The Damage Done.

I’m tired. Deeply tired of the pathetic adolescent tactics being used in politics these days. And it makes me deeply sad and disappointed with people.

Are we so stagnant that we don’t remember what kind of behavior was not acceptable in elementary school? Have we forgotten that being a bully is not acceptable behavior? Does evidence and proof no longer hold any weight in how you see things? Does the rule of law no longer hold any weight?

There was a time when bullies were held accountable. They were punished for their nasty behavior. There was a time when punishment didn’t come until guilt was proven. And if there was no proof, it was accepted that it did not happen. And rule of law was generally accepted as the final word.

And then came Donald J Trump. A man who ridicules a handicapped person. A man that encourages people to beat up other people. A man who tried to attack his own secret service in anger. He’s vicious, violent, rude, has NO respect FOR ANYONE. He does not know how to behave in public. A man that doesn’t know to keep his filthy hands to himself. A man who name calls when he doesn’t like someone or when he does and they reject him. When he is called out, he attacks. When he’s taken to court, he buys his way out. This is not a man worthy of our respect.

Now to be fair, Trump supporters would consider me a never trumper and they would be right. But its not what they think. No, I do not like him and never have. He gives off what my best friend and I always called the creepy vibe. Most women would recognize that as that feeling that we would not be safe alone with him. However, that is not why I wouldn’t vote for the man. He has shown that he expects to get what he wants and is willing to do whatever it takes to get what he wants. Based on the evidence and testimony presented by the January 6th Committee, he has shown that he is willing to break the law to get what he wants. And he tends to seek revenge when he perceives someone as having betrayed him or who he perceives as his enemy. He has repeatedly shown this by filing law suits and ordering investigations while in a position of power.

I don’t pretend to be psychic or anything but anyone paying attention could see this coming. He bought his way out of trouble many times well before he ever ran for office. His record in the American legal system speaks for itself. His actions that have come to light shows that he feels entitled to be able to get away with whatever he wants. He has never had to face consequences so he has come to believe he never will. He actually said he could shoot someone on Wall Street and wouldn’t lose any supporters.

Why is that? Why do you support a man that is such a spoiled, entitled misogynistic racist, Malignant Narcissistic Megalomaniac? Do you really believe his ability to cheat people out of their money makes him strong? That the ability to use ill gotten gains to buy his way out of trouble makes him strong? It doesn’t. It ruins his reputation to the point where people don’t want to do business with him. NO American bank will loan money to him anymore. In elementary school, he was the kid no one liked because you couldn’t trust him not to stab you in the back. He was the one that would ridicule you and everyone would laugh until it was them he was picking on until he finally ran out of people who would tolerate him. Its why he has to pay prostitutes. Most women see him for what he is. Why can’t you?

The Republican party should be ashamed of themselves. They have allowed this adolescent minded bully manipulate them until he got enough dirt on them to allow him to bribe them into supporting him. All you really have left is to own up to your embarrassing secrets to release yourself from his power. If that embarrassing secret is enough to ruin you, you may as well cut your losses. Otherwise you will be sacrificing the country you claim to love so much. You have abandoned the idea of earning the peoples trust decades ago, we all know that. You’ve been manipulating the numbers and lying ever since Reagan. We can see it. We see how you vote. We see the way you contradict your words with your votes. But you have sold your soul to Satan with Trump. Yes, we hear where “your constituents approve” but do they really? If they did, gerrymandering wouldn’t be necessary, now would it?

It makes me sad to see so many people being fooled by the manipulation and the lies. It makes me even more sad to see people seeing a toddler in an elderly man’s body acting up and taking that as model behavior. Did you never learn that being a bully is unacceptable? Would your grandmother be proud of your behavior? You let a small minded mentally ill man convince you that your neighbors who just disagree with you are some kind of evil demon that you have every right to commit violent crimes against. We are human. We are much like you in that we want what we see as what’s best for our country, our family and our children. We just disagree. That doesn’t make us bad, evil or the enemy. It just means we have a different opinion.

