The wound we keep open

Folks, as someone much wiser than me has said, assertions that are “not supported by the historical record and simply throw more fuel on today’s incendiary and misinformed national uproar about the origins, aftermath and memory of the Civil War” are not helpful.

PLEASE, I implore you, learn facts, learn what you think you know, inside and out and do not let ignorance and misinformation spread. Stand up to the revisionists and the apologists. They may buy “The Lost Cause” myth, the nobility of traitors who fought to tear our nation apart for the singular purpose of creating a slave republic, but don’t you buy it! Allow me give you some good reference material to fight back with.

In reading the writings of Robert E. Lee you will come to the irrefutable conclusion that yes, “Lee did believe that persons of African descent were inferior to white people.” He may have spoken against slavery as an evil (but of course more evil for the white race) and he may have allowed slaves in his control to be taught to read the Bible (which they believed condoned slavery), but he was as racist as anyone in the confederacy. The awful truth of his refusal to swap prisoners if it included black Union troops he had captured is another telling part of his mentality.

Sure, he could make it sound sympathetic, but in the end, he made war on his own nation to keep slavery: “In a letter written to his wife in 1856, Lee described slavery as “a moral & political evil,” but went on to qualify that it was “a greater evil to the white man [my emphasis] than to the black.” He then resorted to the time-worn ad hominem attack on people of African descent: “The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known and ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.”

It is also patently false to claim Lee thought states rights were more important than the Union and that he simply stood with his native Virginia. He made that choice against his families wishes, against his mentors wishes and from all accounts, against his own oath to the Constitution and 25 years of service to the United States, not Virginia!

Lee wrote in January 1861 “I take great pride in my country, her prosperity and institutions, and would defend any State if her rights were invaded. But I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than a dissolution of the Union. … I am willing to sacrifice everything but honor for its preservation. I hope, therefore, that all constitutional means will be exhausted before there is a resort to force. Secession is nothing but revolution. The framers of our Constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom, and forbearance in its formation, and surrounded it with so many guards and securities, if it was intended to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at will. It was intended for ‘perpetual union.’” His attempts to parse following Virginia as opposed to the confederacy are just rhetoric.

He fully understood the very simple definition of treason that was in the US Constitution he had sworn an oath to defend then, and the definition is the same now: Article III Section 3: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.”

“The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted.”

Who, better than Lee, with his family history and his own service knew the power, might and determination of the United States Army, as well as the weaknesses of the confederate rebellion?

Another fact the revisionists overlook is that the United States never accepted secession, never acknowledged the confederacy as a separate entity. They were and remained, states in rebellion and all laws, taxes and issues remained.

It is true that no matter how long and hard Lee drove his soldiers, nor how much the south sacrificed for them to do so, Lee became a god-like figure to them. He knew this. And that knowledge as well as being acutely aware of his crimes against the Union and signing an “Amnesty Oath” he tried to tell the South not to make the iconography they were determined to raise.

“I think it wiser,” the retired military leader wrote about a proposed Gettysburg memorial in 1869, “…not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”

“As regards the erection of such a monument as is contemplated,” Lee wrote of an 1866 proposal, “my conviction is, that however grateful it would be to the feelings of the South, the attempt in the present condition of the Country, would have the effect of retarding, instead of accelerating its accomplishment; [and] of continuing, if not adding to, the difficulties under which the Southern people labour.”

“At his funeral in 1870, flags were notably absent from the procession. Former Confederate soldiers marching did not don their old military uniforms, and neither did the body they buried.”

Historians say Lee thought the nation would heal best without reminders of the confederacy and without the division it would create. He was so right! They say Lee “didn’t want a cult of personality for the South.” But that is just what the South delivered.

Through a long and concerted effort, the United Daughters of the Confederacy started erecting monuments and revising the bloody rebellion as a wronged South, enobled to fight for their rights in a hostile nation. And that narrative took. It is wrong, but it stays. It stays because the monuments stay.

You know what else stayed? The KKK, formed by former confederates and meant to terrorize former slaves. That white nationalism is still here doing damage today and they revere the confederate icons above all.

You know what else the South did after Lee was gone and could not have spoken against it? When the Reconstruction Troops were withdrawn, the Black Codes and the Jim Crow era of subjugation began the replacement for slavery. The night riders, the public lynching parties, the deep segregation and disenfranchisement of the entire black race. And the former confederates made it happen.

