of this was done to please Putin, who needs a fractured and dysfunctional NATO alliance if he is to realize his plans of reabsorbing large portions of Russia’s western frontier back into a post-Soviet greater Russian Federation.

Most experts in these matters believe that his first targets will be the Baltic States of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. The Russian Federation has all the land it could ever want. What it needs (as it has always needed) are western ports, and vast buffer spaces against Western militaries.

Second, before this rancourous display at the NATO summit, President trump publicly called for the re-admittance of Russia back into the G7, once more making it the G8. Russia was expelled from this group of the world’s largest economies in retribution for their invasion of the Ukraine and annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. Of course, with an annual GDP of only 1.3 trillion dollars, they don’t really belong there, anyway.

Of course, no one in the US government had any idea that President Trump would make such a ludicrous suggestion and state, publicly, a complete reversal of a core American foreign policy developed over decades of cooperation with our sister states in Europe. Not only does this reversal possess no benefit at all to the United States, but it actually creates a more dangerous global environment for the United States and its allies. It is, of course, of great benefit to Vladimir Putin.

Third, both during and after transition from the Obama Administration to the trump administration, the State Department was given the directive of finding ways to lift economic sanctions on Russia, return diplomatic compounds, and ease tensions with Moscow.

Fourth, In May of 2018 the Trump Administration, under orders from new National Security Advisor, John Bolton, eliminated the position of Cyber Security Coordinator from the National Security Council. It is well known within the various wings of our national security apparatus that John Bolton has virtually no cyber-security knowledge or experience, and now this country has no single coordinator of the most relevant and immediate threat to our national security to assist him in advising the President.

The reasoning given for this move was to help streamline the government’s response to cyber-based threats emanating from our adversaries in the world. However, you don’t have to be a political scientist to realize that when you disperse responsibilities in this manner, you act against the very concept of streamlining. The United State’s cyber-security functions will now be coordinated by two individuals with differing responsibilities.

Fifth, to date, after three and a half year in office, the trump administration, to the chagrin of Congress and the American electorate as a whole, has neither devised, submitted, nor, apparently, even considered any plan to protect the American democratic electoral system from foreign cyber attacks. It is obvious that they have no intention of either developing any such plan, submitting any such plan to Congress and the people, or even enacting any sort of ad hoc plan to protect our sacred democratic processes from foreign interference.

Instead, they intend to spread our legs before the greatest adversary of the United States; Vladimir Putin. This intent to undermine American democracy by the trump administration extends beyond the aspects above, they are also pursuing it in a backdoor manner such as the incidents below:

First, on the same day the the indictment against Russian national, Marina Butina, was unsealed, charging her with, among other things, using the NRA to funnel Russian money to republican candidates and conservative causes in the United States, the US Treasury Department, under orders from the trump administration, announced that the NRA and other similar entities will no longer have to reveal to the IRS the identity of their donors.

Second, during the Transition process from The Barak Obama Administration to the donald trump Administration, Jared Kushner held a secret meeting with the head of a Kremlin-linked Russian Bank currently the target of US and other international sanctions. The president of this bank has personal ties to the Russian Federal Security Service and Vladimir Putin.

This list of offenses against the American republic could go on almost indefinitely, but I must end them in order to move to the next section of this essay.

The Man who Would be King

Donald Trump admires the strong man, the autocrat, the dictator who can have people murdered with a wisp of his breath. Men who are above the law in their countries. Unfortunately for him, he is in the United States, and will never realize his dreams of being able to rule by decree — okay, so that may not be entirely true, since the republican controlled senate is unwilling to operate as part of a separate and equal branch of government. So let me rephrase — Unfortunately, he is in the United States, and there are limits on the point to which he can rule by decree.

This is no secret. It is why he praises them above those weak presidents and prime ministers of Europe who respect that cumbersome and unnecessary rule of law. Trump has no idea why they seem to relish the restrictions put upon them by their nations’ laws, history, constitutions, and the basic precepts of democracy. It is why he is drawn to monsters like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. It is also why, while he attended the NATO summit, he spent a great deal of time associating with President Erdogan of Turkey; a man who was not only almost overthrown by a coup d’état in 2016 after having himself declared “president for life,” but has also moved his country so far from the democratic principles of the European states with which it is aligned, that Turkey is in danger of being expelled from NATO, and sanctioned by the European Union.

