“Red sky at morning …”
You probably know the rest of that quote. What you may also know is that a storm warning was issued for America on 8 November 2016.
Unless you have been sequestered on a tropical island, completely bereft of news from the outside world (and if you have, lucky you!), then you know we will soon be saddled with a thin-skinned, incompetent blowhard for our next president. This is bad enough, but of course Mr. T
(no, not that Mr. T)
will not arrive in Washington, DC, alone. He will bring with him, to oversee and direct the various departments of government, an assortment of conspiracy fantasists, anti-government government employees, inhabitants of bubbles, sellers of snake oil, privatizers, insiders, major political donors, and the wife of a prominent Republican senator.
Among these, we find: a chief advisor and strategist who has encouraged racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim statements, to say nothing of proclaiming his most recent business venture a platform for white “nationalists” (i.e., KKKers and Neo-Nazis); a future Secretary of Education who hates public education; a National Security Advisor who hates Muslims; a Treasury Secretary who used to work at Goldman Sachs (I wonder if he was present for any of Hillary Clinton’s speeches there?); for Secretary of State, the CEO of the largest oil company in the world and BFF’s with Vladimir Putin; an Assistant National Security Advisor whose main qualification seems to be that she donated a lot of money to our future president’s campaign; a Health and Human Services secretary who wants to destroy the Affordable Care Act and reverse Roe vs. Wade; a Secretary of Housing and Urban Development who knows nothing of government, except for a once-held desire to be president; a Labor Secretary who is opposed to raising the minimum wage and dislikes unions as a matter of principle. And so on.
Despite Hillary Clinton having won approximately 2.8 million more votes than Mr. T, she lost the election due to the nature of the Electoral College. So, we shall have to live with the results of the election. Living with it does not, however, mean we have to accept it. It does not mean that now we should all just link arms and sing Kumbaya.
To the contrary, I think it very important that we resist the calls we are hearing, to give our next president a chance to govern, a chance to succeed. That’s a nice, can’t-we-all-just-get-along sentiment, but I don’t want him to succeed, because his success, and that of his appointees, would be built atop the ruins of eight decades of social progress in this country. Therefore, I am going to do whatever I can to resist the coming attempts to return America to the supposedly bucolic days of 1956, and I encourage you to do the same.
One facet of that resistance is this blog. I’ve started this as an alternative to shouting at the television, which has accomplished little, except to scare my cat. While I may be outraged every day (and so far, I am), I will probably not write here every day. Nevertheless, I invite your comments and observations, as we move deeper into the storm that is about to envelop our country and, as a consequence, the rest of the world.
Thanks for reading!
M.
The Daily Outrage 