As the monuments went up, the Civil Rights Movement was beginning too. From Julian Carr’s speech at the dedication of “Silent Sam” a confederate monument in NC: “The present generation, I am persuaded, scarcely takes note of what the Confederate soldier meant to the welfare of the Anglo Saxon race during the four years immediately succeeding the war, when the facts are, that their courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South – When “the bottom rail was on top” all over the Southern states, and to-day, as a consequence the purest strain of the Anglo Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States – Praise God.”

“I trust I may be pardoned for one allusion, howbeit it is rather personal. One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison, and for thirty nights afterwards slept with a double-barrel shot gun under my head.”

Think long and hard what you are praising, what you are perpetuating and how the confederate hate and rebellion is still affecting our nation these 155 years later.

View at Medium.com

https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/julyaugust/feature/how-did-robert-e-lee-become-american-icon?fbclid=IwAR1qtptRE1Byf5OcQnnSp7QrfZSwRpkTmp_Kzb4rBoUruGZwUb2OeZBd4nk

https://thetandd.com/opinion/local-historian-responds-to-robert-e-lee-letter/article_60e4ce3a-59cb-5e38-a69e-b0c63432d4d4.html?fbclid=IwAR1CJG03CRNPXQzhc5QQqhimXrBlyKUXf0XirKnnYr1EDCo_ya1RR_L_kTw

 

View at Medium.com

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Please read!

Violence Never Works? Really?

How do you think this country came to be?

Tim Wise

Following

May 29 · 2020

The moralizing has begun.

Those who have rarely been the target of organized police gangsterism are once again lecturing those who have about how best to respond to it.

Be peaceful, they implore, as protesters rise up in Minneapolis and across the country in response to the killing of George Floyd. This, coming from the same people who melted down when Colin Kaepernick took a knee — a decidedly peaceful type of protest. Because apparently, when white folks say, “protest peacefully,” we mean “stop protesting.”

Everything is fine, nothing to see here.

It is telling that much of white America sees fit to lecture black people about the evils of violence, even as we enjoy the national bounty over which we claim possession solely as a result of the same. I beg to remind you, George Washington was not a practitioner of passive resistance. Neither the early colonists nor the nation’s founders fit within the Gandhian tradition. There were no sit-ins at King George’s palace, no horseback freedom rides to affect change. There were just guns, lots and lots of guns.

We are here because of blood, and mostly that of others. We are here because of our insatiable desire to take by force the land and labor of others. We are the last people on Earth with a right to ruminate upon the superior morality of peaceful protest. We have never believed in it and rarely practiced it. Instead, we have always taken what we desire, and when denied it, we have turned to means utterly genocidal to make it so.

Even in the modern era, the notion that we believe in non-violence or have some well-nurtured opposition to rioting is belied by the evidence. Indeed, white folks riot for far less legitimate reasons than those for which African Americans might decide to hoist a brick, a rock, or a bottle.

We have done so in the wake of Final Four games, or because of something called Pumpkin Festival in Keene, New Hampshire. We did it because of $10 veggie burritos at Woodstock ’99, and because there weren’t enough Porta-Potties after the Limp Bizkit set.

We did it when we couldn’t get enough beer at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake, and because Penn State fired Joe Paterno.

We did it because what else do a bunch of Huntington Beach surfers have to do? We did it because a “kegs and eggs” riot sounds like a perfectly legitimate way to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in Albany.

Far from amateur hooliganism, our riots are violent affairs that have been known to endanger the safety and lives of police, as with the infamous 1998 riot at Washington State University. According to a report at the time:

The crowd then attacked the officers from all sides for two hours with rocks, beer bottles, signposts, chairs, and pieces of concrete, allegedly cheering whenever an officer was struck and injured. Twenty-three officers were injured, some suffering concussions and broken bones.

Twenty-two years later, we wait for academics to ruminate about the pathologies of these whites in Pullman, whose culture of dysfunction was taught to them by their rural families and symbolized by the recognizable gang attire of Carhartt work coats and backward baseball caps.

Back to the present: To speak of violence done by black people without uttering so much as a word about the violence done to them is perverse. And by violence, I don’t mean merely that of police brutality. I mean the structural violence that flies under the radar of most white folks but which has created the broader conditions in black communities against which those who live there are now rebelling.