It is why, when Erdogan was reelected in a non-contested presidential race — his most competent and vocal opponents were in prison — in which he essentially had himself named president for life, that trump called him personally to congratulate him on his electoral victory. I should mention that he did this over the strong objections of his foreign policy advisors. He also called Vladimir Putin after he was “reelected” in 2018 in one of the most corrupt presidential campaigns in history, again, over the strong objections of his foreign policy advisors.

Donald Trump wants to be a dictator and feels slighted by an unfair world because he is not. Kim Jon Un can have his own uncle accused of treason and then taken out and shot! Why can’t Trump do that with Mueller? This democracy thing is nothing more than a nuisance!

Trump loves and admires the dictators of the world so much that he will do almost anything to curry their favor. In March, 2018 in Singapore, president trump agreed to cancel joint military exercises with our close ally, South Korea. Believe me, that was one big gift to his new dictator friend. However, neither South Korea nor our other major ally in the region, Japan, nor even critical actors within the foreign policy sections of the American government were aware that such a concession was even being considered by the White House until it was announced at the end of the meeting.

The US Secretary of Defense had no idea that such a dramatic change in US National Security policy was even being considered. No one with any expertise, or position of responsibility in the complicated world of international relations was consulted. No one, that is, except donald trump’s boss, and the man whose interests donald trump serves; Vladimir Putin.

In the aftermath of president Trump’s many and still unknown concessions to North Korea in his private meeting with Kim Jong Un, it has come to light that in 2017 Vladimir Putin, in a private call between him and president trump, suggested that the US-South Korean joint exercises should be cancelled, indicating that such a move would be a good way to ameliorate Kim Jong Un’s aggressive rhetoric. Such an act would also, of course, drive another wedge between the greater global alliance among the world’s democracies, which Putin needs to be fractured in order to realize his greater plans.

Perhaps Putin was right. Since the Trump/Un summit the North Korean dictator’s public bravado has been a great deal more, shall we say, ameliorated, but his regime continues to develop nuclear weapons, and the United States’ intelligence community has just released a report detailing the facts that North Korea’s nuclear program has continued unabated. In fact, according to the NSA, they are now developing a new generation of intercontinental delivery vehicles capable of striking any target in the continental United States. The response of the Trump administration to this new research was, and I quote: “North Korea no longer poses a nuclear threat to the United States.” That was their entire response. This, of course, is the “Art of the Deal” at work: bankrupt six times over.

UnAmerican Activities…There Ought To Be a Committee

For what, exactly, does the United States of America stand in this world? This is not a rhetorical question, for the answer points to the heart of what America is; not only to its own citizens and the non-citizens who have emigrated here, but to the people of the world as a whole. The United States, more than any other country on this planet is a symbol, and in that sense it is supposed to be a symbol of what can be achieved by humanity if the whole of the planet comes together to work on a project dedicated to lifting the human spirit.

Corruption and cronyism are part and parcel of human politics. They always have been and they always will be, for that is the nature of human, coercive power over another. It is, in many respects, the water that nourishes a politician’s tree of power. This, however, does not mean that we should or must accept its presence in our political system. After all, maybe the greatest prospect of a republic is its innate ability, if acted upon, to minimize, if not defeat corruption.

The corruption emanating from the White House under the direction of donald trump is like nothing ever seen in American history. What is remarkable is that the president doesn’t care, because he knows that his base of uneducated white men with racist views don’t care. As far as they are concerned, as long as they can watch football, drink beer, and use the word “nigger” when among their other uneducated, white friends, trump can do whatever he wants.

The rest of us are not so simple, and we see that the corruption of the trump Administration is in its greater part a threat to America’s place in this world as a symbol of humanity’s common goal. I agree that we are a nation of laws, but since we are the United States of America, we must always first be a nation of compassion. When the law and compassion collide, the law must be circumvented or loosely interpreted in some manner that will allow our natural sense of compassion to win the day. Without this prerogative, we cease to be anything more than just another country.

