Tag Archives: Donald Trump

History, Politics & Current Affairs

Why We Still Need World AIDS Day

Today is the 37th annual World AIDS Day. Each December 1 we commemorate the lives of millions of people who’ve suffered and died from HIV/AIDS around the world. On this day each year, we’re reminded of the millions who continue to suffer from the effects of the illness, the trauma caused by it, and the impact that losing loved ones to AIDS has had.

2025 White House World AIDS Commemoration Canceled

The photo here shows the World AIDS Day event at the White House in 2024, when Joe Biden was president. Note that the lawn was covered in AIDS memorial quilts that honor the memories of people killed by AIDS. These quilts have been international signs of commemoration and activism against the deadly disease for four decades now. But for the first time in 37 years, the White House under Trump has canceled all 2025 World AIDS Day events, and refuses to continue the tradition of annual remembrances of those lost to the disease. Trump has also ended former President George W. Bush’s phenomenal PEPFAR program, a U.S. government initiative which saved untold numbers of lives around the world since it was launched in 2003. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief was the largest commitment by any nation to a single disease. It focused on saving lives, preventing new infections, providing treatment and care, and strengthening health systems in over 50 countries. It provided antiretroviral treatment, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), and care for orphans and vulnerable children, among other essential services. But now it’s gone.

HIV/AIDS is still a major health threat around the world. Despite Trump’s decision not to mark or mention World AIDS Day at the White House any longer, it is still an important day to commemorate the people we’ve lost, the battles we’ve won, the research that continues to improve treatment options, and the terrible inaccessibility of necessary HIV/AIDS treatments for millions of people who desperately need it.

But Isn’t the HIV/AIDS Epidemic Over?

No; it’s a continuing worldwide health threat. AIDS was first identified in 1981, and the link from AIDS to HIV was made in 1983. As of 2024, over 44 million people had died of AIDS worldwide. HIV continues to spread and kill massive amounts of people annually. An estimated 630,000 people died of it just last year.

It’s true that antiretroviral medications have saved untold millions from suffering and death caused by HIV/AIDS. But millions more with HIV still don’t have access to such drugs, and many people can’t tolerate them. About 1.2 million people in the U.S. have HIV today, and an estimated 13% of them don’t know they have it. Without treatment, they could become very ill, unknowingly pass the illness on to others, or even die.

Early Years of HIV/AIDS Awareness & Research

AIDS was an epidemic first identified in gay men, and prominent gay men were the first public faces of the disease. Entertainers like Rock Hudson attracted attention and scorn for being outed as both being gay and having AIDS in a highly homophobic era. But they had inspiring and powerful friends, like Oscar-winning actress Elizabeth Taylor, who’d been a close friend to Rock Hudson for decades. She co-founded amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, one of the nation’s most influential and important AIDS-related organizations. The UK’s wildly popular Princess Diana also made expanding awareness of and compassion for people with HIV/AIDS one of her biggest goals. Ms. Taylor and Princess Diana normalized treating people with HIV/AIDS with warmth and compassion, visiting them, hugging them, and holding their hands and laughing or crying with them, instead of treating them like pariahs.

In 1980s America, President Reagan refused to even say the word AIDS publicly for several years, while it ran rampant, eviscerating the gay community—including many of his personal friends, among whom were many closeted gay actors. But during that time, the spread of AIDS galvanized activists, who established powerful awareness groups like ACT UP. Public health giants like Dr. Anthony Fauci researched the causes of AIDS and its spread, and provided essential public health services and advice.

Fauci’s initial experiences with anti-AIDS activists were contentious. Many activists verbally attacked him for not taking their greatest concerns seriously enough. To his credit, he recognized that he was not working effectively with the people most hard hit by the AIDS epidemic. He met with them, listened, and apologized for his previous arrogance. Dr. Fauci turned leading AIDS activist Larry Kramer from an adversary to a friend by learning how to better work with communities impacted by disease through mutual respect and dialog. Over time, Fauci learned not to bristle when the famously (and necessarily) outspoken and irascible Kramer gave him hell.