Let us remember, those places to which we refer as “ghettos” were created, and not by the people who live in them. They were designed as holding pens — concentration camps were we to insist upon plain language — within which impoverished persons of color would be contained. Generations of housing discrimination created them, as did decade after decade of white riots against black people whenever they would move into white neighborhoods. They were created by deindustrialization and the flight of good-paying manufacturing jobs overseas.

And all of that is violence too. It is the kind of violence that the powerful, and only they, can manifest. One needn’t throw a Molotov cocktail through a window when one can knock down the building using a bulldozer or crane operated with public money. Zoning laws, redlining, predatory lending, stop-and-frisk: all are violence, however much we fail to understand that.

As I was saying, it is bad enough that we think it appropriate to admonish persons of color about violence or to say that it “never works,” especially when it does. We are, after all, here, which serves as rather convincing proof that violence works quite well. What is worse is our insistence that we bear no responsibility for the conditions that have caused the current crisis and that we need not even know about those conditions. It brings to mind something James Baldwin tried to explain many years ago:

…this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it…but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

White America has a long and storied tradition of not knowing, and I don’t mean this in the sense of genuinely blameless ignorance. This ignorance is nothing if not cultivated by the larger workings of the culture. We have come by this obliviousness honestly, but in a way for which we cannot escape culpability. It’s not as if the truth hasn’t been out there all along.

It was there in 1965 when most white Californians responded to the rebellion in the Watts section of Los Angeles by insisting it was the fault of a “lack of respect for law and order” or the work of “outside agitators.”

The truth was there, but invisible to most whites when we told pollsters in the mid-1960s — within mere months of the time that formal apartheid had been lifted with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — that the present situation of black Americans was mostly their own fault. Only one in four thought white racism, past or present, or some combination of the two, might be the culprit.

Even before the passage of civil rights laws in the 1960s, whites thought there was nothing wrong. In 1962, 85 percent of whites told Gallup that black children had just as good a chance as white children to get a good education. By 1969, a mere year after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., 44 percent of whites told a Newsweek/Gallup survey that blacks had a better chance than they did to get a good-paying job. In the same poll, eighty percent of whites said blacks had an equal or better opportunity for a good education than whites did.

Even in the 1850s, during a period when black bodies were enslaved on forced labor camps known as plantations by the moral equivalent of kidnappers, respected white voices saw no issue worth addressing.

According to Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a well-respected physician of the 19th century, enslavement was such a benign institution that any black person who tried to escape its loving embrace must be suffering from mental illness. In this case, Cartwright called it “Drapetomania,” a malady that could be cured by keeping the enslaved in a “child-like state,” and by regularly employing “mild whipping.”

In short, most white Americans are like that friend you have, who never went to medical school, but went to Google this morning and now feels confident he or she is qualified to diagnose your every pain. As with your friend and the med school to which they never gained entry, most white folks never took classes on the history of racial domination and subordination, but are sure we know more about it than those who did. Indeed, we suspect we know more about the subject than those who, more than merely taking the class, actually lived the subject matter.

When white folks ask, “Why are they so angry, and why do some among them loot?” we betray no real interest in knowing the answers to those questions. Instead, we reveal our intellectual nakedness, our disdain for truth, our utterly ahistorical understanding of our society. We query as if history did not happen because, for us, it did not. We needn’t know anything about the forces that have destroyed so many black lives, and long before anyone in Minneapolis decided to attack a liquor store or a police precinct.

For instance, University of Alabama History Professor Raymond Mohl has noted that by the early 1960s, nearly 40,000 housing units per year were being demolished in urban communities (mostly of color) to make way for interstate highways. Another 40,000 were being knocked down annually as part of so-called urban “renewal,” which facilitated the creation of parking lots, office parks, and shopping centers in working-class and low-income residential spaces. By the late 1960s, the annual toll would rise to nearly 70,000 houses or apartments destroyed every year for the interstate effort alone.

Three-fourths of persons displaced from their homes were black, and a disproportionate share of the rest were Latino. Less than ten percent of persons displaced by urban renewal and interstate construction had new single-resident or family housing to go to afterward, as cities rarely built new housing to take the place of that which had been destroyed. Instead, displaced families had to rely on crowded apartments, double up with relatives, or move into run-down public housing projects. In all, about one-fifth of African American housing in the nation was destroyed by the forces of so-called economic development.

