What Can One Say?

 It is getting increasingly difficult to write my blog lately. Why? Well, part of it is my age, well past my “sell-by” date. And why is age a factor in whether I write, or about what subjects I write? Well, it seems that I can only complain about an issue so many times and then I tire of it, and it of me.  I mean how long can you go on writing about Trump’s continued Organized Crime Gang behavior?  It seems that nearly every other day, a new revelation pops into our consciousness, and yet another of his past criminal acts comes to light and is now likely to lead him to difficulty. But then we go on, and he goes on whining about Fake News. Increasingly, he wants his attackers charged with some illegal behavior and jailed, or maybe even killed.  See, he no longer even pretends to be civilized. He seems to think he is an actual monarch, and not even a constitutional monarch, but an Absolute Monarch bound only by his own rules.

And so we go on. And my pen is stilled, because there is no longer anything I can say that is new.

And then I read a story about the West Coast drought that is now being compared to a drought that may have occurred over 1200 years ago.  Or, at the least, it seems to be the worst drought in over 1200 years. See, we used to say things like, “wow, we haven’t seen a dry spell like this since 1980”, or some such retrievable date. But we seem to have stopped saying the Climate Change thing. Apparently, the climate has changed, and we are now in some new era, one we have never seen before. We speak of droughts that may deliver us new Sahara deserts, and we speak of coastal erosion that will deliver sea-level rise of 1-2 feet. Now that may not seem like much, but apparently many coastal regions will either disappear altogether, or will become seriously flooded. I gather, any town or city along any of our coast lines will be partly or wholly under water. So, pay attention New York, East Second Avenue may soon be under water. I imagine that means that MaraLago will be under water and Miami will simply disappear, along with Key West.  So, you folks living in Florida might want to consider moving to Appalachia sooner rather than later.

Oh and remember that pandemic thingie? Well, guess what? It ain’t going away any time soon. Oh yeah, those red states are shedding themselves of those damnable mask mandates. But really all that will accomplish is that more folks will wind up in the hospital, or dead from COVID.  See the “red” states, meaning republican, or Trumpies, don’t care about protecting their citizens any longer. Well, to be fair, they never really did care anyway, trapped as they were in paying obeisance to their rich owners. But they used to at least pretend. No longer sadly.  And so the political wars over a disease state will continue, because it pleases the Trumpies.

And I guess the Reddies are becoming tired of yelling about mask mandates that strip their freedoms to act stupidly. And so they have descended to yelling about books. Hard to imagine but it’s true. Several hundred books are now on someone’s Banned List. A few are listed here:

Maus, The Hunger Games, 1619, I know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Harry Potter, A Wrinkle in Time, Are You There God, It’s Me, Slaughterhouse Five, 1984, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Handmaids Tale, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, Animal Farm, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, A Farewell to Arms. Someone even added Ulysses to the list for God’s sake. And I doubt that anyone in charge of book banning has ever even succeeded in reading Ulysses.  So what is this book banning all about? Well, it seems to give the religious right yet another opportunity to demonstrate that they really wish to eliminate civilization as we know it, and return us perhaps to some 12^th century lifestyle.  And this uncivil crowd also is pursuing abortion banning. Over 20 states now are poised to ban abortions once our SCOTUS eliminates Roe V. Wade as the law of our land, which should be any day now.  They call themselves “Pro-Life”, but really they seem to be “Anti-Sex”, since they care not about any of the children that occur as a result of their bans.

And I await with great anticipation what the Trumpies will next pursue. I am thinking that they will begin to act to try to make it illegal to forego religion. Yeah, surely that’s next, so all agnostics and atheists beware. They will be after your bodies really soon.  And then America can move smoothly into the 12^th century. No public education, surely a monarch at the top of our government, perhaps even an Absolute Monarch, ahh, yes, King Donald I, with Princess Ivanka waiting in the wings.

And so life goes on in 21^st century America.  We could of course vote to change all that, but the reddies are working busily to eliminate our ability to vote. First, all those folks of color, then maybe all those old folks can be eliminated as voters.  Then . . . ahh what comes next?

Stay tuned to the next installment of America in the 12^th Century.