Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

I am a white male in my sixties as of this writing. I have never had trouble voting, although I have met older folk who were threatened for wanting to vote. Inevitably those souls were in bodies with darker skins. Throughout my lifetime political leaders have tried (with varying degrees of success) to maintain power for themselves and their cohorts by cheating. It has rarely been subtle. Parties extolling law and order strip felons of that citizenship right casually because no one cares that it is unconstitutional, jailed citizens not having much sympathy. Districts are drawn every ten years explicitly to support the ruling party who controls those maps. In my childhood a lot of this came to a head: incredibly brave people risked their lives and livelihoods to say that they were citizens and not second-class ones. As nothing gets better for any group without access to voting, their focus was on getting the vote as a color-blind right of citizenship. There was a time when shame of who w...

In my twenties I tooks some martial arts classes: Judo, Aikido, T'ai Chi Chuan.  My Aikido instructor made a point of telling us students not to offer our opponents handles to make it easier to throw us. I haven't been in a dojo for decades but that piece of advice has stayed with me. I have spent my career involved in the genteel world of campus politics. Outside this bubble conflicts continue over disputed regions, resources, presidents who hate many of our country's citizens based on their gender or skin color.  Very early on I realized that caring about what others think about me gave them handles with which to manipulate me. I'm human and so that constantly comes to mind as I interact with others, in conflicts great and small. I have my pride, more than an abundance of it. The times when I have been able to persevere in pursuit of a goal in the face of resistance and/or active opposition, it has always been when I stop caring about what others think of me. And so I...

I've always felt strongly that for most people their sources of incomes were gods (not their only ones) in their lives, and that how people spend their income is as clear and honest a statement of their values as you can get without being omniscient enough to read someone's heart. The Trump administration is burning money on the war that it launched against Iran; Trump wants to build a monumental arch to himself; he is negotiating with his own IRS to get ten billion dollars in some kind of damages for some leak of his tax records (God forbid we should know anything about the gods he worships, and what countries they may be located in), while funding for federal safety nets is slashed. No one voted for Trump thinking he would be compassionate; the only shock for his voters is thinking that he wouldn't turn on them. So: the leadership of the federal government is in the hands of folk whose values represent the cruelest greed known to humankind. We should change it.

I'm still struggling with how to put into words how I feel about my country committing war crimes and our leader threatening another country with genocide. My old friend (and much better writer) Michael Covington did a good job of it. https://www.covingtoninnovations.com/michael/blog/2604/index.html#x260408

Um, not to be too extreme here, but if anyone thinks that is not totally evil they are a monster. Do not, do not, do not give power to sadists; it does not end well.