Why on earth would you believe ANYTHING Donald Trump says? Your WHOLE LIFE, the CDC has pursued their mission to study and track disease and find ways to protect the people from those diseases. Dr Anthony Fauci made it his life’s work to protect people from disease. WHY would you buy into Trump’s demonization of Dr Fauci? All he’s done his whole life was to each us how to protect ourselves. Trump doesn’t know anything about disease.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste. This was a statement used to advertise getting a college education. It still holds true today. Don’t just trust what they say. WE ALL know politicians lie. Why would you start trusting republicans just because they’re telling you what you want to hear? Pay attention to how they vote. The truth lies in how they vote. Actions speak louder than words. Your enemy is not your neighbor of color or whose first language isn’t English. Its the man or woman positioning to take your social security, to remove the country’s safety nets and taxing you to pad their offshore accounts.

Democracy is on the Ballot

The GOP has been trying to dismantle the very basis of our Republic for decades. They are closer today than ever before thanks to Donald J. Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell.

When Donald Trump announced he was running for president in 2016, he made no effort to hide that he was in support of this agenda. He immediately attacked the media, calling them the enemy of the people. He called for eliminating the protections in place so they could be sued. That protection is the 1st Amendment and they were put there for a reason. The media is the first of a set of checks and balances put in place to keep our government as honest as they could in the capacity they have.

More recently, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas expressed interest in going after birth control. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and opened the door to much more in limitations of our 1st Amendment rights. Donald Trump also attacked the Black Lives Matter movement calling for them to be arrested and jailed for nothing more than exercising their 1st Amendment rights. They also demonized Colin Kappernick for his peaceful kneeling campaign.

All of these are attacks on the 1st Amendment. They’re trying to force their interpretation of the Constitution and religion on us all. They want to eliminate free speech, and criminalize the right to peaceful protest for petition of the government for a redress of grievances.

The GOP and the Supreme Court are also attacking the 9th Amendment. The Enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. On a more basic level, the use of the Constitution via Amendments to take away rights guaranteed to the people shall not be interpreted in such a way as to remove the rights of the people. This was done through the Supreme Court decision of Citizens United.

The 14th Amendment section 1 guarantees that all who are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, whether they be natural born or naturalized, equal protection under the law. By not allowing women equal rights federally with the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, including body autonomy, we are not getting equal protection under the law. The reversal of Roe v. Wade severely diminished our protection under the law including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, aka HIPAA laws. If a woman is required to defend her Healthcare decisions in open court they become a matter of public record. Therefore, HIPAA no longer protects her.

The 14th Amendment also went after Jim Crow laws (section 2). Section 5 gave the Congress the power to enforce by appropriate legislation, the power to enforce by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. This applies to gerrymandering and SHOULD deem it unconstitutional.

The 15th Amendment gave black men and former slaves the right to vote. This has been under attack by both gerrymandering and unfair and unequal law enforcement, targeting black Americans for decades even after the 14th and 15th Amendments were passed and ratified.

Most important and perhaps the most concerning of these attacks on the 14th Amendment sections 3 and 4. Section 3 bans anyone who holds public office and anyone running for public office from holding that office if they participated or engaged in Seditious Conspiracy or Insurrection. Section 4 allows public funding for repairs sustained in an act of insurrection to rebuild without question. It also bans the use of public funds in committing insurrection.

The GOP wants to rewrite the Constitution to suit their purposes. They want to eliminate the voice of the people. They want a farce of Democracy ruled by the Christian Right. They don’t want Freedom of Religion, they want Freedom of Christianity. They want power of the GOP, not of the people.

After the founders signed and settled the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of government we had. He replied, “A Republic, if we an keep it.”

Republic- A state in which a state is ruled by representatives of the citizen body.

The Founders spoke of their intent in the Federalist Papers. They included the structure of our government the consent of the governed. A government’s legitimacy and moral right to use state power is justified and lawful only when consented or agreed to by the people over which that political power is exercised.

WE HAVE A VOICE. -OUR VOICE IS A VOTE. Use your voice. Help us save our republic. WE WILL FIGHT BACK. WE WON’T GO BACK.

ENOUGH ALREADY

This country needs our elected lawmakers to think. Not to come up with ways to force their own beliefs down the throats of others. Not to find ways to spread their agendas. They need to consider how their actions impact the country as a whole. 

