Marching on weekends does little to disrupt the regular flow of life in the United States of America, nothing really to pinch where it might be felt. It seems to me that the remedies called for by the behavior of the new administration must be more radical, something that really causes those making the misery know that there are consequences for what they are doing. Donald will not be moved by marches—the very big one a few weeks ago, it seems, did nothing to cause him even to publically acknowledge that there is legitimate descent. He, I think we have good reason to believe, watched the “reporting” on Fox News and listened not to what those demonstrating were saying. The Muslim-not-a-ban ban came within days of the marches! And so did the attack on the Johnson Act. He did not pull any of his candidates for cabinet posts and he nominated to the Supreme Court a person who, it seems, is not of the sort that will preserve the rights of women.
My ideas for action are not going to be taken seriously, I can tell. A general strike is probably out of the question-maybe not, maybe there are people working to bring about just a thing. If anyone knows of people working on bringing about such action, let me know. As I think I said earlier, the economy is what the United States of America is about and its disruption would truly shock the nation and those currently holding power including those who so many are depending upon who will probably do hardly anything but enunciate a word or two connoting radicalism but who really are really too happy with the status quo to actually do anything radical about Donald Trump and what is looking to be the sealing of the deal for those who have been pushing a radical rightwing agenda for a very long time, an agenda that has pushed the old party that had pretentions of leftness so far to the right of center that there is no viable party in existence that is more concerned with the process of humanization than with insuring that those with lots and lots of money are able to make lots and lots of money.
The only radical movement with viability now is the movement represented by the current administration, its top advisor a straight out and proud advocate for a politics of exclusion who wishes to punish those who disagree with him. What kind of march is going to move this guy toward a humane sense of how things should operate? What is it that he and those who support his ideas take from marches by the opposition?
In many of my much too long (it seems) posts to Facebook I have complained about “liberal,” in its most visible forms, having become neoliberalism. That is what I saw when Hillary Clinton became the only candidate allowed to vie against Donald Trump and there is ever so much available if one wishes to look to show that no true liberal was she, not at all one to go after the corporate-religious coalition that she was running against. Mr. Bannon, by the way, is both a corporatist and a religionist, the latter the most dangerous aspect of him as it fuels his racism and his desire to purify the nation by pushing all who are not white and Christian into obscurity.
The problem, really, is us, we who may have a scintilla of good sense left in us, we who really do want a society that is fair to all and equitable, that works to insure that our humanity is respected, that the phrase in the Declaration that states that “all men [sic] are created equal and therefore, just by the fact that they are human, by nature have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That the corporatist-religious agenda gets in the way of ALL people being afford what is, by nature, theirs, because it is about some being able to get much more at the expense of a good many, a good number of these not having enough (education, health care, income that allows for the happiness), the religious part justifying the selfishness of the corporatist (capitalist) system so that those who enjoy the benefit have God as good reason for not engaging in the kind of introspection that might help them understand that the system is truly harsh and patently unfair.
I begin to sound like a commie, don’t I? And my railings against the democratic party and its neo-liberal tendencies the bashing of the best choice we have. So be it. Until those opposed to Trump begin to understand what the effective preventative against the full-on from the right take-over of the United States (the talk in right-wing think-tanks starting as far back as the Reagan era was to build the permanent republican majority, one that is harshly corporatist/religious) is something, as Mr. Sanders pointed out, pretty radical seeming to those relatively content with the status quo, an agenda that is based in redistribution of wealth and the undermining of magical thinking that is sponsored by that “religious community” to which the illiberal liberals that run the democratic party constantly give praise.
And once again I am feeling something like ambivalence toward myself for, at a time when people of certain religions are being treated in terribly unfair ways (by religionists, I have to say) here I am, again, saying that religion is a problem. It is, a problem, and that one group of religionist would ban another group on the basis of religious belief is, for me, not only a sign of the problematic nature of religion but also significant because it reflects how crazily important religion is our world, how belief in fantastical things affects the ways in which deal with one another.
Shut it down! And march? Shut it down with marches?