Family Separation

This country continues to suffer through one of the most horrible episodes in its history. It does not not, of course, compare in any way to the genocide to which the white, European interlopers subjected the indigenous peoples of this continent, nor to the horrors of forced enslavement of millions of African hostages and their children, nor to the Holocaust, but it is, to contemporary America, no less humiliating. This stated policy of the trump administration is one of the cruelest things any state could do to a family; forcibly take the children away from their parents mere moments after the family has appealed for that which must separate America from all other countries: mercy.

Try, if you can, to place yourself in the shoes of these people for just a moment. You have uprooted your family from their home, and all they know and hold dear, because of conditions that make it impossible to stay. You are poor, uneducated, have no idea at all how to navigate the bureaucratic matrix where you are, so you and your spouse decide that if only you and your children can make it to America, you can make a better life…and so you set out on this journey into the unknown.

That, my dear readers, is absolutely appalling, and perhaps the most unAmerican thing any administration could do, short of mass slaughter. Please remember that this was not the actions of some small group of bigoted zealots acting without authorization from their superiors. This forced family separation was the stated policy of the trump administration and it carried out bu agents of the United States Government. When asked by a reporter about the solution to this open hatred at the White House, Trump said, and I quote: “You want a solution? Don’t come to our country illegally!” Our Embarrassment-in-Chief never fails to live down to the world’s expectations of him.

The Muslim Ban

Bigotry has many roots in a person’s heart, and every one of us knows that it simmers just beneath the surface in all of us. Most of us, however, are able to see this innate human bigotry, recognize its darkness, and keep it confined, like a genie in a bottle, deep in the core of our existence; minimized and marginalized as it should be.

Unfortunately, in recent decades there have come the voices of men and women of the Christian and political far right who have sought to loose this evil genie that rages against its confinement in us all. After years and years of preaching to those weakest souls among us who were susceptible to fringe principles, they finally found the fool who could rub the lamp in the hearts of so many who have had their souls distorted by the human racism menace; the fool’s name is donald trump.

One of the most prominent and characteristic properties of both Mr. trump and his base is a basic lack of knowledge of history. I have never met a person who possesses a deep and abiding knowledge of, or love of, history to have been as openly bigoted as those who’s voices are so loud today in American politics. It doesn’t happen because people with a knowledge of history possess a consciousness of the suffering that bigotry and fear causes in a nation.

Also, another aspect of this insanity of the “Muslim Ban” is that it is not borne out by the statistics associated with it. The fact that the only terrorist attack by foreigners who came into our country for that sole purpose was on September 11th, 2001. Since that day, the number of people killed in terror attacks by people of the Muslim faith in the United States number only sixty-four. That’s nineteen years.

Note: Since 2007, a minimum of 283 people, including 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School have been killed in mass shooting terror attacks by whites (280 by men, 3 by a woman) in the United States. Hundreds of others were wounded in these attacks.

Each of these Muslim perpetrators was a legal resident of the United States who lived peaceably among his and her neighbors for years; until, of course, people of the Muslim faith and Islam in general began to become vilified by American society as a whole. These ordinary people found themselves living in a society which, under the auspices of the right-wing press, no longer allowed them to be just people, but labeled them as terrorists, one and all. Eventually, there will be those among them who become susceptible the message of groups like ISIL, or Al-Qaeda. Of these people, a small percentage will look for a way to strike back at those who have marginalized them and hated them simply because they are not white, evangelical christians.

Closing

This essay could go on until trump is either voted out or forcibly removed from office, but I must end it. I will close by stating clearly that donald trump is the greatest threat to the American Republic since England’s King George III. This man, of course, was King of England during the American war of independence. He had not only the means, but also the desire and the will to destroy the United States of America. Hitler posed no such threat. The Japanese Imperial war government of the 1930s and 1940s posed no such threat. Donald Trump poses such a threat.

As Americans; a nation to whom this world looks for leadership in the cause of freedom, we must reject the trajectory on which we now find our country, and realign ourselves with the western democracies with which we have so much in common.

We must, each of us, go to the polls when called.

George Floyd: 3 Factors

This essay was initially going to contain two factors that contributed to George Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis police department, but another came to mind, and felt I needed to expand the scope of the treatise to include it. The three factors I will explore are: Racism, The Deal, and Our Endless wars. These, of course are only three of many factors that helped to bring us to our current state of crisis, but I am limiting my observations to these three. I will then offer a few concluding remarks. To be clear; when I use the term crisis, I do not mean the massive protests sweeping across this country. The crisis is the wanton murder of American citizens by a bloated and viciously violent police force.

