Stop Being Awful

Two chicks resting in a person's hands.
Image: Duygu Güngör on Unsplash

Oh, my word. There has been such ugliness these past few days. First, I’m going to put this out there about how people are reacting to Joe Biden’s cancer. I think it says everything that needs to be said with respect to how a lot of MAGA people are calling the diagnosis “karma.”

Indeed. It seems empathy and compassion are completely shot in the U.S.

Look at what Congress and the Senate are doing. The current budget bill would pretty much destroy Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP. These odious Republicans are not going to be happy until the poor have nothing left to lose. It’s very short-sighted of them. See: France, 1789. Tell ya what, though. Most people aren’t going to care about which party someone belongs to when it comes to putting heads on pikes. At that point, all politicians are going to look the same because deep down, most of them are. Cory Booker, I’m looking at you. (Booker voted to approve Ivanka Trump’s felonious father-in-law as ambassador to France.) You’re not much better, Bernie Sanders, what with your comments on “identity politics.” Thanks for reminding us all that you are, at heart, an obliviously privileged cis-het white male.

And then my heart just broke today when I read of the 14,000 chicks abandoned in a hot USPS truck for three days without food and water so that nearly 4,000 of them died. Who in heaven’s name made it legal to ship chicks through the mail?

If you’d like to help with a donation, foster, or adoption, the name of the shelter that is caring for them is First State Animal Shelter and SPCA. You can make a donation through their website.

Yep. People need to stop being awful.

The Void Is So Full

The Milky Way Galaxy as seen from Earth at night.
Image: Graham Holtshausen on Unsplash

Is it really mid-May already? When last we left off, it was the end of February. So much for my New Year’s Resolution of maintaining this blog.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t write in an online journal in April at all, but to check in a couple of times. I took a month off from all of that, and writing in a paper journal, just to rest and see if I could regain some semblance of motivation for anything as things had become a relentless grind since January. Get up, log on, work, log off, eat, watch TV, sleep, rinse, repeat.

I’m still a bit stuck, but have concluded that I’m in that weird place Carl Jung talked about when he described how people lose motivation after their awakening, enantiodromia. I’ve stopped chasing, stopped worrying about to-do lists, stopped caring about hustle, proving myself, and achieving—all the things that keep Washington, the institution running—and now find myself thinking “How much of this really matters?”

Part of it is that I’ve made some time to refocus on Zen and Stoicism. The first “rule” of both of them is to concern yourself only with what you can control: your actions, reactions, thoughts, and perceptions. The second “rule” is to let go of what you cannot control, and oofta, there’s a LOT of stuff I cannot control, like other people’s behavior and reactions, the evil in the world, and what happens around me.

When I stopped to think of all the things I can’t control, I started bowing out.

I will not engage in political discussions beyond agreeing with strangers’ social media posts. Someone wants to think I’m wrong? Okay.

Someone didn’t respond to a text? Okay.

Someone doesn’t have time to get together? Okay.

Someone doesn’t want to reschedule after breaking plans? Okay.

Someone didn’t respond to an email or call at work? Okay.

Someone gets angry after asking me to do something for them and I set a boundary and say no? Okay.

Traffic? Okay.

Bad weather? Okay.

Number I didn’t want to see on the scale? Okay.

No one wants to join me in something I’m doing or going where I’m going? Okay.

I’m not chasing. I’m not forcing. I’m not striving to make any points, get people to agree, impress, perform, or bring people into my sphere who don’t want to be there. I welcome those who are with me, let go of those who aren’t.

At any rate, that’s why I haven’t been around. I’m in what the video below describes as the Hermit stage, the phase between death and rebirth, and it’s all swirling around with rising detachment in the Zen sense. But I’m still floundering around a bit. Although I’ve begun to say no to things that don’t resonate, I’m still learning to let go of wanting things to be the way I want them to be rather than how they are. I just have to trust the process.

Third-Party Sellouts

I’ve had the flu since last Friday and have been home recuperating all week. Yes, I’m vaxxed, but that doesn’t prevent infection like some magic forcefield that rebuffs errant sneezes. It just means that if one does get infected, one can fight it off better.

Anyway, yesterday the illness broke. I was tired but definitely had rounded the corner and was starting to feel human again when I VERY STUPIDLY decided I was well enough to handle Threads and other sources of public discourse and news. And there I was in the wee hours, calling out Jill Stein supporters for selling out women, children, people of color, older people, the poor, LGBTQIA+, and immigrants in THIS country to throw their little political hissy fits.

Oh, my good GAWD, I am so tired of the trope that voting for Kamala Harris was a vote for genocide. Ever notice how so many of those types going on about that are men, usually white ones, who will not be affected in any way by Project 2025 who expect the rest of us to sacrifice our safety and reproductive, civil, and human rights to take a side in a conflict between two groups of people 10,000 miles away who have hated each other for 1,000 years and will hate each other for 1,000 years more? Nah, brodudes. I didn’t vote for genocide when I voted for Harris. I voted to protect my own country from fascism. I voted to protect my fellow Americans from Project 2025 and exactly the crap that’s happening now. Domestic policy matters. And right or very, horribly, disgustingly wrong as it is now, the U.S. will always support Israel to one extent or another because the U.S. gets a lot of intelligence from Israel about entities in the region who are hostile to the U.S.

Well, if you were Palestinian- or Arab-American you would–

VOTE THE SAME DAMN WAY I VOTED THIS TIME. Look, if Gaza were Italy, I’d still vote for Harris. I say that even as my sister is headed to Messina to meet cousins we didn’t know we had. My father fought for the Allies. My mother, who was part German, supported the Allies in WWII. My paternal grandfather, who was direct from Italy as a first-generation immigrant, was all in for the Allies in WWII. They were American first, tied to the old countries second. That’s my attitude, too. My goal in the voting booth was to do right by my fellow Americans—my friends, loved ones, neighbors, colleagues, and myself, right here in the U.S.—by trying to stop Creamsicle Caligula.

Furthermore, Stein is nothing but a shrill cicada who comes up out of the earth every four years to make noise, only instead of having the good graces to fly away and shed her mortal coil after giving everyone a headache for a few months, she goes back into the earth to await the vibrations of a campaign speech so she can re-emerge and do it all again. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would see how some feel she’s a right-wing plant because she does nothing but deflect and siphon votes away from the Democrats and then she drops off the face of the earth. She’s useless, her candidacies are hopeless, and voting for her, or not voting, makes one partially responsible for what is happening in the U.S. right now. Those who threw their votes away—votes that millions of Americans have fought, killed, and died to preserve—have no moral high ground, and they’re about to find out as much as the idiots who voted for Apricot Pol Pot thinking he would lower the price of eggs. As I told one transgender man who was nattering on about how the Democrats weren’t much different than Republicans and who will likely be screeching an octave higher from a beardless face in six months when the regime takes his hormones away, “I voted for the [candidate] who would not take away your gender-affirming care AND who had a chance of winning. You threw your vote away. That’s on you.”

And don’t get me started on all the Drumpf-humpers who are now going on like, “Well, I didn’t vote for THIS. He betrayed me.”

Yeah, you voted for this. You just didn’t think it would affect YOU. You were fine with it as long as it happened to someone else. So you, too, can sit down and shut up.

As for the regime, holy hell, someone needs to do it soon. You know exactly what I’m talking about. Yes, you do. And, like the punchline of an old joke, whoever does it needs to take no chances and do all three.