And then, at the same time that black and brown housing was being destroyed, millions of white families were procuring government-guaranteed loans (through the FHA and VA loan programs) that were almost entirely off-limits to people of color, and which allowed us to hustle it out to the suburbs where only we were allowed to go. But we can know nothing about any of that and still be called educated. We can live in the very houses obtained with those government-backed loans, denied to others based solely on race, or inherit the proceeds from their sale, and still believe ourselves unsullied and unimplicated in the pain of the nation’s black and brown communities.

As much of the country burns, literally or metaphorically, it is time to face our history. Time to stop asking others to fight for their lives on our terms, and remember that it is their collective jugular vein being compressed. It is their windpipe being crushed. It is their sons and daughters being choked out and shot and beaten and profiled and harassed.

It is their liberty and freedom at stake.

But by all means, white people, please tell us all the one again about how having to wear the mask at Costco is tyranny.

Busted!

Don’t let them lie! They are not voting for Trump because they want a conservative. The ONLY conservative value Trump has not trashed, is white supremacy.

In my news feed: “Guns, the NRA and the Second Amendment are under assault from the left” BS right under “AOC dings Democratic National Convention targeted to ‘white moderates’ BS” Could we make up our mind?

You know how people hated that we robbed native tribes for beads? Well a lot of people traded America for a red hat and a clown.

“I have never encountered a public official, a candidate for office, a bureaucrat, a defense lawyer or, frankly, an actual criminal who is as regularly and aggressively dishonest as the current president of the United States. And that includes a dozen years covering the Florida legislature”   – S.V. Dáte, HuffPost’s White House correspondent.

“I’ve been in this business more than three decades, and what’s happening now is unprecedented,” Dáte wrote as part of an unsuccessful pitch to become president of the White House Correspondents’ Association. “We are attacked on a near daily basis using Stalinist language. We are called corrupt and dishonest. We are given false information from staff who often know full well that it is false.”

Trump tells us every day that he does not respect us enough to tell us the truth or work at trying to solve problems or put effort into learning how to do the right thing. He is an abusive human being.

This is on us!

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” President John F. Kennedy -1962

How many times will it take?

How many people have to die to be heard?

This is on us.

It is on every police department making excuses instead of condemning it. It is on every officer who stood by and did not intervene. It is on every American who views the riots as the problem and not the cause of the riots!

What if, instead of standing down, the police attempted to disburse the toy soldiers armed to the teeth protesting at our state houses? Whose fault would it have been then?

Living the life…

Such is life on news forums…Not for the faint of heart but attracts eejits like horse pucky.

1962 Jason Apr 20, 2020 5:11pm

Sandi – Your commitment to stamping out sanctimony wherever and whenever it rears its ugly head is admirable.

Sandi Saunders Apr 21, 2020 8:11am

Jason, your commitment to only noticing what I say or comment is not admirable at all. I answer in kind.

1962 Jason Apr 21, 2020 1:30pm

Thank you, Sandi. One fine point: I take exception to your misplacement of the word “only” in your remark. After all, you surely cannot expect that the “only” thing I am committed to do all day is to notice what you say or comment. Question: Which one of us is more full of ourselves? Or possibly, you may wish to restate your comment and apply the word “only” in a more effectively modest place among your thoughts.

REPORT ADD REPLY

Sandi Saunders Apr 22, 2020 9:33am

Way to get all fluffed up…I merely meant that in this letter, in this comment thread, you ONLY chose to comment on what I said., and you often do so.
You are most assuredly more “full of yourself” than most here because instead of any substantive point about the thread topic you go after only some comments rather than even addressing the issue itself. What really is more “full of it” than that? Not much.

Pooh Apr 21, 2020 3:37pm

Jason, there is a reason that Sandi has to comment on about every letter every day. What’s so funny is this is from 9 years ago, and she’s still trying to tell everyone they’re wrong.

https://www.roanoke.com/news/local/sandi-saunders-scores-with-posts-and/article_cfb1710e-2513-5f60-b554-6c3a40516446.html

1962 Jason Apr 21, 2020 4:25pm

Wow! I read it. It no longer is a question for me which one of us is more full of herself /of himself. Makes me wonder, too, how with all that meticulous writing experience, she let a misplaced modifier get away from her so easily.

 

 

Sandi Saunders Apr 22, 2020 9:36am

I agree, there is no longer any question, if there ever was any. You rival a Christmas turkey. the substance you continually fail to offer and the petty, childish personal attacks you post instead are really all we need to know about you.