Racism:

Racism is not and American phenomenon. Racism is a human phenomenon. It is, I believe, endemic to our species, and may even be written into our genome. Consider this, we are an animal species that congregates in packs and herds. We call them societies and communities, but when we boil this down to its constituent elements, that is what our groupings are; packs and herds. Other mammals that congregate in such a manner always shun and act against the intrusion of an outsider. Humans are no different.

Humanity has spent a lot of energy throughout its existence trying to overcome this scourge and, barring that, at least minimize its effect on how we conduct our lives. We will never completely eliminate racism from human society, but it is one of the most worthwhile endeavors we, as a species and as individuals, could ever undertake. The human world has made great strides and continuous progress in this effort to be inclusive of each other. Many of our sister countries in Europe continue to do so, even under the pressure of right-wing groups that seek to undermine this effort.

Others are moving forward, but the United States of America is moving backward, and we are moving backward at an alarming rate of speed. We are so far back in time on issues of race, now, that black Americans are murdered in white-initiated hate crimes at an insanely high rate. The murder of Ahmaud Arbery is just the latest example.

Many have said that Arbery shouldn’t have resisted, when confronted by two white men carrying guns. There may have been a time in the American South when that was true [okay, stop laughing]…There has never been such a time. So, consider this, A black teenager is jogging through a mainly white area in the American South, two white guys confront him by pointing guns at him. He knows that the only way he will survive the confrontation is to, if possible, wrest one of these guns from one of the white guys and defend himself on somewhat equal footing. Short of that, he knows that they’re going to kill him; for the sport of it if nothing else.

The worst part of the issue of race in America is that we now have a president who stands firmly with the two white guys in the scenario above. The president of the United States depends upon the solid voting block of southern, Christian, “white power” racists. These people make up a large portion of his base constituency, and he is as faithful to them as Mary was to Jesus.

Racism in America today is propelled by not only what seems to be its endemic, natural part of the human species, but now it is also supported and bolstered by the highest office of the executive branch of the US government.

The Deal:

Long ago, America made a deal. That deal was that it is okay for cops to kill people. The origins of this deal are shrouded in mystery, because the deal isn’t written down anywhere. It’s not quantified, or codified in any recognizable manner, but it is there. We all, as Americans, know that it is there. Not all societies, especially Western societies have made such a deal, but America has, and this is the main reason why we live in the most violent society humanity has ever known.

It has been propelled in many ways, and not the least of which is Hollywood. American television and film is rife with with cops killing people. Most people the cops kill in television and film, are “bad guys,” but there is, occasionally the collateral damage, average person, who just happens to take a cop’s bullet. Either way, it always ends up a ‘righteous kill.’

When I consider this issue of The Deal being propelled by Hollywood, I have the image from the end of the movie “48 Hours.” Particularly, the scene in which our main bad guy is charging at Nick Nolte’s character, and Nick Nolte stands there, expressionless, and starts shooting the guy. He doesn’t hit the guy center-mass once, but stands there firing round after round at him, and he doesn’t miss once, He unloads somewhere around six bullets into the guy, and afterwards, everything’s cool. Yeah, everything is cool, and he goes home and has a good night’s rest; it’s been a tough case.

On top of this basic problem of our entertainment industries glorifying the killing of people by cops, you have also the glorification of killing in general. Take any number of series from American television, and the glorification of killing is at the core of it. All of your westerns, almost all of your police shows (except Barney Miller), and many others. How do we solve problems in America? With a bullet…or six.

Regarding cops and their relationship to The Deal, the problem is this; once you tell cops that it’s okay for them to kill people, they’re going to start killing people. Eventually, they will not only kill people, but they will begin to kill people with impunity. This is because The Deal, in order to actually be a deal, and not an aspiration, has to be backed up by government policy, and supported by the court system. These are the two pillars that gave rise to “qualified immunity.” If cops don’t have qualified immunity, then there is no Deal. There can be no deal if cops spend one day in the county jail, or even worse, “life in prison without the possibility of parole” for killing people…you know, like you and me.