Those Republican senators still pushing the lies trump created and spread should be ashamed of yourselves. You took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, both foreign and domestic as much as your military counterparts did. And yet you’re willing to sacrifice Constitutional rights of anyone who disagrees with you in favor of a bunch of low information voters who don’t care if there is any validity to trump’s claims because they fit their view of what the world is. Even if that ideal is a delusion. You are either also low information as well in which case you shouldn’t be in charge of making nor enforcing laws as you obviously don’t bother to make the effort to learn whether something is a lie or not or you KNOW it’s false information and are manipulating those low information voters to your advantage based on what you know to be lies which means you are corrupt. 

You need to think about what it means not to convict Donald J Trump for his actions over the full term of his presidency. By not prosecuting him for his crimes, you are giving license to future presidents that they are above the law and can do whatever they want, regardless of the laws of this country and Constitution be damned. And this does not just apply to Republican presidents, but also Democratic presidents. 

Democrats, you need to think about what you are allowing Republicans to get away with. They have repeatedly changed the rules to fit their agendas. As a result they have run roughshod over the Constitution and violated the rules and made rules that allowed them to violate and deny the civil rights of hundreds of thousands of voters. You need to put your collective foot down and stop bending to their will. You need to put a stop to them changing the rules to fit their agenda then changing them back to deny Democrats the very same freedoms. Mitch McConnell denied President Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court saying he couldn’t appoint one during an election year then the VERY NEXT ELECTION, HE FACILITATED DONALD TRUMP APPOINTING ONE IN THE LAST TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE ELECTION. This kind of corruption needs to END. 

You as elected officials have a responsibility to uphold the Constitution. Those of you insisting that trump did nothing wrong need to take a Constitutional refresher course. Trump violated multiple Constitutional laws. He began before he even gained the White House. He started by attacking the First Amendment. Then he violated the Emoluments clause. And it goes downhill from there. And now, the Republicans acting against the rightfully elected president and refusing to prosecute trump are subject to section 3 of the 14th Amendment as you are in violation of your oath. And you should lose your seats.

It is time for honesty in politics. Long past time. It sounds like a pipe dream or delusional but continuing to lie to low information voters will lead to the demise of the Democratic Republic. We have two choices. Keep the Democratic Republic and conform to the Constitution or contribute to the chaos. When you contribute to the Chaos, you put us as a whole at risk to our enemies. DIVIDED WE FALL. 

Donald J Trump disgraced the office of the Presidency. He committed criminal acts repeatedly. He did so with the attitude that he is president and that makes him free and clear of prosecution. Is that really a message you want to send to future presidents? Or for that matter ANY current and future office holders?

PS. I don’t know who the artist is for the photo but It wasn’t me. Kudos to the excellent work.

Point for Point Address to Propaganda Post

I recently found a post on a friend’s page about trump and I read it over and decided Okay, this needs a point by point address. The bold is my response to each section I felt the need to address. This contains the entirety of the post with my responses placed between each section.

I’m not posting this for debate.

No, you’re posting it because you want to “piss off a liberal”

Unfriend me if you must. Just please consider this …when you think the president is a jerk. The bottom line has been that Trump IS a jerk. He’s crude, he gets his feelings hurt and he’s a hot head

Trump lacks the temperament required of a world leader.

His Twitter activities are debatable at times.

Debatable? Try atrocious and aggressive and offensive and adolescent in style, vocabulary, content and the attitude of an elementary schoolyard bully with little to no grasp of reality.

Let me tell you what else he is. He’s a guy that demands performance. He’s a guy that asks lots of questions. The questions he asks aren’t cloaked in fancy phrases, they are “why the heck ..”
questions.

Sure he demands performance, despite his lack of understanding how to make the kind of performance he wants to see happen. He has no idea how the industries he wants to perform work. To top that off he also has no idea how government works nor any understanding of law and often wants people to break the law to make what he wants happen. His lack of “fancy phrases” means he has no grasp of the language and he uses his limited understanding of language to express what he wants.

For decades the health industry has thrown away billions of face masks after one use. Trump asks “why the heck are we throwing them away? Why not sterilize them and use them numerous times?”