 

Sandi Saunders Apr 22, 2020 9:34am

Is stalking me something that takes up much of your free time, anonymous troll?

Sandi Saunders Apr 22, 2020 9:38am

I have a blog too, in case your sleuthing missed it.

https://blueinredvirginia.wordpress.com/page/2/

 

1962 Jason Apr 22, 2020 10:05am

I love the First Amendment for you, Sandi. Also I love the permissiveness of these RT comment boards that allow you to post four times to criticize others (in what I read as a defensive posture) and one time as a substantive (epistle-length) reply to the topic. Carry on!

 

 

Sandi Saunders Apr 22, 2020 12:27pm

Yes, I can imagine all of you would love to bash me without any rebuttal.

 

Pooh Apr 22, 2020 4:24pm

Yeah Sandi I have seen that blog of yours, along with some other “Voice of the Valley” , or something similar, place that you spew your hatred. I can’t imagine anyone having so much hate, and dislike, for our country and President.

You came unglued the day after Trump was elected, before he was even sworn into office. Why? Was it because Hillary lost an election that she was supposedly a shoe-in to win? Is it because Trump says what he thinks, without worrying about who it might upset? We all know he’s not perfect, not even close, but it could be a whole lot worse.

Do you really believe that your daily tirades posted on here will do anything to change things? No …. Nothing you, me, Jason, EDR, hazydays, another voice, no name, or anyone else do or say will change a thing. But it is entertaining to read the comments and replies.

 

1962 Jason Apr 22, 2020 5:30pm

Pooh – I agree with your conclusions. A neverending trail of sanctimonious position statements do not serve to persuade, but only to entertain those (few readers) who would be entertained. And now, over to Steven K who never has anything substantive to say but who likes to take moronic jabs at contributors, perceiving that they may have an emotional volatility. Steven?

 

Sandi Saunders Apr 23, 2020 9:20am

I suppose you both miss the irony of whining about how I “spew” my “hatred” while doing so yourselves? If you really “can’t imagine anyone having so much hate, and dislike, for our country and President” go look in a mirror, or read the comments of folks you agree with. They love Trump and his government, but no one else’s which is rank hypocrisy and malarkey.
You are not wrong that I “came unglued” but it was the moment Trump, the unstable, pathological liar, narcissist who is ignorance personified, was elected. Trump was a terrible mistake. And he has only proven I was right, every day and rage tweet that dawns. And no, it could not, in any way “be a whole lot worse” if Clinton had been elected. Not in any way, shape or form.
What I “believe” (because people have often told me) is that my “daily tirades” show that the opposition to the vile Trump and his vile, dishonest supporters and enablers is alive and well and will never let up. The only thing I “change” is the echo chamber you all seek. I relish the role.
If I entertain, so be it. I don’t think that is why you all keep trying to shut me up. I also do not lie, make things up, or sugar-coat my perspective. And , unlike you, I say my piece under my own name (so you stalkers can find me and my history of speaking out) My integrity matters to me and I would never throw it away as the right-wingers do. Stay hidden, keep attacking, I welcome the chances to prove you and Trump wrong.

https://www.roanoke.com/opinion/letters/letter-life/article_ed037092-8e71-5a07-8b87-e98487f281d8.html

Yep!

Great Response to Fools

“RESPONSE FROM A MICHIGAN NURSE TO PEOPLE PROTESTING ABOUT “STAY AT HOME”

“I have seen 4 patients die, 5 intubated, 2 re-intubated, witnessed family consent to make 2 more patients DNR, sweat my butt off during COPT, titrated so many drips to no avail, watched vent settings increase to no avail. We are exhausted and at a total loss. Some of you people have never done everything you can to save someone and watched them die, and it shows….

You wanna complain because the Garden Aisle is closed? Your garden doesn’t matter. If killing your plants would bring back my patients, I would pillage the shit out of your “essential” garden beds.

Upset because you can’t go boating, in Michigan? You wanna tell my patient’s daughter (who was sobbing as she said goodbye to her father over the PHONE) about your FIRST-WORLD problems.

Upset because you can’t go to your cottage up north? Your cottage…your second property… used for leisure. My coworkers can’t even stay in their regular homes. Most have been staying in hotels and dorms not able to see their spouses or babies.

All of these posts, petitions online to evade “TYRANNY” it’s all such bullshit. I’m sorry you’re bored and have nothing to do but bitch and moan. You wanna pick up a couple of hours for me?
Yeah, didn’t think so.