Our Endless Wars:

George Floyd may very well have been murdered, not so much by the cop who kneeled on his neck until he was dead, as much as he was by America’s endless wars. This ‘rogue state’ situation in which America now finds itself began with the Reagan Administration and has continued, almost unabated, since then. It was during the Reagan years that the efforts by conservatives to de-fund education and over-fund our military machine began to occur in earnest.

Once the United States began to shift its international priorities from collective, diplomatic engagement, and leadership in multilateral organizations like the United Nations, to a unilateral and adventurist foreign policy based upon military might, the era of endless war became inevitable. How then, does this affect the murder of George Floyd? The age of endless wars murdered George Floyd through its creation of the militarized police force.

I believe that may be the most significant factor in his death. We have vast numbers of people coming out of combat-driven military service every day. These people need to find employment when they discharge back into society. These people, and all of us, would like to find employment in a field in which we feel comfortable. Your basic military veteran feels comfortable carrying a gun. There is only one profession in America, outside of the military, in which members carry guns, and that is the domestic police force. This is one of the major factors in the militarization of our domestic police forces.

The core problem here is training. Domestic police forces should enter any situation with the following thought process at the center of their training: “We have citizens here in a conflict, how can I best diffuse the tensions here, and serve the proposition of domestic tranquility, using arrest tactics only if absolutely necessary, and deadly force only as a last resort to save people’s lives.” When a philosophy like that is at the core of police training, peace will reign in your society. There will always be violence in any society, but a domestic police force that operates on the principles in the statement above will be a factor in minimizing incidents of violence.

Military forces are not trained that way. Military forces are trained, very simply, to identify and neutralize enemies. When you bring that philosophy into the realm of domestic policing, your society is in big trouble, because not only will the police see themselves as a separated cadre of former soldiers, but they will bring the philosophy of ‘identify and neutralize’ the enemies here to their policing practices. This is the core problem of the militarization of police forces. George Floyd was identified and neutralized.

What do we do?:

Let me start with this: We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all people are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator, by God, with certain unalienable rights that can never be taken from them by any person or people. That among these rights are life…yes, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, people create government, and these governments derive their just powers only from the consent of the people. Also, that whenever any government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter, or completely sweep aside that government, and to form a new one; laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to secure their future safety and happiness.

The rebellion must not stop. The people have to realize that unless they press their knee down onto the neck of this government, no change will happen. The politicians will pay lip service to the plight of black Americans’ being subjected to state-sponsored terrorism at the hands of the police, just as they pay lip service to the thousands of people killed in this country by gun violence every year, but lip service is all it will be.

The majority of our politicians are members of the wealthy, shareholder class. Let me say this as an aside: just because you own a couple of stocks here and there, and play a little in the market, doesn’t make you a member of the shareholder class. The shareholder class is made up of the wealthy; the top 10%. The corporate CEO’s who, in the name of their money, have stolen our government. Therefore, we must understand, that unless we confront them and their police with ever increasing numbers and determination which they cannot match, nothing will happen.

This is what we must do. It is not easy, and the government will resist. They have had the American people on the defensive for too long. It is time to turn the tables on them and make them defend what they have done. We should take heart, though, because your average politician is a coward, and just a small amount of courage and discipline on our part, will take us a long way towards a “new government” in which the words of Thomas Jefferson paraphrased above can have true meaning.

Peace,

Niemand

I Will Strike Back

This is a letter from that which you call your mother; a letter from Mother Earth to the human species. You may not want to recognize me, and that is fine. You can say this is a letter from one of your gods, or whomever. None of that matters to me. Make the author whomever you wish, because the message will be the same, no matter who you want to believe writes this letter to you.

Please do not misunderstand me, and let me point out something from the start: I love you. I really do love you. You have such a capacity for creating beautiful things from the gifts I give you, and to see the love of which you are capable is amazing, even for me. Like all mothers, my love for you is unconditional, for if I am your Mother Earth, then you are my children. I have sought to care for you and protect you for countless millennia, but you have taken this love and spat in my face for it.

So, humanity, my message to you, here, is plain, and should be all too evident at this point: I will strike back. If it weren’t so sad that I have to even say any of this, it would almost be funny. You call me “Mother Earth,” but if you treated your earthly mothers in the manner in which you treat me, each of you would spend the rest of your life in a prison. I can take more abuse that you can even imagine. I have taken it, and sought always to comfort and renew for you.