As someone who has worked in the healthcare business most of my adult life, I can tell you that you can’t sterilize masks made of the materials medical masks are made of without compromising their effectiveness. What the industry is forced to do right now in this pandemic is putting medical providers’ lives at risk. They are getting sick and dying because of lack of effective PPE. Reused PPE is contaminating work areas and workers and helping to spread the disease.

He’s the guy that gets hospital ships readied in one week, when it would have taken a bureaucrat weeks or months to get it done.

He did not do this until two months too late. And frankly, all he did was give the order. The personnel on the ship did it.

He’s the guy that gets temporary hospitals built in three days.

No, the Army Corps of Engineers did that at state governors requests.

He’s the guy that gets industries to build ventilators and face masks in a business that’s highly regulated by agencies that move like sloths.

No, those companies picked up where he dropped the ball and took it upon themselves to do what was right without the president’s order or have acted at the request of state Governors. And regulation exists for a reason. They protect consumers from predatory business practices. Due to the president’s inaction, these industries are price gouging.

He’s the guy that asks why we aren’t using drugs that might work on people that are dying, what the heck do we have to lose?

Well …what we have to lose is human lives.

We are not using the drugs he’s been pushing (because he owns stock in the companies that manufacture them) because they have not been proven to work. Many people are having adverse reactions to them like rapid heart beat leading to death in some cases. Trump is not a doctor and does not know better how to treat patients than doctors and needs to shut up.

In spite of all the naysayers. He’s the guy that shut down travel from China when the liberals and the media were screaming xenophobia and racist. Now they are asking why he didn’t react sooner?

He shut down travel from China EXCEPT for Americans returning home and did not require them to self quarantine until they’d already exposed any number of other people. He reacted too late and with little to no effectiveness. And the xenophobia was because he called it a Chinese disease when the WHO has still not pinpointed its point of origin and its been proven to NOT have originated at the Chinese market they thought it had come from.

He’s the guy that ran on securing the border in the face of a screaming press and media . When he shut down the borders in the midst of the Corona-virus they were up in arms over such a draconian move.

No, that wasn’t the reason. It was because what he was doing had nothing to do with how the virus was spreading and that it was too late. It was already here. Again because he waited too long and did not take the advice of the WHO until over two months too late. What he should have been doing is accepting the tests the WHO offered him instead of insisting we make our own so he and his friends could profiteer off our misery and illness. He should have been LISTENING to the WHO and following their recommendations instead of enabling the spread of the disease. Its almost as if he WANTED Americans to get sick so he and his friends could make money off it.

Then the rest of the world followed suit all over, including the European Union between member countries. Has he made mistakes? Yep. Everyone I know would have.

No country is following his lead. He is behind the rest of the world in taking action.

All these experts couldn’t have done any better. Trump is working harder than I’ve ever seen a president work. He isn’t hiding in his office, he’s out front every day.

Ask yourself why SARS and Ebola were not this massive a problem in the United States. We had what, 5 Ebola cases in the US? That’s because all other administrations were much more prepared and followed the recommendations of the WHO. Obama had a response team put in place and his swift action headed off the worst of it. THOSE EXPERTS HAVE DONE MUCH BETTER.

Take for instances all the shortages of PPE and ventilators. I’m unaware of anything that prevented all of these governors from ordering all the PPE and Ventilators for emergency purposes over the last two years. And yet, its Trump’s fault that they didn’t.

In light of previous administrations handling such problems on the federal level, governors have never had to do it themselves. Its the federal government’s responsibility to enact the protocols that handle these situations and the trump administration dropped the ball on this one and deny responsibility when it IS THEIR RESPONSIBILITY to act. President Obama left a whole team of people to take care of this sort of thing including a stockpile of PPE which disappeared under trump’s control, and a maintenance program to keep the equipment working properly which trump eliminated solely because it was created by Obama and an instruction manual so that the proper action could be taken in all future cases of disease pandemics so that we would be prepared, which trump promptly dismantled when he took office. Instead trump delayed a response for weeks calling it a “liberal hoax” and now is trying to blame the previous administration and the WHO for his own lack of preparation and action. Thanks to him, the death toll will be much higher.

