These are more of my black and white images from this past fall. Most of them are from the parks that are close to home because I’ve been concerned about venturing out. When I do go hiking with my camera, I wear a mask and I stay away from people. I would venture a guess that in the parks in central Ohio, fewer than half of the people are wearing masks. I’ve done more than my share of reading about the virus and about the vaccines, driven primarily by the work I do for my association. I’ve learned that the virus can be aerosolized and remain in the air suspended for a long time. Being outside helps a lot – the virus does less well in heat and sun, and it will dissipate more rapidly. But if you are walking behind people without a mask, you are victim to the air they are expelling. Bastards. It is not okay and it makes me crazy that people can be so selfish. I look forward to being out in nature and not having to worry about getting sick and dying from the vacuosity of my fellow humans.
I am so grateful for the covid relief package that was passed by congress and signed by the president. It is going to help so many people who desperately need it. The covid has been a health nightmare for our country and the world, and it has caused so much economic suffering. The poor have been particularly hard hit. Not a single republican voted for the package, and they’ve followed their actions with lots of complaints about it. My senator went directly to his concern about debts and deficits. He had none of these concerns about the $2 trillion dollar tax present to corporations and the wealthiest Americans. It has been estimated that his tax gift to the richest among us will add $1-2 trillion to our national debt. His hypocrisy has been demoralizing. I’m relieved he isn’t running in the next election. I really need for him to go away.
Mitch had the unmitigated gall to use the word ‘jam.’ Think supreme court justices. He also referred to the package as a trojan horse filled with goodies to further the liberal agenda. Why is it that it just galls these people to be helping poor and middle-class Americans? These are the people who have been crushed over the past year, and fundamentally marginalized by our economy for generations. For the life of me, I’m never going to understand why people vote against their economic interests. Looking at this in the crassest direction, living in a world where every person isn’t allowed to own a gun, or a world that values a woman’s right to choose, or allows gay couples to marry may feel sort of yucky, but it has to beat how yucky it must feel not to have a decent paying job or good health care or enough money to help children with their education or to even think about saving for retirement. I’ll continue to think about it. I do understand why people vote against their economic interest when they are driven by hate and the fear of the other. It’s not okay, but I understand it.
The relief package is going to help families with children. It will help to lift a large percentage of children in our country out of poverty.
As to the bloated package filled with liberal goodies that Mitch was all bent out of shape about, I would like to focus on just one of those republican irritants. About $31 billion dollars of the package will go to Tribal governments and Native communities. The reservations started in an economic hole as wide and deep as exists anywhere in these United States of America. The hole was our doing – our government and all our citizens, i.e., us. The average American doesn’t have to think about these people, because we’ve conveniently moved them off into far away, desolate places where we don’t have to see them. We’re all culpable for their suffering, because as you look down at your feet, you are standing on the land we stole from them. We’ve totally screwed up their way of life. Our management of this relationship has been an abject, shameful failure from the time Europeans stepped onto their shores. Every program we administered to rip their cultures and languages from them not only caused an economic, social and health crisis, it created a mental health crisis. The covid has made the health crisis worse and it has made the economic devastation worse.
The $31.2 is a good start. These people need so much more, and we owe it to them. Unlike the other minorities in our country who we often treat like crap, our indigenous peoples hold an entirely different status with our government, and therefore, we the people. We don’t help these people out of the kindness of our hearts. We are legally obligated to do so. At the time our government (us) was working to get all of these people scattered across the entire US out of our way, we treated them as foreign governments. To acquire (steal) their land, we negotiated treaties with them. We’ve screwed them in these treaties repeatedly. The bottom line is that our support of these reservations and these people is our obligation.
About a third of the Navajo Nation is without running water on their reservation. I wish these kinds of conditions were rare on reservations. They are not. Substandard housing, not enough housing, no running water, this can be life for many on reservations. Rural America wouldn’t have electricity and roads without federal government support. It is going to be the same way on reservations. Broadband in rural America will arrive with lots and lots and lots of federal subsidies. We need to do the same on reservations. Unemployment remains rampant. Medical, including mental health, care is not acceptable for many people. Lack of access to healthy food is a way of life. There are so many critical and difficult social problems. These people need our help, i.e., we need to demand that our government accept its responsibilities to find real, and lasting solutions and involve the tribes and the communities in their own decision-making. We need to have sensitivity to the cultural differences between the tribes and to find strategies that will work. Global solutions will not always work due to these differences. Not investing enough money and resources is not okay. Throwing large sums of money at the problems is not okay. There isn’t going to be any easy fix but if we want to reconcile our shameful past and give these people the future they deserve, we’re going to have to make the investment of resources and creativity and remain dedicated to working on meaningful solutions.
I am hopeful that having a Native American serve as the Secretary of the Interior which includes the Bureau of Indian Affairs will be a step in that direction. If this contribution to the health and well-being of our indigenous peoples is part of the trojan horse of liberal agenda items, so be it. The contribution is always too late and not nearly enough.
