This seems like the only logical response to Brexit.
Image: onsizzle.com
politics
The Weekly Vent: A Middle-Aged Sit-In
One of my heroes, Congressman John Lewis of Georgia, has had enough with the obfuscation and obstructionism in Congress after so many mass shootings. He is leading a sit-in of fellow members of the House of Representatives. U.S. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who led the recent filibuster on the same issues in the Senate, has stopped by to offer support. I’m glad elected officials are finally forcing a public conversation, because we just can’t go on like this. You can watch some of the sit-in on CNN.
Image: cnn.com
If Martin Niemoller Were Here Today …
If Martin Niemoller were here today …
They shot the high school students. And I didn’t speak out, because I wasn’t a high school student.
Then they shot the college students. And I didn’t speak out, because I didn’t go to college.
They shot the immigrants. And I didn’t speak out, because I’m not an immigrant.
They shot the midnight movie-goers, and the public employees. And I didn’t speak out, because I don’t go to movies at midnight and I’m not a public employee.
They shot the customers at Luby’s and MacDonald’s, and I didn’t speak out because I don’t eat at Luby’s or MacDonald’s.
They shot Parisians and Texans, and I didn’t speak out because I’ve never been to Paris or Texas.
They shot Tunisians and Egyptians and tourists, and I didn’t speak out because I don’t know any Tunisians or Egyptians and I’m not a tourist.
They shot Sikhs and Jews and the Amish, and I didn’t speak out because I’m not a Sikh or Jewish or Amish.
They shot black Christians in church, and I didn’t speak out because I’m not black or Christian and I don’t go to church.
THEY SHOT FIRST-GRADERS AND THEIR TEACHERS, and I didn’t speak out because I’m not a parent or a teacher.
Now they’ve shot Latino/a and LGBT club-goers and I’m not Latinx, or LGBT, and I don’t go to nightclubs. Who is left to speak? Will I speak out now? Will you?
#NoBillNoBreak #DisarmHate #HateWontWin
The Weekly Vent: Doonesbury Nails It
The comic strips “Doonesbury” and “Bloom County” are having a field day with this primary season, and who can blame them? The debates are like catnip to cartoonists, especially the Republican displays of cartoonish aggression. This Sunday’s “Doonesbury” is especially chortle-worthy: Doonesbury, February 14, 2016.
© G.B. Trudeau – All Rights Reserved.
Featured image: Reilly Butler/Flickr.
The Weekly Vent: “Too Poor to Retire and Too Young to Die”
A sobering article from the Los Angeles Times: Too Poor to Retire and Too Young to Die. My spouse and I have diligently worked and saved our whole married life, to provide for our own retirement and our kids’ educations. Our parents did the same, but had more of a safety net, such as company-funded retirement benefits. Those seem to have gone the way of the Dodo.
I don’t think our country has any real idea of the crisis that’s going to hit when that demographic phenomenon known as the Baby Boom hits its 70s, which starts this year, seventy years after the Baby Boom began in 1946. We’ve allowed a generation’s worth of unprecedented wealth creation to become concentrated in the hands of billionaires and corporations since 1980. We’ve allowed infrastructure and basic public services to crumble. And if we don’t get our act together and reclaim some of that undertaxed wealth through revised estate taxes for these mega-fortunes, we risk permanently entrenching this concentration of money and power.
The billionaires distract us by linking their situation to that of people like my family: middle-class people who worked and saved in the hope of being independent and comfortable, not obscenely rich, in our old age. Basically, they are asserting that if they get taxed, savers like us will also lose what we’ve worked so hard to accumulate. Baloney. There’s a huge difference between the size of their estates and ours. We need to stop getting distracted by the political gibberings of the likes of Donald Trump. While we react to his outrageous “campaign”, he is laughing all the way to the bank.
The Weekly Vent: American Fascism
The more I see of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Fox News and the rest, the more I am reminded of the rise of fascism in the last century. Xenophobia is on display, with know-nothing values, corporatism, authoritarianism, etc. This is nothing new, we’ve seen it before, but it has been repackaged with modern communications and given a smoother surface. And it is scary how many of today’s leading lights of the GOP have fathers who are alleged to have been quasi-fascists: the Koch brothers, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz. For an instructive look back, here’s what Salon.com has to say: It Can Still Happen Here, which recounts the 1944 article written by then U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace, on the danger of fascists in America.
“The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact,” Wallace wrote. “Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy.”
In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism, the vice-president of the United States saw rising in America, he added:
“They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”
Sound familiar? Scared yet? I am.
The Weekly Vent: Death Among the Middle-Aged
For those of you who may not read The New York Times, here’s a sobering piece of news: Death Rates Rising for Middle-Aged White Americans. Basically, so many white Americans with less than a college education are dying prematurely from things like suicide and substance abuse that they are causing a statistical anomaly. This came to researchers’ attention when they realized that “unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.” So they started digging into the details of that data. ” [P]oorly educated American whites … are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case found.” Dr. Angus Deaton, by the way, is a 2015 Nobel Prize winner in Economics.
Furthermore, the impact of this sudden increase in death rates in a specific age group is so dramatic, “Dr. Deaton had but one parallel. ‘Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,’ he said.” Continue reading
The Weekly Vent: Can We Talk?
Events of the past week — yes, I’m talking about the shootings in Oregon — have made me, in one of my oft-used phrases, “sad and mad.” And it seems as if it is no longer possible to have a civilized public discourse about these horrible public events. So — can I talk? I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind about gun ownership. I grew up with guns, my father owned at least a dozen, I know how to shoot, and I honestly do not see any good reason why gun safety and ownership cannot be reasonably regulated in ways similar to cars, for safety reasons. So that’s my POV. But I want to talk — politely — about something else. Continue reading
The Weekly Vent: Is Honesty for Suckers?
I have a love-hate relationship with The New York Times’ “Room for Debate” feature. I know the whole point is to present, in brief, conflicting points of view. It just riles me up. And this past week’s topic REALLY riled me up. “Is Honesty for Suckers?” . I think in our culture, at this time, it probably is. But that doesn’t mean I plan to become dishonest or I envy those who are. It just means I have resigned myself to foregoing some of the rewards that I have seen dishonest people reap for years. And I’m okay with that, as I am very fortunate in many ways, and I’d rather be myself (and live with myself) than go through life the way they do: rushing to grab every advantage, making and dropping “friends” along the way, unable to sustain loving, real relationships (funny how many of these folks seem to have dysfunctional personal lives). If that makes me a sucker, so be it. Honestly.
The Narrative of Privilege
This is an extraordinary piece by a young doctor: The Narrative of Privilege. From the perspective of middle age, and raising teenagers myself, she is so accurate about the ways in which adolescents are shaped not only by the choices they make, but by the choices they are offered, throughout childhood and adolescence.
Just so you don’t think I’ve lost my snarky edge — this is why it enrages me when public officials nickel and dime services for children, like public education, so they can slash taxes for the overly fortunate. We are a fabulously rich nation. Surely we can afford to make sure all American children are offered excellent choices as they grow.
Middle Aged Rage 
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