AIDS Treatment in 2025

In 1992, after the death of many friends—including the 1991 death of Freddie Mercury—from AIDS, Elton John established the Elton John AIDS Foundation, which is still going strong. The foundation has raised over $650 million to support more than 3,100 projects in 102 countries to end the stigma, discrimination, and neglect associated with HIV/AIDS. Since the organization was established, the world has seen huge forward movement in the prevention and treatment of HIV.

As a result of the successes of hospitals, researchers, activists, and community health initiatives, and the excellent HIV/AIDS meds now available, it’s no longer the uncontrollable public health menace it once was. Indeed, many assume that getting HIV today isn’t that big a deal, since you can take PrEP drugs to prevent it, or antiretroviral drugs to treat it. However, about one in ten people with HIV develop intolerance to treatment, or they become drug resistant. Many more people have a lack of consistent access to healthcare or insurance, and can’t afford meds. So the need for awareness, healthcare access, affordable (or free) medications, and counseling for those affected by HIV/AIDS is still great, and the services are vital.

How You Can Help Stop HIV/AIDS

World AIDS Day is a great time to find a way to support AIDS prevention, treatment, or counseling organizations. To find reputable and successful organizations that rely on public donations in the U.S., check out Charity Navigator, which vets organizations and lets you know which ones are most reputable, reliable, and spend their money most wisely. You’ll find a link to Charity Navigator’s best AIDS charities in the comments below.

History, Politics & Current Affairs

Trump & Tariffs: Increasing Inequality Is the Whole Point

Donald Trump’s attacks on parents who buy a lot of toys for their children have nothing to do with dolls or pencils. His recent comments have made some parents think, “I feel guilty about how many possessions my kids have; maybe Trump’s right and they SHOULD have fewer toys.” But he’s just attempting a diversion from the real issues he doesn’t want you to think about.

A Way to Shift More Power to the Richest 1%

Do you think Trump ever gave a thought to whether rampant materialism would make his children more selfish or shallow? Of course not. He doesn’t want you thinking about how he’s trying to create a future with even greater wealth inequality. He supports the restrictions on freedom, product availability, and product quality caused by restricting market availability. He likes billionaire-owned companies that engage in monopolistic practices. He’s all for power grabs by autocratic government entities and corrupt politicians—as long as he gets a cut.

The autocrat in chief and his friends want to tell you what you should and shouldn’t be able to buy, at what prices, and from whom. They want to control the market so they can create more opportunities for themselves to receive more financial kickbacks or power. Their support for heavy tariffs is about increasing their power while taking away yours.

Free Trade Increases Peace, Prosperity & Safety

Isolationism doesn’t make a nation stronger, safer, happier, healthier, or more peaceful. Strong international relationships, including trade, lead to a greater variety of available products, lower prices, and many more chances to buy things of better quality. People have known this for literally thousands of years. By trading with other countries, all countries involved can optimize sales of products they’re good at and that they have enough resources to create. That way nations can import things that are too hard or expensive to make at home, improving the standard of living across nations.

Greater access to affordable commodities leads to fewer wars. Wars interfere with the benefits of free trade, destroying trade routes and stopping the influx of needed materials, and the outflow of products from exporters who rely on foreign markets.

Beneficial Trade Agreements Lead to “Soft Power”

Making trade with other countries easier and more affordable makes our trading partners fonder of our products, sure. It also makes them fonder of us as people. The incentives to treat our trading partners with greater respect and appreciation lead to warmer relations. When we make trade deals, we also build positive relations that give us “soft power”—the power that comes from positive feelings, trust, and mutual respect. Strong trade agreements can lead to greater tourism, cross-border business deals that allow for faster innovation and business growth, stronger border agreements, and more information sharing regarding health and security matters. Strong trade agreements also help countries build alliances against rogue states who might want to attack or invade them.

Limiting Trade Restricts Freedom

Adding heavy tariffs and destroying trade agreements benefits oligarchs and corrupt government officials. Such people have the power or money to create regional monopolies, decide what items the market will or won’t sell, and push resources toward their favorite suppliers. When oligarchs and autocrats are in charge, they make international trade agreements giving lower tariffs to countries that promise to bend the knee politically, or that pay kickbacks to corrupt officials in our country.

