Just Try Me

Here’s how this is gonna go from now on.

– If we meet and I find out you voted for Donald Trump and continue to support his policies I will confront you.

– I will confront you if you are a friend, relative or a friend of a friend or relative.

– I will confront you on social media even if I don’t know you but you are posting on a friend or follower’s page.

-I will confront you if you are in my home, at a dinner party, on the street, in a restaurant, at the movies and, most especially in front of people we know.

– I will confront you and I will be tireless. I won’t stop. Seriously. I will have an answer for every argument you posit and I will not hesitate to roll around in the mud with you, no matter how nasty and dismissive your argument gets.

– I will confront you because there is no time to be nice and to pretend that you have not wrapped your arms around someone who is a mentally imbalanced pathological liar, corrupt, racist, sexist and bereft of morality. Someone who doesn’t read, is not very smart and is a threat not only to the country but to the very existence of the world.

– I will confront you because time is ticking and it is not on my side. In fact, it is not on your side either but you are too brainwashed, prejudiced or set in your ways to look at reality.

mic drop

I really wouldn’t care to engage with you at all if I didn’t have to share the world with you. I’d let you and your kind burn to the ground at this point. But being that we have to breathe the same air – at least while we can breathe it – I will attempt to persuade you into reality using what has always been the most effective means at my disposal – words. Yes, I will listen to you but I will not indulge your fantasies, your fake news or your claimed past history of being a decent human being. Everything about you is indecent at this point. If you knew better or had any morality left you’d be ashamed.

I won’t go through a litany of what the Pres. Elect (who lost the popular vote by more than 2.8 MILLION and counting) has done in the last few weeks. Things like appointing a woman to head the Dept. of Education who doesn’t believe in public schools, a guy to head the Environmental Protection Agency who doesn’t believe in global warming, a billionaire businessman to head the Dept. of Labor who doesn’t believe in the minimum wage and a religious homophobe to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development who admits his only experience for the job is that he was “raised in the inner city.”

Oh! And he owns a home too! #wowie

Here’s what I will do. I will mention and provide a link to the Washington Post expose that just came out detailing the undeniable evidence that both the CIA and FBI have proof Vladimir Putin and Russia spent the last year trying to influence voters and tilt the election to Trump with fake news, massive computer hacking and god knows what else (oh and this NY Times piece too). If we meet in person or online I will make a good case to you that given Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort became a very wealthy man working for Russian and Ukranian oligarchs it is logical and likely the campaign and the candidate himself had at the very least knowledge of this and more probably aided and abetted them. I will also share several stories I’ve heard over the last few years from very wealthy people that the working class billionaire Pres. Elect himself had become HEAVILY in debt to Russian banks and billionaires in order to keep his financial empire afloat and that, until his emergence in the Republican field, was denied much if any bank credit in this country anymore. No I can’t legally prove that but ask yourself another question – why does Trump go out of his way to NEVER criticize Putin or Russia or ANY of their military or financial misdeeds when there is almost NO ONE in the world other than family and a handful of fellow billionaires, and certainly not a SINGLE OTHER COUNTRY, who he has not criticized?

Two is just not enough

Also ask yourself, why were Republican members of Congress actively attempting to suppress all information about Russia’s involvement in our election while the election was going on – so much so that Republican Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell threatened Pres. Obama with an orchestrated smear of political bias if he dared to speak out about how widespread our government believed the Russians were in influencing the election?

Oh, and I will also ask you this follow-up question: “If you claim to love this country as much as you say you do, and the idiot Elect claims to, and the Republican members of Congress say they do, and you all truly want to “make America great again” (whatever the hell that means) – “Why does all of this not matter to you?”

… but saying this sends you into a tailspin. #priorities

What I won’t argue about is that Pres. Obama, born uniter and glass half full scholar in chief that he is, should have screamed the truth as loud and as strong as he could from the presidential bully pulpit and let all the chips fall where they might. Perhaps he had information we all didn’t but it’s hard to imagine that whatever he knew could possibly be worse than the outcome we’ve already gotten. Still, the end of the story has not been written yet and he’s a lot smarter than I am so perhaps there is a method to his momentary madness. At least I hope so.

Barack, whatcha gonna do?

You are welcome to say things to me like liberals can’t hear opposing views, you’re exaggerating and why don’t you give the guy a chance. I’ve heard them all and have well-reasoned responses. You can also call me a Jew or a fag or mutter other epithets under your breath because I’ve heard all of those recently and through my life and know just what to shoot back online or in person with the likes of those of you who will do that. I and my kind don’t scare easily so give it your best shot but don’t try to sell me on the idea that Trump’s senior advisor Steve Bannon isn’t a rabid anti-Semite and a racist. That really insults my intelligence and what little you have left.

I see you… and I’m not taking my eyes off of you

By the way, you might be interested to know how I finally reached my tipping point with you. Strangely enough, it was the NBC live broadcast this past week of the Broadway musical Hairspray. It’s a cream puff of show but it thematically does deal with a chubby girl who tries to integrate a local TV dance show in the early sixties and has to battle a gaggle of privileged and unprivileged white people who down to their very souls believe Blacks are inferior – as is anyone who is overweight, or who is skinny and wears glasses, or is, well, even a little different from them.

Thank you perfectly polished NBC cast #evenyouArianna #especiallyyouderek

Thank you perfectly polished NBC cast #evenyouAriana #especiallyyouderek

When this show debuted on Broadway more than 10 years ago it was fun and nostalgic and was a reminder of a hard fought history lesson. This week it was strangely relevant and resonant and all too timely. It spoke to a new era under an incoming president whose supporters scream his name at rallies with Hitler-like salutes, spew hate-speak at minorities nationwide in public places, and shout down, threaten and troll online and in person anyone who dares to vehemently disagree with him. I was a kid when these battles were fought and I’ll be damned if in my third act of life I’m going to let the likes of you drag us back 50 years in time.

