Wednesday Sept. 17, 2025

Wednesday Sept. 17, 2025

Fitful sleep as we struggle to organize. The other side seems energized, confident. The news outlets have all capitulated, spewing their lies, the party line. I get my news from the left leaning independent outlets and receive a healthy dose of our own propaganda with it.

Facts may exist in the world, but they have to be extracted from the packaging of this damned inflammatory rhetoric. 

For once, I need to see the raw data, uncurated, unspun, pre-collation. I’ll connect the dots just fine. The picture should be coming into view pretty clearly. Just don’t tell me what I’m supposed to see. No spoilers. 

Maybe that’s where I’m going wrong. I do see it, and I’m quick to pull the alarm: 

Authoritarianism. A tyrannical dictator dismantling our system of government.

Not that I’d have give two shits a couple of years ago. Nihilist, fuck-it me would have said, “Oh, boy! A shit show! Burn it down – it wasn’t working anyway.”

But like it or not, it was what we had. An unheated house, broken windows, bad plumbing, siding rotting away – still, it’s the only roof over our heads we have. How will we live without a government? Like animals? Not the harmony and bluebells Disney variety, but in packs of predatory roving thugs, taking what’s easy from the weak.

We sheep have got to organize. Some black sheep has to turn the flock to face the threat, make us see that we’re stronger together. 

But are we really? This is the United States government. The same people who nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who mowed down peasants and rained down napalm in Vietnam. “Death From Above.” 

Guns are ubiquitous, but that doesn’t mean we all have them in equal measure. And some of us are loathe to use them on principle, a little nagging thing called conscience prevents us from taking a life. When does the survival instinct kick in? How do we win if we’re all dead?

Is all really fair in love and war? Who said war was fair? 

You can react, resist or retreat. Or you can try to defuse. I have desperately been looking for the solution in the last option, but reasoning with an angry gorilla seems to be a task I’m unqualified for. Where is Jane Goodall when you need her?

I’m sure there’s a language that will get through to even the most indoctrinated numbskull – pain. It keeps coming back to that. Words are ineffective, and people who are one rung above on the ladder seem perfectly OK with their own level of pain as long as someone else is having a worse time. 

Why is it like this? How did these spoiled kids at the birthday party become so rotten? Share, welcome, invite, extend – why are these concepts anathema to them?

Black and white thinking, even as this ink stains the paper, is the true enemy. It’s either this or that – no in between

OK, I’ve purged for now.