He’s balanced his approach and listened to the experts, when his detractors said he wouldn’t and couldn’t

No he hasn’t. The WHO are the experts and doctors and scientists. He’s disagreed with them on every turn and shut them up by firing them and trying to keep the media from talking to them so that he could “control the situation” which has failed miserably at doing. He’s ANYTHING but balanced.

When he offers hope, he’s lying and when he’s straight forward, he should be hopeful. Its a no win, but he’s not deterred by all that’s coming from the press and liberals.

He is offering hope by lying and telling his followers that there is nothing to worry about when there most definitely is. So its not hope, its false hope. He’s putting the whole country at risk. He’s a threat to national security. He can’t win because he is a self serving malignant narcissist megalomaniac. Look up the definition of those diagnoses in medical journals and perhaps you can come close to understanding what we are up against with him at the helm.

I’ll take this kind of leadership over a nice guy that can make eloquent speeches. Cowboy logic. He is my President and I support him! Copy and paste if you agree.

No, I don’t agree. We are in big trouble until he is removed from office and whoever replaces him has a long road and a lot of work ahead to repair the damage he has done to the Democratic Republic. The more he does, the worse it gets. He repeatedly does and says things that are illegal and can get him impeached again for. Its just a matter of those who can taking the corrective action they need to. A president is not the ultimate power. The Constitution does not give him unchecked power. There are checks on his power as much as on the power of the Congress and the Supreme Court. We just have to put people that are qualified and truly patriotic and cannot be bought in those positions to do what needs to be done to save our country.

Ladies and Gentlemen, please read, question, verify, act….VOTE.

We Need to Make a Change

We need to make a change.

My mom and I were talking as we often do at the dinner table about politics and how things are going and our thoughts on who we like and dislike out of the candidates. And we came to the conclusion that we need to make a change. We collectively. In the error of Trump (not a typo) we have to listen constantly (if we’re to hear any news) to Trump bashing this person and that person because they’re disloyal or don’t like him or never liked him or investigated him. Enough already. We have become a battered nation, constantly listening to hateful rhetoric and we’re sick of it. So when we see the Democratic debates spiral into another mud slinging verbal battle, it just shows us that no candidate is perfect and we see these debates bring out everyone’s bad side. This needs to stop.

We would like to see debates being done very differently. I would like to see a round table in a neutral location with the candidates sitting comfortably around said table with Rachel Maddow moderating. She keeps her head and keeps abreast of all that is going on in this political climate. I’d like to see her lead the candidates into an intellectual discussion about what the country needs and how to bring it about. I don’t want to hear about how bad the other guy is. I want to know what each of you brings to the conversation. I would like to see things like “Mayor Pete, you have now said you are not behind Medicare for All. What is it about the plan that concerns you?” followed by Senator Warren, you and Senator Sanders both support Medicare for all. How would you address Mayor Pete’s concerns? What would you do to fix the problems he sees?” Followed by Senator Sanders, what would you do different from what Senator Warren would do?” I want to see civil discourse and an intellectual exchange of ideas.

We don’t need another Donald Trump and we don’t need his tactics to beat him. We need real solutions. For instance, my question to Senators Warren and Sanders is that I work in the Healthcare Industry and Medicare for All could leave me unemployed. There are hundreds of thousands of people just like me that have worked in this business for decades. Starting over in a brand new profession would set us back so far that we won’t recover before we reach retirement age and many of us already fully expect to have to work until we die. This, given how many of us there are in that industry would throw the economy into a tailspin. What would each of you do to head that off? Mayor Pete, how does your plan accomplish what Medicare for All does without being Medicare for All? And how would you help those who are impacted negatively by your policies?

I would like to ask Mayor Bloomberg what would you do to help correct the damage that Donald Trump has done to race relations? You have public service experience in a state with a history of welcoming immigrants (Ellis Island) , how would you address immigration policy given that experience?

I would ask Senator Klobuchar, You have strong opinions and ideas on how to regain our progress on climate change. What would be your plan to help those that have been most severely impacted by climate change like the people of Puerto Rico? What would you do to ensure that no other state or territory in our nation ever got left behind after such a natural disaster again?

