This happened in my back yard last Friday as we were having a little back yard camp fire. Double rainbows. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that live in all my life, or if I did but didn’t have the maturity to care.
So, I’m not dead. Just wanted to put that out there. I haven’t posted in a long while though. Because there really isn’t much to say. But maybe I’ll start to post again. I have been writing a little bit here and there. Maybe I’ll post some of that too.
It is a dark day, in my opinion, in the history of my country. Day 1 of the Trump Presidency.
Completely unrelated to that, I assure you, is this video from Disney’s animated Robin Hood, the first Robin Hood I ever saw and still my favorite.
“I’m going to give Trump a chance. And we the historically disenfranchised… demand that he give us one too.”
Everything still sucks, right? Yes it does. And so I’ve found myself watching Dave Chapelle’s stand-up from Saturday Night Live on Saturday over and over again. Because it feels good to laugh.
It’s fine, obviously, to celebrate Veteran’s Day. However, it is a shame that the day that used to be Armistice Day that celebrated the end of conflict in World War I has been mostly forgotten in this country.
“I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.” –Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
So yeah, the election. We are officially in the darkest timeline.
I’d like to tell the world that not all of us are okay with this and in fact, more of us voted for Hillary than we did Drumpf. But that is letting the United States as a society off the hook. The fact of the matter is we as a nation elected the candidate LITERALLY endorsed by the KKK.
I got perhaps 3 hours of sleep last night. To be honest, I was worried about telling my kids the results. Because they could see how much of a bully Trump is. To them, it is obvious. And I hated to tell them that hate had won. That the biggest bully had won. But you know what, I told them what had happened and they were okay. And I told them we would be okay (even if I don’t know how much I believe this myself).
And to my fellow Christians. You are not bringing people closer to God with this stuff, aligning yourself with one political party that would produce Donald Trump. The man who brags about killing the families of terrorists. The man who treats women the way he treats them. The man who started his campaign with this:
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
The Christ I know would stand up for the poorest among us. He would welcome those into the country that are fleeing war, without question. Without some test. Jesus was for piece. He was for the meek inheriting the Earth. Jesus was for being humble.
When asked what the most important of the Commandments to follow, Jesus said nothing of abortion. But he did say this:
“Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” [Matthew 22:37-40 KJV]
This is the antithesis of Trump.
Finally, I have finally given up Facebook. I’ll miss seeing people’s pictures they post and telling them happy birthday. I won’t miss much else. And I’m fine with that. I probably spent too much time there anyhow. I’d delete my profile completely, but I have some photos there I’d like to save.
In conclusion, we are indeed in the darkest timeline. Hate has been unequivocally rewarded. Maybe we are better than this, but more than likely we were always this bad and it’s just know the final veil has been removed.
To be honest, I never thought I’d be posting a Tupac interview on this blog, but here we are. And you know what? He’s talking the truth here. Back in 1992. And things certainly haven’t improved since then.
Here it comes. After years and years of telling us that the cost of goods have gone up due to gas prices rising they are now telling us that lower gas prices are bad: NPR: Why Cheap Gas Might Not Be Good For The U.S. Economy. You know what? I’ll take something that is not great for “the economy” but that will help the poor and middle class save a little money on their drive to their job every morning, keeping “the economy” running.
It would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad. I predict more and more articles like this, especially from corporate news sources. Once they get us all worried about how bad cheap gas is, then the President will be blamed for it, just as he was blamed for higher gas prices. And certainly don’t hold your breath waiting for cheaper bread and milk prices. Money rarely trickles down in that direction.
But whatever. It’s Friday and payday, which means I get to head out to my huge money bin for a nice little swim.
You can go more than a few minutes (seconds if you are around my age and on Facebook) without seeing an article or meme throwing the “kids these days” under the bus. It drives me crazy, to be honest. Well, it turns out it has been happening since Aristotle’s time or longer. I came across this pretty in depth discussion of what has been called “Juvenoia”.
Perhaps you will find it interesting. I did.
As Christians, as a modern society, as heck, Human Beings, we are supposed to be better than this. Or at least we like to pretend we are. But are we? I don’t know man.
I came across this today and it pretty much says what I’m feeling in my heart, at least. We need to show those in need compassion at this time more than any, to demonstrate who we really are, not just who we profess to be.
This show sounds like an enormous pile of excrement.
And I guarantee the majority of those watching this show, judging these people, and patting themselves on the back are one illness/job layoff/honest mistake from finding themselves in the exact situation as those they are judging. Or maybe they did have things happen in their lives but were able to survive it because they had someone in their lives to fall back on like a family member. And yet these people will act like they’ve achieved all of this success on their own.
But the rich in this country, those that want to pay less taxes and eliminate programs such as welfare (because they got theirs so screw everybody else), they’ve already won. They already have the rest of us convinced that the poor are only poor because they are lazy. Because they are bad people. Which has no basis in reality, of course. But that ship has sailed, I’m afraid.
But I bet this show will be a massive success. And now I’m mad because before I read this article I would have had no idea this show even exists. Happy Friday.
“America perceives poverty as a moral failure, which is why the participants on The Briefcase have to perform generosity to such an extreme degree. These people have to “prove” themselves as virtuous—to themselves, to one another, but in particular to a viewing audience at home—to show how unlike other poor people they are. We’re not really poor, we just had a string of really bad luck, unlike those other people who are poor on purpose. I’m not suggesting the families on the show aren’t actually nice. In fact, many of them seem incredibly loving and wonderful, people any of us would be lucky to know. But even assholes are entitled not to live a life of abject suffering. Why does the burden of helping “struggling” people fall on other struggling people? Is Les Moonves pulling his car over to throw up because he’s so paralyzed by trying to do the right thing? If he is, make a show about that. If he’s not, make a show about why not.”
via On The Briefcase, poor Americans have to “prove” themselves..
The Struggling Writer 