I wouldn’t trust most of you with patient care anyway. Not just because of the selfish lack of humanity your posts exude, but because most of those posts and petitions are so riddled with misspellings and grammatical errors, that it makes me question your cognitive capacity.

Shout out to my coworkers, the real MVPs.”

Another Great Steal

Yeah I’m mad and I’m gonna stay mad!  This is not my work but I believe it is accurate:

JUST SO WE ARE CLEAR ON THE TIMELINE:

Dec 18 – House Impeaches Trump

Dec 31 – China alerted WHO to several cases of unusual pneumonia in Wuhan, a port city of 11 million people in the central Hubei province. The virus was unknown.

Jan 8 – First CDC warning on Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19)

Jan 9 – Trump campaign rally

Jan 14 – Trump campaign rally

Jan 16 – House sends impeachment articles to Senate

Jan 18 – Trump golfs

Jan 19 – Trump golfs

Jan 20 – first case of COVID-19 in the US, Washington State.

Jan 22 – “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”

Jan 28 – Trump campaign rally

Jan 30 – Trump campaign rally

Feb 1 – Trump golfs

Feb 2 – “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”

Feb 5 – Senate votes to acquit. Then takes a five-day weekend.

Feb 10 – Trump campaign rally

Feb 12 – Dow Jones closes at an all time high of 29,551.42

Feb 15 – Trump golfs

Feb 19 – Trump campaign rally

Feb 20 – Trump campaign rally

Feb 21 – Trump campaign rally

Feb 24 – “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

Feb 25 – “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”

Feb 25 – “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”

Feb 26 – “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”

Feb 26 – “We’re going very substantially down, not up.” Also “This is a flu. This is like a flu”; “Now, you treat this like a flu”; “It’s a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for. And we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner.”

Feb 27 – “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

Feb 28 – “We’re ordering a lot of supplies. We’re ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn’t be ordering unless it was something like this. But we’re ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”

Feb 28 – Trump campaign rally

Feb 29 – First COVID-19 death in US

Mar 2 – “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don’t think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”

Mar 2 – “A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”

Mar 4 – “If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”

Mar 5 – “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.”

Mar 5 – “The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!”

Mar 6 – “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”

Mar 6 – “Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful…. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.”

Mar 6 – “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”

Mar 6 – “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”

Mar 7 – Trump golfs

Mar 8 – Trump golfs

Mar 8 – “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus.”

Mar 9 – “This blindsided the world.”

Mar 13 – [Declared state of emergency]

Mar 14 – Young Asian-American family of 4 stabbed in TX Sam’s Club by man who thinks they’re responsible for COVID.

Mar 15 – 3,613 COVID-19 cases, 69 deaths

Mar 17 – “This is a pandemic,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

Mar 18 – “It’s not racist at all. No.
Not at all. It comes from China. That’s why. It comes from China. I want to be accurate.”

Mar 23 – Dow Jones closes at 18,591.93

Mar 25 – 3.3 million Americans file for unemployment.

Mar 30 – Dow Jones closes at 21,917.16

Apr 2 – 6.6 million Americans file for unemployment.

Apr 3 – 270,062 COVID-19 cases, 6,927 deaths.

Tests still not available for most people.

(Thanks to Laramie Kay Sasseville (whoever you are) for the hard work.)

6J

I wish I had written this!

( Found on a friends FB Page, I dont know who wrote it, but wish I had.)

For two dozen years I’ve tried to figure out the difference between my conservative friends and my progressive friends.

Ideologically, I don’t identify with my conservative friends.

If I’m being honest, I don’t buy into the Jesus myth, so I’m not one to put someone in my thoughts and prayers, however, of those who are truly devout, and live the life of a Christian, I like them.

I also am bound to like those I grew up with who bleed RED in their political beliefs, even though I’ve learned to like them less and less. Still, I had a hard time truly pinning down what it was that made them characters I found distasteful, and many have shown themselves to be despicable over the last three years. And I hate that I feel that way, I really want to like them, and I would give them the shirt off my back if they needed it.

Then this pandemic hit, and the difference became abundantly clear with the aid of the most repugnant human on the planet.

A republican and a democrat both love their country, but they love it for vastly different reasons. Sadly, if you line up on one side, you have a hard time seeing the other side as love.

Because the left is global, their tribe is more diversified.

Because the right is nationalistic, their tribe is love-it-or-leave-it white America.