I would ask Former VP Joe Biden, what would be your plan to repair the damage to Foreign relations? And What would you do to protect our nation from corruption like we’re seeing now? And what would you do to safeguard from the reversal of good policies that protect our nation from those who would abuse us for profit?

After each of these questions, I would allow each candidate a rebuttal that would be restricted to positive feedback, not criticism.

I would like to know if each candidate would be willing to choose their cabinet from the pool of their opponents. Would you be willing to bring in the candidates that have dropped out of the race for their input? Each has good ideas and good experience and have plenty to contribute and bringing them together would help prepare them for future positions. Perhaps start that conversation by having each of them say something good about their opponents. Talk about all the candidates strengths. Talk about what they bring to the table. Its time to bring people into the political fold that will put country first and we need to know that you can come together to accomplish what needs to be done.

Donald Trump has done a lot of damage to this country. We need you to work together to repair that damage. We don’t need to hear more about what he has done. We need to know how you’ll counter his actions. We believe that the negativity is a big factor in putting off those who didn’t vote in the last election. If we don’t put a stop to it, it may discourage them from voting in the next election. We need you to work together to get those who have not been voting excited about the future again. Because we need every single eligible voter at the polls in November. That is the only way we beat Trump.

What’s happened to us?

What’s happened to us?

I don’t know what’s happened to the human race over the past few decades. They don’t seem to have the ability to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. What has happened to the human capacity for compassion? Are we, as a species devolving? Are some of us losing some of our mental capacity to apply emotion to situations that don’t involve us personally?

Think about your last doctor’s appointment. Did your doctor tell you that you have to start doing anything differently? Did he tell you to start getting more exercise? To cut out salt or sugar from your diet? Did he tell you that you have to stop smoking and/or drinking? Did he change or prescribe medication to help treat health conditions you have? Are you able to pay for those medications? Have you ever looked into what a medication costs through your insurance company vs not having insurance? Could you afford them without insurance? Do you feel justified in judging someone for their inability to pay for prescribed medications? Are you willing to sentence them to death for the inability to afford prescribed medications?

Do you have any chronic illness that requires you to take regular medication? Asthma, heart disease, Diabetes? Have you ever become immune to the benefits of the medications you were prescribed and had to have the dose increased or the medication changed? Have you ever had a bad reaction to a medication? Have you ever had no improvement with a prescribed medication? Do you think people should be denied healthcare coverage for “not following doctor’s instructions?” How would you know if they didn’t? Is it even possible for you to know if you didn’t know that person personally? Would you want someone you didn’t know making that kind of decisions about your healthcare?

Have you ever lost a job? Have you ever worked a job that required special skills that eventually became obsolete? When utilizing said special skills, did it make your wages higher? When those skills became obsolete, did your pay plummet? Was the job outsourced? Or was that job eliminated through the use of automation machines? When you lost that job, did you receive unemployment benefits? Did your bills get behind? Did you struggle to put enough food on the table for your family? Would your kids have gone hungry without unemployment checks? Would you deny your neighbor that assistance if he or she were in the same situation? Would you refuse them for yourself and your family? Do you realize that unemployment benefits are among the entitlements you have supported being eliminated?

Have you ever been injured on the job? Did you have to be out of work for an extended period of time? While you were out, did your bills get behind? Did you struggle to put food on the table? Did you receive temporary disability during that time? In either of these situations, would you consider yourself and your family living beyond your means? Do you believe people should be punished for living beyond their means? Do you realize that these benefits are also considered entitlements?

The thing is, we as a species tend to judge by what we see and base it on personal experiences. The problem is that past experiences vary widely. So what you judge someone else for is not the same as your experience. You don’t know what they’ve been through any more than they know what you’ve been through. So no matter how you judge them, you do so unfairly because of your ignorance to what got them where they are. We all come from different places and different experiences and perceptions.

Bottom line is that we need to go back to live and let live. We need to fully educate our children in public schools, funding those schools fully with our tax dollars and providing all necessary tools and resources to do so. Then we need to trust that those who have been through that public educational system to have the knowledge and resources to make suitable decisions for their own lives and quit assuming they are either stupid or immoral. Because to make such assumptions says more about you than it does about them. And you know how you judge others. Try and imagine what they’d say about you. Do Unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Slavery or States Rights?