The reason for Trump’s tirades about how many dolls or pencils small children own isn’t based in concern over modern child-rearing methods. He’s not stoking your guilt because he cares about your children’s welfare. Trump harps on dollies and pencils because he doesn’t actually believe in a free market. He wants to up-end conservative support for free-market capitalism, the holy grail of traditional Republicanism.

For its many faults, pure free-market capitalism does support the freedom to buy what you want, whether the purchase is wise or foolish, well-made or shoddy, bad for you or good, as long as you can pay for it—or can pay the bank fees on your line of credit. A free-market economy is the antithesis of having a government entity tell you what you can and can’t buy, use, or enjoy. It also tends to lower prices, and lower prices on commodities means increased freedom and opportunity to buy exactly what you want, at a price you can afford.

Protectionism & Isolationism Don’t Lead to Safety or Prosperity

Protectionism is the belief that taxing imported goods more highly, restricting or refusing their importation, and giving special deals to domestic businesses benefits domestic businesses and helps one’s own nation’s economy to grow while avoiding providing unfair benefits to those outside one’s borders. Isolationism, which often increases at tiems of greater protectionism, preaches that outsiders, their products, and their ideas are not to be trusted, and that we leave ourselves weakened and vulnerable if we make treaties, trade agreements, or join organizations like the United Nations that seek to create international legal structures and encourage economic, social, and health equality.

Such “America first” protectionist and isolationist politics and economic leanings have been popular at various times during the last two centuries. Many who have followed them believed that such policies would exclude unwanted “foreign influences” on culture and business, and would avoid the dilution of a supposed American way of life.

The result of this distrust of interactions with outsiders has instead often been a more insular way of thinking that led to greater xenophobia. What’s more, protectionism and isolationism left U.S. businesses and financial institutions at greater risk of failure because they did not diversify their funds, product pipelines, or markets across national or continental borders.

Doesn’t Capitalism Have Significant Flaws?

Free-market capitalism tends toward rampant materialism and encouraging ever-expanding markets, even when that causes pollution, dwindling natural resources, or social problems. It supports a mentality that says buying more is necessarily better, and that your success and appeal are based on what and how much you buy. It encourages waste and disposal instead of repair or reuse of resources.

Clearly, this system has many terrible flaws. But there are limitations on these downsides, including environmental impact laws and free-trade agreements that ameliorate many downsides of unfettered capitalism.

For millions, the chief attraction of a free market is that it supports the individual’s freedom to choose what to purchase and how much, IF a person has sufficient capital to do so. A good thing about a free market open to many sellers and buyers is that competition provides downward pressure on prices, and it tends to push the worst products out of the market based on lower demand. Those who can provide a greater variety of goods at better prices tend to do better.

Antitrust Laws Help Balance Free Markets

For the past century, the U.S. has had strong antitrust laws to avoid monopolistic practices (like having one big company buy up or destroy all its competitors, thereby driving up prices and driving down quality). Limits on monopolies help us avoid price-gouging and lowering of quality standards, and allow small businesses to compete more fairly with larger ones.

Other Laws Affecting Free Markets in the U.S.

Over the past century the U.S. has also developed a strong legal framework regarding the health and safety of products sold in the U.S. We’ve also passed thousands of laws about the safety and working conditions of those who produce goods and services on U.S. soil. These laws help to ameliorate further downsides of expanding markets. These include risks to human beings that are increased when competitiveness is prized above health, safety, and wellbeing.

Heavy Tariffs Are Hardest on Small Businesses

On the other hand, creating significant impediments to free trade through untargeted tariffs widens imbalances between resource-rich and resource-poor countries and people. This often leads to greater hostility between nations, and between people of different financial means. Smaller, more entrepreneurial companies bear the greatest brunt of high tariffs, and are at greatest risk of failure because they don’t have the scale and resources to pay huge tax levies or customs bills.

Higher Tariffs on Imports Can Lower Our Own Standard of Living

When Trump slaps tariffs on foreign-made goods imported to the U.S., he drives up prices at home, destroys jobs, crushes U.S. businesses and industries that rely on export sales, and destroys the trust of other nations in our government, or financial instruments, and our companies. The primary reason for a U.S. president to do that is so he and his friends and family can make more money and consolidate more power by taxing people in the U.S. who want or need imported goods. This takes money from everyday people and lowers their standard of living.