I truly do not believe that the right is defined by Christians anymore. The biggest reason why Christians took the right in the first place was over abortion, and it is the divide that will forever keep fervent bible thumpers from ever accepting a left platform, even though I believe they understand that the left is far more generous and giving on every other issue.

The right is made up of Americans who look around and are stunned by how different Americans look now. There are people who speak languages from lands they’ve never heard of, by people who call themselves Americans. They play sports like soccer—about as un-American as they come. They can barely speak English but they get the best grades in American schools.

Girls are winning beauty contests that aren’t blonde, and there was even one who wore a Hijab. This America seems to have left them behind. That has to be a pretty sad feeling. It’s like when you move out of your house that you’ve had for 40 years, and someone else moves in and changes the landscape. It makes you sad to go back and see how different it looks.

But all of that didn’t really go into the differences that puzzled me. I know that globalism and nationalism are things that are a part of us by way of education and experience. I was more puzzled by a difference I couldn’t put my finger on—until we went into quarantine. We went into quarantine because PEOPLE were going to die. We needed to stem the tide, prevent a million deaths. We had the opportunity to see the rest of the world ahead of us, and thankfully democratic leaders shut their states down, and the republican leaders reluctantly followed suit.

But it was in their supposition, that the difference that has always puzzled me has become clear. The love of money is the root of all evil. What I discovered is that the right, and only the right, has rationalized that ECONOMY is more important than LIFE.

I have heard it over and over, from republican talking heads, that a failed economy is worse than 50,000 thousand deaths.

Folks, a failed economy isn’t worse than ONE death, if that death is YOU.
A Failed economy isn’t worse than ONE death, if that death is your child.
A failed economy isn’t worse than ONE death, if that death is a stranger.

THEREIN lies our differences. A person who answers that question, and that question alone, can be identified on which aisle they sit.

Economies can be rebuilt, a death cannot.

Economies ebb and flow, and often times bull markets become bear markets when production exceeds need, and the last quarter, before the pandemic, we started to see the economy slow, we saw the indicator that economists fear, a production/need flip.

This (convenient?) shut down came ahead of that becoming a realization, and there is a chance, when the wheels start churning again, that we might have stayed the execution of a depression, because we will have a lot of NEED when this is over.

However, it won’t be over until it is over. Don’t rush. Let human ingenuity figure out how to survive and THRIVE while we wait that virus out. No life is worth starting too soon, and the truth is, if we start too soon, and another outbreak hits us, which it may, just as it was in 1918, the outcome may be worse the second time round

—

“Be content with what you have;

rejoice in the way things are.

When you realize there is nothing lacking,

the whole world belongs to you.”

Lao Tzu

Dear Trump Supporter

Here’s the thing, I am a good, God loving family woman. The teachings of Christ inform and mold my every value and belief. I am also an American who believes in independence as a natural law right. I believe that the rights and freedoms I have are guaranteed by our Constitution and I see no evidence of even someone as foul as Trump thinking they can take that away from any of us. Certainly no Democrats are seeking any such thing.

Because I believe we are a country of laws, I do not believe that anyone is above them. Trump has repeatedly in his life skirted the spirit and likely the letter of the law and was always able to wriggle out by settling, because he has money. That in itself is corruption and a broken system. If your business did what he has done, you would likely be in jail.

I don’t argue that there should be no consequences for crossing any nation’s border illegally, I don’t even know many people who would, but separating children from family, living in cages, and being warehoused like stock is not a solution and neither is wasting money we do not have on a vanity wall. This is just not going to solve the problem of illegal immigration.

You can believe in your ability to own whatever firearm you choose, but that is not our law and never will be. Even if every military styled rifle and high capacity magazine was removed from our nation overnight, you would still have thousands of choices of firearms at your choosing. Your life is never in danger from ANY gun control law proposed by anyone.

As a moral and competent person I too “believe in supporting our law enforcement officers, first responders, firefighters and our military” but I also have the mental capacity to see the corruption, racism, injustice and problems in all of them.

We all “believe that less government, not more, is what our founding fathers had in mind” but they also had many ideas that just did not work as America evolved and grew. Their knowledge and passion formed a great roadmap, not a prison. We have adapted and revised when we needed to and sadly not as often or as soon as our conscience should have dictated.

