If you listen and/or watch one commentary on post-election election news, listen to this one. It covers a broad spectrum of upcoming prolems in a succint, listenable monologue.
https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/chris-hayes-if-the-gop-loves-our-country-it-needs-to-fight-covid-19-95751237606?fbclid=
-z_H8Et-s4k6fQdoxOrwUSLxbxhqzFZh57ivy8Tuc110
This short comment on the election by Jan Wilberg on Red’s Wrap sums up so well the current state of the nation that I had to share it.
We have been saved. By ourselves.
Maybe that’s all I need to say. But it feels like I need to say more.
We are changed by what has happened in our country. There are fine parts of us that have been worn away by the steady rasp of cruelty. We felt this happening. It was searing and painful at first, but soon we became numb, and then we were surprised to look at ourselves and see the fine parts gone.
There has been damage done, not just to us as a people, but to us as people. Each of us.
But there’s also been muscle built where before there was weakness. Millions of people, exhausted but made stronger by treading water in the bottomless, terrifying ocean of our country, found their way on to the life raft of the election.
Seventy-four million of us. We saved ourselves. We saved the…
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I could not stand to watch election results, afraid that election results from four years ago would be repeated. I awakened at 5 a.m. to read a Facebook message from a friend fearing Trump had won. (Thanks, Gordon, for such a pleasant awakening message.) Then a message flashed in the upper right of my screen that Trump was protesting the election. So perhaps he hadn’t won, but the idea that it was close enough that he’d consider doing so broke my heart. Then I looked at the prompt words:
Fools Rule Fools
Utopia is broken, it’s promise growing faint.
Not a pretty picture for liberty to paint.
That it could even be this close signals something broken.
That all our pretty declarations have become a token.
Liberty and fairness? Land of opportunity?
What happened to “Give me your poor?” What happened to our unity?
“Opportunist” works to label one who seeks to rule us,
driven to seek office out of a lust to fool us.
People, take your blinders off. Your piper is a cruel one.
When it comes to ruling over fools, it takes a fool to rule one!
Voting Our Destruction
Some birds will still sing and flora abide
no matter what human might reside
in the colorless house with the POTUS inside.
But not so for those that have already died.
In the past year, seven more
have ceased to run or swim or roar.
The outcome of our land and sea,
each animal , insect and tree
depends on policies they make.
Will Earth survive or will we bake
on the spit of reckless choices,
protests made by unheard voices?
Will we find, at end of day
we’ve voted our kids’ lives away?
These are the species lost to us
in last year’s sparring, useless fuss:
What new denizens will perish
from this Earth we say we cherish?
Yet we vote its life away
And we’re the ones who’ll have to pay.
Today the loss of species is estimated to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times than that of the natural extinction rate. WWF reports that between 0.01% and 0.1% of all species go extinct every year. Considering the fact that there are around two million species on the planet, it means between 200 and 2,000 extinctions occur every year. And note, we are talking about species of which humans are one.
As per the 2018 report of World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), there’s a 60% decline in the population of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians in just 40 years. As per the IUCN Red List, more than 30,000 species are threatened with extinction, which means 27% of the nearly 1,12,000 species accessed so far are under grave danger.
In the past ten years, 33 plant species have become extinct. The species listed above in my poem all vanished in 2019. I was unable to find a list for 2020.
November 3, 2020
We’re all on tenterhooks, watching and waiting.
We’re tired of tirades. We’re tired of debating.
All of our liberties turned inside out.
What was once done in peace has turned into a bout.
They storm and they threaten and set up false boxes—
the eagle of freedom brought down by vile foxes.
We can’t vouch for our system when so much goes wrong—
when our national anthem’s drowned out by a throng
of those who think that because they are white,
they are superior and have the right
to put down minorities and to change facts,
their white supremacy pardoning the acts
of looting and burning and intimidation.
These acts being staged with no trepidation
thanks to the POTUS who sits calmly by
and approves of it all from his perch in the sky.
We anticipate violence—fear it’s the ones
sowing disorder who have all the guns.
What is the solution? To arm everyone
and have a big shootout when voting is done?
Increasingly, I fear our cyber connection
has been both a bane and a lethal infection.
The villains know how to make use of it
to foment disaster and cause a big fit.
It reaches out hands to enter our homes.
It slashes and pierces and rabidly foams.
Hiding its poison in all of the cracks—
in viruses, malicious websites and hacks.
Turn out the villains, then work on the system
that welcomed them in and pampered and kissed ’em.
Our system of governance was made to be changed,
lest it be exploited by the deranged.
Enact campaign finance and firearms control,
then stem the electoral college’s role.
Time-worn practices need doing in,
for the robes of liberty have grown too thin.
Threadbare and tattered, she quakes at the blast
of self-serving politicians that tear at the past.
Prompt words today are tenterhooks, anticipate, storm and vouch. Image by Peggy Zinn on Unsplash. Used with permission.
Forgottenman just informed me that I misspelled “Just Deserts.” Hard to believe, but it isn’t “Just Desserts.” Go figure!!! I just changed it.
Click on the link below to read the entire message: ‘We Do Not Live in Javankastan’
Click on link below, not on arrow to play video
Mandy Patinkin & His Wife Riff Over “Doom & Gloom” Campaign Video
One No Trump
It seems that any smartie would
have questions of the hardihood
of one who can’t control his urges,
but opens mouth and simply purges!
It’s anything but recondite
that he is less than erudite.
He stammers and he mispronounces
as he proudly mis-announces
facts and figures he’s invented,
letting out hot air that’s pented
up inside his roiling brain.
The scuttlebutt? This man’s insane!
For the present, we’re stuck with him,
but (we hope) his future’s grim.
In the future, perhaps a cell—
a domain that would suit him well.
No more oval office for
this vain and posturing dimwit bore!
If they ever choose to make
a movie of this shyster flake,
casting’s bound to be a bummer—
choosing between “Dumb” and “Dumber.”
Which will most aptly replicate
our soon-to-be ex “Fool of State?”
Prompt words for today are hardihood, scuttlebutt, urges, recondite, the present and movie.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 