About Thinking Out Loud

Like it says, this is about thinking out loud, just me thinking out loud, which I have been doing some of on FB except that a very good friend of mine said “If you are going to do this, you need a blog.”

I said, “I can’t figure out how to do that”, and Joel Dowshen said well that’s not a problem, because he knows how to do it. And so he helped me create it and here I am, for which I thank him.

And then I thought about one of my favorite quotes of all time, the one you see here from Will Rogers, that great American humorist and wisest of men; and it seemed to me that what this thinking out loud should be about is peeling the onion, just peeling and paring away all the stuff that gets in the way of a common sense understanding of politics, policy, government,  history — of how it all fits together with an understanding, as someone wrote once, of “life its own-self.”

So the first observation I’ll make here is that, actually, we don’t actually have a government now and it does not look like we will have one for a very long time, if at all.

It has been hollowed out and if this persists for very much longer we could fail — yes, we the great American Republic, could fail.

This great experiment, the one Lincoln dated back four score and seven years, taking it back to the Declaration of Independence, not to 1787 and the Constitution, but to the date on the Declaration, July 4, 1776, is in the gravest danger it has been in since — since when?

Well, is it since 2 a.m. on Christmas Day 1776 at a place now called, on both the Pennsylvania and New Jersey banks of my river, the Delaware River — now called Washington’s Crossing? The spot where Gen. George Washington and 2,200 ragged soldiers (hundreds without shoes, their feet wrapped in rags though marching in blizzard conditions) crossed the river and organized themselves to march on and take Trenton later that morning — dividing into two forces, one taking what we who know that part of the world today call Route 29 and also called the river road, and the other a pathway that now traverses Route 31, which they called the Pennington Road.

Or is the moment of gravest danger until now the moment the British burned down the White House during the War of 1812?

Or the moment Pierre Beauregard literally gave the order to fire on Ft. Sumter (not for nothing is Beauregard the middle name of Attorney General Jeff Sessions — and not for nothing is his full first name Jefferson, as in Jefferson Davis)?

Or could it have been July, 2, 3 and 4 1863 at a place called Gettysburg? Many would yet say that is the right answer.

Or  perhaps it arrived in the shape of Japanese dive bombers barreling down as the sun rose over Pearl Harbor at 1 p.m., eastern standard time (7 a.m. in Honolulu)  on Dec. 7, 1941 (Dec. 8 to the Japanese on the other side of the International Dateline), a day on which 2,400 Americans died, more than 1,000 entombed inside the hull of the Battleship Arizona?

Or it came June 6, 1944, when 2,400 more Americans died securing a grip on Utah and Omaha Beaches, mostly for sure on Omaha, and at St. Mere Eglise and other jump targets of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions?

Or  is it the most recent of these memories,  9/11/01, when 2,800 people died, not all Americans but all of them for sure on American soil, in American buildings that reached into the sky in the greatest city in the world?

And the answer to the question of the date and moment of the gravest and greatest danger to this experiment of ours we call America may well be Nov. 8, 2016, the date of course of our recent election and its distortion by the historical malignancy called the Electoral College, an integral part of a deal made with slave owners in 1787.

But this one? This  one is different because it is on us, on us now. It comes from our own inattention to our democracy and our far too short attention span and it comes from the fact that we place our attention on the wrong things– and so we took our eyes off the ball, gave up the game and allowed this to happen.

This? That so many are protesting? You want to know who is to blame for it? You are, I am, we all are.

And why, for us, is it graver than all those very grave moments in our common American history? Because it is happening now, to us and because it is happening because of us, because we got careless. And because unless it is stopped it could end America as we have understood it, as the world understands it, as it must be if there is to be any order in the world.

A lot of people are now aware of all this and so they are about the work of fixing it. Before they get the chance to do that in 20 months in the mid-term elections, there will be a lot more that gets broken in this country. But at least now we can see and hear the breakage and know who is doing it and know they have to be tossed out.

And not just tossed out on their ears or their proverbial rear ends, but on their flat out stupid asses.

So, let’s be about doing that. Soon I’ll write about the one and only prescription I know that can accomplish that and gain back America, its future and order in a disordered world.

Vive La Resistance!