Think of all of the things you have done to me. When you pierce me for your precious oil, you invade and infect the very blood that runs through my veins. When you burrow deep into me for your gold, and your diamonds, you steal from my very heart. When you carve out massive quarries and take the vast mineral wealth I possess, you leave scars upon me that will never fully heal.

I am the very planet on which you live, and I have provided everything for you. All that you have comes from me; the air you breathe, the water you drink, the food you eat, the clothes you wear. In your greed, you have polluted my waters, you have cursed my food, and you now even carve away at the very forests I have given you that provide your precious air.

What will you do when there is not enough air for everyone; all seven-plus billion of you? Will you ration it to the wealthiest of you? Will you bottle it and sell it? Yes, I suppose you will. When you have killed off all of the insects I sustain that are the agents of the sustenance I provide for you, what will you do? When there are not enough bees to pollinate my plants and insure your survival, what will you do? “Ration and sell,” that’s what you’ll do. When the ice caps have melted away, what will you do? When that happens, you will die, that’s what you’ll do.

Through all you have done, I have continued to filter your damage and renew myself for you. Filter and renew, filter and renew, those are the two base functions to which you have reduced me. I am no longer able to thrive and produce new and wonderful beauty for the animals of this world to see, because you have reduced me to a commodity whose sole function is to “filter and renew.”

Through all of this, I have loved you and cared for you, but when you cross a certain line, I WILL STRIKE BACK. I will strike back at you in ways you can never imagine. I will send storms to you the likes of which you have never seen, My hurricanes will grow in size and fury, my tornadoes will grow in size and fury, my fires will grow in size and fury. My visible wrath will be of a size and a fury that should make you tremble, and would make you tremble, were you not too proud.

Remember this, though, humanity: All of these are just a prelude to the full and true expression of my wrath. When I truly strike back at you, I will do so with things you cannot even see. It will be the microscopic world I sustain that will come upon you. They will come from the darkest recesses of my biosphere: places you should never have gone, but in your foolishness, pride, and greed went anyway. These great agents of wrath are my viruses and my bacteria.

Without great destruction of property, without floods that wash away whole towns and villages, without tsunamis that can make an entire island vanish, they will quietly and effortlessly sweep aside all you have made. They will make your systems and your economies crumble. They will hit the “reset” button on your civilization.

World War III is upon you, and I will win, for in the end, know this, for this is the greatest truth you will ever know: I can survive without you, but you cannot survive without me. Through all of this, the wealthiest of you will scramble to maintain their places on their thrones, but they will fall.

When all of this happens, you will then, in the humility I hope you can experience, have the opportunity to filter and renew as I have done so often. You will have the opportunity to truly look inside yourselves and see truths that have always been there, but from which you have turned and blinded yourselves. When all of this happens, you and I will have the opportunity to once again live together. The greatest difference will be that this time our relationship must be a mutually supportive symbiosis, and not the ‘parasite — host’ relationship we have now. You have become a parasite upon me, and I am sick of it.

I am sorry, for one thing, my dear humans. When I strike back at you, those who suffer the most will be those who have dedicated their lives to caring for others. These are your doctors and nurses. They are the ambulance drivers, and the police and fire fighters. They will suffer in serving the rest of you; in doing what your gods have called them to do, because they will live and work in such close proximity to my wrath. In this I am truly sorry, but I cannot avoid it. I weep for them as they shield the mass of you from humanity’s punishment.

Next, although I cannot stop it, the mass of workers who serve others, including the wealthy. They will suffer because of their sheer numbers. They will suffer, because they will have no choice but to enter the fray of my wrath. They must eat, keep a roof over their heads, and they must feed their children. They are the working poor, and they know that they must work to survive from one paycheck to the next.

The wealthiest of you. Through your history, they have always made fortunes off of war, but they will not profit from this one. It will consume them as it will all others. Their gated communities, where the poor are not allowed, will not protect them from my assault. Their hoarding of healthcare in places like the United States, where the care of doctors is not for everyone, will not shield them. They are my true target, but to reach them I must reach everyone.