It was all about Slavery
I am the most liberal person on the planet. Or so I’m told at least. In an attack by someone I thought was my friend, a friend with potential, perhaps not so much. The red flags were there. He set them on fire with that attack. That was only the beginning, but that’s another story.
The debate was initiated in that way followed by asking my opinion of the question of Confederate Memorials. It may or may not be a popular opinion, but my stance is that if it’s just honoring the dead, and was erected right after the war, there is no reason to bring them down. But if its celebrating the actions of a Traitor to the United States, it should come down and if it was erected as a protest against segregation and the civil rights movement, they should come down immediately. The motives behind putting it up should be a factor.
So the next assertion he threw at me was that the Civil War was not about slavery, that it was about States Rights. Wrong. It was about slavery. And that can be proven by reading the Cessation declarations of the Confederate states. These declarations can be found at http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~ras2777/amgov/secession.html . Note that the site is a Southern college. Each declaration from Georgia, Texas, Mississippi and South Carolina all mention the elimination of the fugitive slave laws and the nullification of their “property” because of the banning of slavery. So these primary states of the Confederacy all specifically name Slavery as one of the primary reasons for their leaving the Union. This solidly establishes slavery as one of the primary political issues that led to the Civil War.
The first argument of all conservatives in answer to such a response is that the source is not dependable so I offer another. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/csapage.asp also displays yet another exact copy of these declarations. Yale University and UCS Louisiana. The story is also backed up on https://www.civilwar.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states and also https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/secession/2feb1861.html . Note that’s a southern and a northern college and a historical organization and a government website and that they all agree. I’m sorry Mr and Ms Conservative, your argument is invalid.

What We’ve Become

It is common knowledge that politicians lie, and we all, as citizens of this country accept that as a common truth. But those who vote choose the politician who seems to agree with them on the issues that matter the most to them. Sometimes to their own detriment they unknowingly vote against their own best interests. Human nature leads us to assign importance to issues that we feel passionate about. In doing so, we often ignore the issues that don’t spark any sort of emotional response in us. By doing so, we miss things that have a big impact on our wellbeing.

Politicians are well aware of this trait of human nature. They realize that they can appeal to these passions and distract voters from other issues they don’t assign as much importance to. This is why many politicians claim to be “Pro-life”. The issue sparks passion in many people but does not really affect most of those that are passionate about it. Those people are so passionate about eliminating a choice for other people that they miss how their own rights are being trampled. Politicians use it as a diversionary tactic. And people buy into it without bothering to even look into the voting habits of the candidates that they think they agree with. They make assumptions that if they agree with the candidate on the one issue they assign the most importance to; the candidate must be the one that has their best interests at heart. But the problem is….they don’t.

It’s time for a new age of enlightenment. We need to reawaken our minds, renew our ability to think critically and do so on all public policy issues. If we don’t, we will most certainly lose our country, if we haven’t lost it already. We’ve allowed our laziness and lack of drive to think and to question the motives of our public representatives and because of it; we have allowed ourselves to be led down the path to the deterioration of our country. As a result, we have an administration that wants to re-write our Constitution to fit the purposes of said administration including, but not limited to eliminating our freedoms of speech, press, and to petition for redress grievances. This can be validated simply by reading the president’s twitter account. This sort of behavior was previously seen in the rise of one of the most evil men in world history, Adolph Hitler.

As citizens, why are we not questioning this connection? Are we so focused on wanting “the American Dream” and our desire to have no hurdles between us and the prize that we don’t care what else politicians are doing? Why are we not questioning EVERYTHING they propose to make a law that affects us all? Do we not realize that ever y single law has an impact on all of us, regardless of whether or not it’s direct?

It’s perfectly normal and natural for people to want what’s going to allow them to maximize their own financial stability. And to focus on what affects one’s own life is normal. But when one loses the ability to critically think, they tend to miss important details. Its common to hear the old adage that “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”. Politicians tell the public what the bill they propose is intended to do, but if we look at every bill proposed, politicians add other things to the initial bill. It doesn’t just do what they say publicly. They add things to it that they don’t talk about. This is why transparency is so important. We need to pay attention to every single word included in each bill.

