What Fresh Horrors are Portended?

Or the failure of the Great American Experiment.

Does anyone else out there keep shaking their heads lately and wishing they could wake up to Kamala as president and an all is well feeling in the chest?

Me too. I find most don't even want to talk about all that is happening in this world right now and He still hasn't been sworn in. I see His idiot son grinning like a maniac as he lands in Greenland planting a virtual flag like Hillary on the peak of Everest. "This is ours now, Daddy, right?" And He grins in response and tells the press in a rambling incoherent mess of an "interview," "We'll no longer call it the Gulf of Mexico, it will now be the Gulf of America."

I only read Him now, I can't look at His great melon face or listen to that awful drawn out whiny voice. 

I threw my X account to the curb and restored my sanity on BlueSky and yes, I have cut my news intake by at least 50%. If you need any good soothing series to stream, just let me know and I will share my fixes. For now, BlueSky is a decent place with kindred spirits. I need to know I am not alone in my horror and grief for the world that is now gone. He promises to bomb the tar out of the Middle East as soon as He ascends the throne. Along with controlling Canada and Panama and sending the military into Mexico.

And his tech-bro buddies will now suspend fact-checking on all the platforms.

We are on our own now. 

But humour is saving a lot of us from despair. We need to laugh more.  And like someone said recently, empathy is the missing factor in all these monsters. We all need more empathy for the pain and suffering so many are suffering. 

Will goodness prevail in the long run?

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Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day coming up shortly,  where soldiers march and remember the "glory" of their service, applauded by one and all. Flag waving, cheering, teary. Medals glistening on uniforms, smart salutes, Last Post, maybe pipers in kilts blasting praise to the skies. New monuments erected, lists of the fallen and betrayed And cannons or guns fired in glory. Honouring the Dead, the Unknowns, selling red poppies to support recruitment of more such heroes. Another November 11th. Another glorification of the non-stop "wars" of men, (how many centuries now?) Another misuse of that plural noun "freedoms." 

I wrote this 5 years ago and read it somewhere, the men were pissed, the women cheered and applauded but controlled themselves when they saw the men's faces. "We will Remember Them" is a common refrain on November 11th. We even have the moment of silence across the country at 11.00 a.m. in all our multiple time zones. But I remember the women. 

1939 St. John's Newfoundland

I wiIl remember

Where are the monuments, the medals,

The honours and commemorations

For the women and girls who carried on,

Who birthed year after year after year after year

While husbands and lovers marched

And killed and drank and fell down

In wars for the wealthy back room boys.

Women who despaired and cried in the poverty of their existence

Who had no choice, no say, no name. But his.

Who died and were replaced. By women like them

Who birthed year after year after year after year

And worked their fingers to the bone day and night.

Who were oft times beaten. And raped.

And in their turn, watched their daughters sacrificed.

And now, they are glorified without name,

Sanctified only as a matriarchal monolith,

Sacrificial lambs, their misery forgotten,

Mere nameless footnotes.

Their struggles negated.

Their stories erased forever.

MM 10/28/2017

Peace Bench

Cupids, NL. Yesterday.

If I could bring you all together. And you all could take turns sitting on this bench.

Yes,  I know it would take a long time.

But it would be worth it.

And then I would tell you to cast your eyes outward and tell me what you see.

And tell me what you hear.

And tell me your hopes and your dreams that didn't involve possession or theft or anger or self-righteousness or hurting anyone else. 

We could put an end to all of it now, couldn't we?

Courage

To write (fairly publicly) about depression is an act of courage in itself. So they tell me.

Courage? Was ever a more misunderstood word?

What is courage?

I would first of all discard the patriarchal and militaristic appropriation of the word "courage" for nefarious purposes. I think of all those millions of soldiers dying in wars not of their making. To my mind they weren’t full of courage. Fear and terror of their lives, certainly. Some of them were just barely out of diapers. Dying for some mythological cause created by monsters that were never near a battlefield. There’s never a justification for war. These poor young people are sold the hero myth and encouraged to give up their one and only precious lives for it. And take the lives of the most innocent of bystanders with them. War is all about killing children. Millions and millions of children. There is never a justification for that. And courage doesn't come into it.

We need some new definitions of courage.

Courage: ordinary people running into fires and diving into water to rescue others.
Courage: those tent cities, those smiling faces of Haitians rising up again after a devastation beyond our wildest imagination.
Courage: my friend Dan making sure he called me every day through this rough spot in spite of his own fearsome challenges and pain.

My mother showed the most remarkable courage in the face of a cancer that was vicious and unforgiving. She chose multiple amputations to halt its progress in the face of unbelievable pain rather than succumb (as she was advised) in a much shorter, morphine hazed alternative.

Courage is the face of the ordinary facing extraordinary challenges.

Life is fraught with landmines, often just those internal ones that we’ve negotiated from childhood. Sometimes, it's a conscious choice to embrace these landmines while taking the time to diffuse some of them and then moving on, knowing we will get the strength to face the next one in its time.

One of the best definitions of courage I have ever read is:

Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.": Dorothy Thompson

And sometimes courage is just about feeling the fear but doing it anyway. Starting by getting out of bed. And putting one foot in front of the other.