Humanity, let me remind you once again that I love you, but now I am striking back at you, and I will not stop until you have learned your lesson. My advice to you is to learn well and quickly.

Peace and love to all,

Niemand

Each Of Us Must Now Choose a Side

“These aren’t people, they’re animals.” These are the words of an American President.

I really need for each of you to allow that to sink in for a second. A person who is supposed to be the leader of this ‘nation of immigrants’ and the ‘free’ world has declared, publicly, that the poor and marginalized people who are risking their lives to try to find a better life for themselves and their families are not even human, they are animals; they are brownish…or, really, more of a sandstone, medium to dark tan. Anyway you look at it, they’re not moderately wealthy, Western Europeans. They’re from shit-hole countries, and we don’t want them.

[Aside: no sane, Western European would ever want to come here. I wonder why.]

If you have not actually listened to Mr. Trump’s comments, then you need to. The person to whom he was responding made a comment regarding MS13 gang members, but Mr. Trumps comments, after he declares these people to be animals, quickly ventured into speaking about Latin American immigrants in general with no delineation between them and the criminal element about which he began his comments. This was not accidental. This was not an oversight. This was Donald Trump revealing his inner-most thoughts about our Latin American neighbors. He has declared more than once that in his view these people who are fleeing the most horrid conditions any imperial, white citizen of the United States can imagine; people seeking asylum and safe harbor in the one country on this planet that is, by its very nature, supposed to welcome them, to be animals, something less than human and undesirable.

Please don’t mistake my meaning here. I’m not trying to minimize the brutality of drug smuggling/human trafficking cartels like MS13 and syndicates like them. However, as father Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit Priest who has spent almost his entire adult life working with the toughest gangs in Los Angeles states; he has never met a member of any gang who wasn’t running from something. That something is hopelessness, despair, poverty, and a host of other factors that can take any person from the loving image of God in which they are born, and transform them into the hating image of a devil sent to steal, kill, and destroy.

Every example from the life and teachings of Jesus, the Christ, was quite clear that people should not, and from a secular perspective the President of the United States CANNOT EVER, refer to people as something less than human.

Folks, this can no longer stand. This is the issue on which we MUST confront our legislators in this country. Each of them must declare whether or not they stand with Mr. Trump on this issue, or if they stand against him. However they stand, we must demand that each of them state so, publicly, on the floor of the House or Senate. They must place their cowardly asses on the record. Here, now, in light of these words spoken by the president, it is now plainly (if not painfully) clear that you can stand with Jesus, or you can stand with Trump, but you can not do both.

Jesus said it best in His sermon: “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” ~Matthew 6: 24

I wrote in my last post that we have to ask ourselves if this is what we want America to be, because as long as Mr. Trump sits in the White House, this is what America is.

These words are how it begins. When you begin to characterize people as less than human, as animals, it makes it a lot easier to deport these people, to destroy the families of these people, to slaughter these people. In a sermon I gave a little over a year ago I quoted from Father Martin Niemoller, a dissident priest during the Third Reich in Germany. He said the following:

“When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent. I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent. I was not a social democrat

When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out. I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews, I remained silent. I wasn’t a Jew.

When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.”

I concluded my commentary on those remarks from Father Neimoller with the following admonition: “People, we are at a crossroads in the social evolution of this country. We do not, any of us, want to have to ever say the following; ‘First they came for the immigrants…,’ because believe me, I don’t care who you are, if you don’t speak out, eventually they will come for you, and when that happens there may not be anybody left to speak out.” Christ spoke truth to power, and if we are to be his followers, then so must we.

Even more frightening is that words like those spoken by Donald Trump a couple of weeks ago are the first steps toward genocide. Words like those spoken by Donald Trump a few weeks ago are what allowed presidents and politicians of the 19th century to subject Native Americans to a systematic genocide. Words like those spoken by Mr. Trump led to the lynching of black Americans. Telling a nation that other people are less than human is what allowed people to stand silently by while almost nineteen million people, six million of them Jews, were sent to concentration camps and murdered by the Nazis and their henchmen.

Like Smoky the Bear used to say: “Only you can prevent genocide,” or something like that. The only way to make smoky smile now is to do two things: always speak truth to power, and call out politicians without allowing them to double-speak their way out of an answer.

Niemand