Republicans and Democrats demonize each other for not agreeing to approve bills proposed because they keep good things from being accomplished. But they suppress the fact that there was something else in that bill that would make life more difficult for a sizable portion of the population. Both sides have agendas that they try to accomplish covertly. If we are to recover the freedoms this country was founded on, we must hold them all accountable. How do we do this? We show up. We show up at not only the Presidential elections but also the primaries, the special elections and the local elections. We ask questions. We do our research. If our representative votes against something we think they should have voted in favor of, show up at a town hall meeting. Ask them why they voted against the bill. Perhaps there was a small phrase or a couple of sentences in it that went against all this candidate stands for. Perhaps he or she wants to talk about that. And if that’s the case, we the people need to know if that decision is in our best interest or not and make our decisions on who we vote for accordingly.

We can’t just keep voting on one or two issues anymore. We can’t take politicians at face value and listen to what they have said in their prepared speeches. We need to ask questions. We need to catch them off guard and ask for answers they weren’t prepared to discuss so we can see how they think on their feet. We need to drill them about their stance on any topic that affects us personally. We need to know how they’ve voted in the past on the issues that affect us. And most importantly, we need to re-teach ourselves to think critically. We need to open up communication again with those who disagree with us and work on finding middle ground and elect only those open to that middle ground. We need to stop judging each other on those same single topics that got us here. Abortion does not need to be a solitary issue voted on because many of those voting solely on a politician’s stance on that issue are devastated by the financial decisions those very same politicians make. Pay attention folks. Ask questions.. Not only questions of your state politicians, but your local ones too. LEARN how their decisions have affected you in the past. Learn how the issues impact you personally. READ the bills proposed. Ask questions about what they mean. Consider how those bills can be misinterpreted or used to obliterate someone’s rights. Because if a bill says you can discriminate against someone based on your religion, they also say someone else can discriminate against you based on theirs. THIS is what thinking critically is.

Thinking critically has been played off as being a bad thing for our kids but it’s not. Thinking critically is learning to think for one self. It’s a very good thing that keeps people from being taken unfair advantage of. Politicians don’t want Americans to think critically because they want to continue to destroy the fabric of this nation for their own financial benefit. But ladies and gentlemen, they work for us. They should be doing what is in OUR best interest, not their own. They are not our leaders. They are our employees…they should be working to make our lives better, not to get rich off our tax dollars.

So we need to regain our ability to think critically and start holding our elected officials personally accountable for their actions and make sure they act in our best interests and if they don’t, we need to vote them out.

Lastly, we need to reverse the bad precedent set when Nixon was pardoned and start prosecuting for treason and corruption. And those who commit heinous acts to climb the political gains ladder must be punished for doing so, up to and including prison time, asset stripping and loss of benefits. A President that commits treason through collusion with a foreign adversary must be prosecuted for treason, be stripped of his assets, lose his lifetime retirement benefits as a former president and be imprisoned for his actions. The same goes for any elected official who participates in the conspiracy to commit treason for personal and political gain. If we don’t, we will never be able to trust our political system again.

She

“She was warned, she was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted”
She insisted on being heard
Her opposition put on the record
She was scolded like a child.
Nevertheless she persisted. -Senator Elizabeth Warren

She was going to learn.
Education is important.
Then they shot her in the head.
Nevertheless, she persisted. -Malala

She wrote the Equal Rights Amendment.
She protested, was arrested.
Abused, she went on a hunger strike.
Nevertheless, she persisted. -Alice Paul

She was born blind and deaf.
She was abandoned as a lost cause.
Yet she learned how to communicate.
Nevertheless, she persisted. -Helen Keller

She opened an illegal birth control clinic.
She was shut down in a raid.
She tried again and again, was even evicted.
Nevertheless, she persisted. -Margaret Sanger

The List goes on and will go on, because women who can be silenced don’t make history.

You can try to stop us.
Nevertheless, we will persist.

Chained

Am I chained by gender rules
To this private womb
Made public by morals
Not my own.

Imprisoned in femininity
By a public entity
Poisoned by power
Demanding dominance

Am I to be
Prisoner to pregnancy
Denied choices, living
In forced dependency.