And no, I’m not going to give the white working class of this country a big warm hug for tolerating lies and racism so they could have a national temper tantrum that will endanger the safety of the entire global community. We’re all hurting in different ways. But there are lines that are not crossed. And once crossed we confront them. So stay tuned and get used to people like me being right up in your face because this won’t let up for at least the next four years. You’re not going to drag us down to the gutter of beliefs where you have so very unwisely chosen to live.

Oh, and indeed, you are a basket of deplorables. Though that’s the nice term.

07.10.16

by notesfromachair

What Do We Do Now?

At the end of the iconic film of American electoral politics – The Candidate – blonde, handsome and iconically American Robert Redford sits blankly confused after winning his unlikely maiden bid to the U.S. Senate and famously asks the smarmily savvy political consultant who got him there:

What do we do now?

Almost half a century later, it’s still an apt question.

Two more comparatively young Black men were shot and killed by police this week in what can best and most generously be described as grievous mistakes in the line of duty and at worst would be called racist executions by white guys in law enforcement uniforms.

Still, we should all think long and hard after we listen and speak to as many people as possible on questions such as the above one. Because before those two deaths had even sunk in, a cock-eyed retaliation took place from an angry, unbalanced decision-maker that had worldwide reverberations. This would be the murderous rampage via an assault-like rifle and handgun from a single shooter into a crowd of Dallas police officers and demonstrators that managed to murder five white cops as well as injure seven other people.

too many headlines

Oh yes. The execution of the police was done by a 25 year-old African-American veteran of our seldom-mentioned U.S. war in Afghanistan in retaliation for the aforementioned shooting of the two Black men at the hands of the police. Though what the shooter didn’t know is one of the men in blue that he killed was a young American war veteran himself.

The Candidate was released in 1972 but reflects what seemed like the ripping apart of the social fabric of America at the time. Race riots nationally in 1967, the Chicago police beating the crap out of demonstrators at the Democratic presidential convention in 1968 and the murder of four at Kent State University in 1970 when members of the National Guard decided to shoot into a crowd of students protesting the Vietnam War with a couple of rocks and beer cans. Though in fact, two of the dead were simply walking by on the way to class.

Pres. Obama said in a speech this week in Poland that what is going on now is different from the civil unrest in 1960s America and that today we are a country more unified. This is why he is a leader and the president of the U.S. That’s what great leaders attempt to do – unify.

Also this

Me, I’m not so sure. I tend to think of it more like the writer and journalist James C. Moore (“Bush’s Brain”) observed several days ago. He opined that the angry rhetoric of the far right has released an ugliness into the country that began to bubble to the surface once the majority of us elected our first African American president almost eight years ago. And that this ugliness has morphed into a righteous anger on the part of many whites who are now rallying behind a Republican nominee who periodically releases coded racial dog whistles that flame their anger and more than imply a good old-fashioned American retaliation (nee violence?) to protestors or those deviating from their “values” is more than acceptable.

It is interesting to note that part of what angered young Americans in the late sixties and early seventies was not only the Vietnam War but the election of Richard Nixon, who famously campaigned as the law and order candidate who represented the silent majority. It might not be as currently catchy as Make America Great Again or Take Back America but it served its purpose. He did win. Twice. Though never mind he was forced to resign midway through his second term in order to avoid what was a likely impeachment due to the dirty tricks with which he willingly engaged in order to be re-elected to the White House. #Watergate (Note: Look it up).

… or watch any of these movies

Of course, if you’ve watched any news report in the last several months where either of the nominees speaks or is spoken about it is impossible to not hear accusations of dirty tricks, double-dealings, sketchy email servers, shady real estate dealings or crooked something or others – from both sides.

Still, in 1968 it was at the Democratic convention in Chicago that the Democratic mayor Richard Daley unleashed his police force to rough up protestors that he believed were behaving in an “un-American way.” This time it is only when we watch the Republican nominee speak and a protestor is present do we invariably hear said nominee bellowing from the podium – “Get’em Out! Get ’Em Out” – usually amid roars of approval from his apoplectically cheering crowd as the would-be insurgent is dragged, often literally, out of the arena and away not only from earshot but from his sight line.

Sure, history might repeat itself but certainly never in exactly the same way and usually not by the same crowd in question. Nevertheless, there’s a tediousness to it all, isn’t there? You’d think we adults would have learned something by now.

a bloody mess

Tediousness is, of course, a highly inappropriate term to use when the deaths of loved ones and social injustice are involved. But when you watch Pres. Obama – arguably one of the most even-handed statesmen the country has ever wrought –once again stand at a podium and try to speak about race relations, gun violence and what does indeed make America great amid all the carnage, you can still see the weariness in his eyes.

It’s like a tired, spent parent having to correct his disobedient child for the 1700^th time. You know he simply wants to shake the kid and say, “don’t you get it, yet?? What the “f” is wrong with you??” But instead, like all good parents, or teachers for that matter, he bears down and tries to phrase the lesson in yet another way so the youngster might, just might, understand.

and when in doubt…

This is in sharp contrast to what anyone else is doing at the moment. So even though I might sometimes disagree with his tactics or phrasings, in the end I have to admit that I almost always agree with the message Pres. Obama is trying, against the greatest of odds, to get across. Perhaps, this is because he is equal parts Black and White. Though I’m sure some would say that’s far too easy of an answer.

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: barack obama

Just Try Me

What Do We Do Now?