It has been almost one year since the pandemic was officially announced in the US, and most of us went on lockdown. At the time, none of us could have possibly imagined what this would mean and the impact it would have on our lives. So many lives lost. So many people with long-lasting, difficult symptoms. So many people suffering from personal economic catastrophe. And the political polarization and anti-science crazy shit that motivated millions of our fellow citizens to not wear masks or practice social distancing. I have no doubt in my mind that several generations down the pike, people will look back at all this behavior and lump us into the same historical basket as the Salem witch trials. Now we’re seeing similar anti-science reluctance about the vaccine from a substantial number of white republican men. I honestly don’t get it. I’m not sure if this refusal has anything to do with a consideration of risk. If it does, I hope they understand that sugar, saturated and trans fats, alcohol, smoking anything, being overweight, not wearing a seat belt or a motorcycle helmet and too much exposure to the sun carry a great deal more risk than any vaccine. If refusal is not a risk assessment but rather a political statement, then I would ask you to at least consider the relationship between natural selection and the numbers of republican voters.
I got my second vaccine and I was grateful.
The past four years have been monumentally horrible times for minorities. All these communities have been verbally abused through the direct encouragement of the Orange Emperor. As I’ve noted many times before, he didn’t invent hate or ethnocentrism. Those phenomena have been around since the beginnings of time. What he did was normalize the hate, gave license to the hate and toxic behavior, and encouraged the haters to come out of their caves. The incidence of white supremacist propaganda and hateful incidents have been increasing. These are being tracked and reported on by several groups, including the Anti-Defamation League.
It is a major problem, and it is going to take so much effort to quiet it down. Most unfortunately, the whack jobs have been identified as a significant voting block for republicans. Consequently, because personal power trumps decency, patriotism and humanity, there is little to no criticism of these hateful bigots. Some of these power-hungry cowards remain silent. Some of them go out of their way to speak glowingly of the white supremacist groups. It is both frightening and totally disgusting. I can’t relate to what arrogance must be at work in these people to have them ignore how they are going to be seen by history or the legacies they leave for their families. Geez, grandpa was a disgusting, racist pig.
I appreciate and easily relate to Bill Maher’s concerns about cancel culture. Every reaction to a powerful and dangerous trend can get over cooked. It has certainly happened regarding speech and behavior in this realm. But here’s what I would say about the whole cancel culture thing. Until we can get the haters to go back to whispering and get the white supremacist militias to go back to hiding in the woods, we might have to go a bit overboard as a self-correction to marginalize all these crazy people. Jewish space lasers causing the fires in California. You can’t make up what these total jackasses are making up.
According to Joel Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, social media is a breeding ground of bigotry. I love free speech. If you read my blogs, you would conclude that I celebrate free speech every time words leave my mind. But what do we do as a free society, with our first amendment when speech incites intolerable, unacceptable, or criminal behavior? We’re going to need to struggle with this issue and we’re going to need to deal with social media. It is not in the public interest or our national interest or our collective mental and emotional health not to find a resolution to this dilemma in our society.
When Jews participate in, contribute to, or propagate bigotry in speech or action, I feel a more acute sense of shame and hurt. Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller were either complicit or actors in the last four years of bigotry and hate. Mark Zuckerberg has a whole other set of issues on his plate, but he’s involved in this whole mess, as well. I most definitely hold Jews to a different standard when it comes to this stuff. Given our history and the legacy of prejudice and discrimination toward Jews, they should know better. From the time of the diaspora, Jews have been strangers in a strange land. For centuries, we lived at the whim and will of a dominant society. We purposely had no way to defend ourselves against any abuse that was delivered, and it was delivered with regularity. Medieval Europe, the Inquisition, the pogroms, and the Holocaust … each brought its own brand of suffering, death, and destruction. This history is a part of our cultural and historical DNA. It is anathema to who we are, to not care for the other, however the other is defined – socially and culturally different, economically disadvantaged, socially marginalized, the immigrant.
When a Jew foments hate toward the other, he or she brings it upon themselves. It is more than shameful. It is dangerous and it needs to be called out.
I hope the Facebook brand and the Kushner brand are viewed accordingly.
Let’s hope Stephen Miller just fades away into the obscurity he so deserves.
Regarding whether the royal family is racist … why does anyone care? Why is the royal family a thing? And especially in the United States of America. Think revolutionary war or sing along to the music in Hamilton. Beyond not caring about the royal family, the entire question as to whether there could be racism among the royals, please consider that these are the people who colonized the entire brown and black continents for their own economic gain. They exploited people and resources based on the belief that they had the right to do so from the implicit or explicit notion that they were superior to those they dominated. Where, pray tell could racist attitudes possibly derive from white people who believe that they are in a caste above all others by virtue of no attribute beyond family of birth? The more pertinent question might be, who among the royals is not racist, and how the hell did that happen?
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