The record for Republicans in “shrinking” government or burdens does not exist, so don’t throw that stone! You nor anyone you know is unduly burdened by government, but thanks to our moral compass, many are helped and sustained by it. So is our air, water and soil.

There is no record to say that “less taxation leads to a better economy,” and whether you believe that or not is irrelevant. This nation boomed with the highest tax burden ever, and that is documented fact.

Republican or Democratic administration, there have always been “good people in this country starting businesses and creating jobs” and the economy is not what Trump is proclaiming either. Every economic indicator was going in the right direction when Obama left office.

“Does this sound like a healthy economy to you?
• In nine of the last 10 years, the economy has grown more slowly than professional forecasters had predicted.
• Annual G.D.P. growth has not reached 3 percent in almost 15 years.
• Median net worth for American households has declined, after adjusting for inflation, since the late 1990s. Those are all big warning signs.”
They are not signs of a booming economy!

It is entirely possible that most mainstream media is more biased toward the Democratic Party. As the saying goes, “the truth has a well-known liberal bias.” Right wing spin has been proven false, time and time and time again. But the reality is, no one has to make things up about Trump, he tweets his ignorance, rage, instability and dishonesty daily. Support that at your own peril, always.

I agree that Congress has become a place where power and influence is for sale, to the highest bidder in many cases, but certainly to the squeakiest wheels…which is why high paid lobbyists exist. If we had stuck with the Founders plan of 1 Representative for every 30K people we would not have such a problem maybe, but Congress would be an even worse joke. Either way, the corruption, special interests and intrusions are not at all only from Democrats. I still think many do feel like public servants but are not often heard or supported.

Clearly many do not understand what tolerance is all about. It is about protecting those who are not in the mainstream of our religious or cultural norms. Unless you are among the Muslim, People of Color, Jewish, LGBTQ, Immigrant, Refugee or Challenged community, you are in the mainstream and the collective “you” have written the rules of our nation since its founding and often to the detriment of those groups of also very good people. That they gain equality and representation does not mean you lose. It is not pie.

I hear many on the right claim they are “called ignorant, stupid, indecent, racist, a bigot, a complete idiot and other things because of what [they] stand for.” But in truth it is often more for who you choose to support and defend and how you say it. Claiming your pie is less because someone else gets a piece is not a good look on anyone.

FYI, the Jewish community is so supportive of the Democratic Party because as a much maligned and reviled people, they seek to liberate and alleviate that mentality not revel in it. Not all American Jews support the near apartheid in Israel.

If Trump does indeed (in your mind) come “way closer to supporting what [you] believe than anyone [you’ve] seen in other parties for quite some time” that says not a lot about your knowledge of Trump or the reality in this nation. Trump is not a “brash outsider” he is a corrupt con man who tells you what you want to hear and self-deals on every level. He is not building a party or a movement, he is tearing this nation apart. He has attacked and maligned our intelligence community that put their lives at risk for us, and the same for the FBI that we rely on. He attacks every institution not kissing his ring.

You need to stop fighting and look at some of the leading and truly spiritual leaders in this nation for guidance. Faithful America and John Pavlovitz come to mind. Did you read the editorial from the National Cathedral leaders? Do you comprehend that it is not just crazy left-wing nut jobs condemning Trump and his actions, words and policies? Moderate Republicans are leaving Congress, some speaking out, like Jeff Flake, some not, but they are not supporting Trump.

I don’t know what “belief” of yours has been “stepped on and over” though I could hazard a guess, but I know for a fact that the communities I mentioned above live that story every day.

In truth, Bush 1 and 2, as well as Nixon, Ford and Reagan kept this nation on a sane keel and did not tear up the hearts and minds of the nation to do it. Even when we opposed their policy, we did not fear for their sanity. Trump is almost always inappropriate in every environment and he has made us a laughing stock whose word no longer means anything.

If you would behave as he does, that is on you.

We are NOT “crying about hurt feelings and being offended” we are fighting to return the soul of America to the real American values of honor, decency, respect, morality, leading by example and the principles of a nation of laws and customs. Not the food fight Trump offers daily!

You cannot honestly name more than 4 or 5 people of the House of Representatives 435 members who even come close to being Socialists pushing for Socialism. That is a dishonest talking point to scare people that the right and Trump use, and it should be beneath decent people.

Maybe, if you have “shared most of this with other people whom I thought were my friends and now we don’t talk” that should have been a wake-up call.

WE are just as decent, moral, honest, patriotic and good as you believe you are!