There is no line

Someone asked me at a recent meeting of progressive activists if there was a line past which I would get "really serious." I wasn't sure what she meant. I'm serious now.

There is no line.

I look at the world in a very simple fashion. It's the RAW (Robert Anton Wilson) metric: if the world seems brighter and more beautiful today than yesterday, it's because you got smarter. If it's nastier and more cruel, you got more stupid. What Wilson didn't say was that sometimes that isn't your choice to make. You can't just ingest the lotus, smoke a lot of weed, or drink a lot of wine, and hope it goes away.

There is no line. There is just this: is the world getting nastier? If on the whole it is getting nastier, then the time to act is now. It's really serious.

We have a president^* right now who seems hell-bent on giving our country what it least needs: an increase in the upward distribution of wealth to the already wealthy, all the while supported by a cultural base enlivened by the idea of being able to inflict cruelty on minorities, on women, on GLBT folk, on anyone who's not a white, heterosexual, Christian man. On anyone who dares live in a city with strangers.

The eight years of progress we made under Barack Obama, the extension of the voting franchise to those American citizens who have so far not consented much in the governmentalization of their lives and who have, for the most part, avoided needing too many forms of ID, the extension of health care to Americans who desperately needed it, and the extension of civil liberties to women, all are due to be wiped away. Already, America is converting from a welcoming country to a viciously repellent one that doesn't really want foreigners unless they bring money and promise to leave soon.

There is no line.

There is only the promise of a brighter future. One we fight for.

I no longer care what red states want

The other day, as I awakened to another depressing litany of the things the Trump Administration has chosen to inflict on the majority of Americans who live in urban areas that did not vote for him, I had this weird idea. I looked in the mirror and said to myself, "Is this what it felt like in Red America? Is this what people in small town Idaho over the border woke to, the sickening feeling that America wasn't theirs anymore?"

Then I read this, and I decided something simple: I don't give a fuck at all what Red America wants.

When someone describes women's bodily autonomy, the rights of gay people to participate in the legal benefits promised to marriage, "the transgenders," and so forth as "evil nonsense," I'm ready to start throwing much more than chairs.

This will never stop. I will not rest on this. Isadore wants veto power over his children, even after he's dead. He wants to give them "traditions" that are chains, that long after they've ceased to make sense in a world that requires us to be different from our ancestors, to be better than them, to be more thoughtful, more loving, more kind, he wants to have a veto power over that thoughtfulness, that love, that kindness.

Fuck no.

When I die, I don't expect to have a word in my children's decisions. That's for them, not for me. The best I can do is leave them a beautiful, livable, breathable planet on which to make their decisions.

The Trump administration really has opened up a chasm between those who believe America has a future, and those who believe it has only a past.

I'm heading into the future. And dead or alive, you all are coming with me.