That shift, which disempowers the vast majority of the U.S., is the point of this unnecessary financial mess. Trump doesn’t care about you or your child. He doesn’t want to reset U.S. buying habits out of concern for the moral or financial welfare of the nation’s people. He just wants to grab a greater share of your resources for himself and his buddies.

Don’t fall for it.

History, Politics & Current Affairs

When the Supreme Court Grants Immunity to Rampaging Monsters

Millions voted for Trump despite plentiful warnings that he’d fill the Supreme Court with corrupt far-right activists in the pay of conservative billionaires who’d enable anti-democratic power grabs. Millions didn’t believe Trump could be so deeply hateful and vengeful. They refused to believe that he’d gleefully attack the laws, customs, welfare, and the Constitution of the United States that he was hired to protect.

Yet here we are.

Now the Supreme Court’s intentional delays and anti-Constitutional rulings have removed the possibility of a public trial examining Trump’s treasonous incitement of a deadly riot until after November’s presidential election. Six “justices” have impeded justice for a man who believed his own vice president deserved a public lynching on the Capitol grounds because of a refusal to subvert Constitutional requirements at Trump’s command.

Those who voted for Trump in 2016 were too naive and trusting, and too willing to ignore the signs of his incipient fascism. In their fear and misapprehension, they made excuses for his blatant and repeatedly proven financial corruption, racism, and misogyny. They bought his lies and repeated them in his service. They have no excuses now.

Trump has shown us who he is, repeatedly, publicly, and dramatically, thousands of times. We all know what he wants to do.

But building hatred toward those who voted us into this deadly, dangerous, chaotic man’s orbit will not stop him. That kind of vengeful thinking builds monsters like Trump, and leads to terrorism and civil war. We must love what this nation could be enough to fight for it—nonviolently and lawfully. And we must love the elements of human decency that most people, including those who consider voting for him, still hold in their hearts. We must remember their humanity. Let’s reach out in kindness, despite the irrational fears and anger that Trump has so masterfully created in them. The need to save our democracy should be greater to us than the desire to avoid annoyance and frustration, or the impulse to smugly insult Trump supporters’ choices and fears.

Does that mean we need to be polite and quiet when they roll over us? Never. We must be bold and loud and persistent. But we must respect others’ humanity as we amplify truths and persistently correct misapprehensions about Trump. We must point to the current administration’s successes, and remind people of Trump’s egregious actions while in power.

Do not be defeatist or fatalistic. When you’re fighting a monster who’s burning the gates to your city, you don’t give in because it’s tiring and sweaty work. You don’t take a nap when a fire-breathing dragon sets your baby’s crib alight. If we give in, our home will burn to the ground if we don’t do our part to save it.

We’re all tired. We’re all disgusted. So were millions in Hitler’s Germany who used their disgust over and fear of and exhaustion with fascism as excuses to turn their backs on the destruction of their nation from within. If they made it out alive, they had to live with the consequences of their fear and inaction for the rest of their lives. They had to watch their beautiful and beloved homeland’s people (and people from around the world) lose freedoms, be ground in the dirt, suffer, even die because of their leader’s unchecked power.

Don’t set yourself up to feel that kind of sorrow and shame.

Get angry.

Push back.

Speak up.

VOTE.

At Top:

The Statue of Liberty during a solar eclipse, June 2021 | Anthony Quintano, Wikimedia Commons (CC-by-2.0)

Politics & Current Affairs

Everyone Deserves Respect, Dignity & Autonomy—Sex Workers Included

A usually well-respected defense lawyer, Susan Necheles, today engaged in a so-called “sluts and nuts” defense of her client, Donald Trump, in his current hush-money trial. She painted Stormy Daniels as wacky and not credible by querying Ms. Daniels about her spiritual practices on the stand. Even worse, she branded Ms. Daniels as insincere when she said she had felt scared and anxious on the night she and Trump had sex. She implied that Daniels’ expression of fear over thinking she was in a situation in which her safety and career could be compromised if she didn’t agree to sex with Trump was unbelievable.

And that’s disgusting.

Trump is accused of paying Ms. Daniels $130,000 to keep silent about a sexual encounter they had nearly two decades ago. While such payoffs are not necessarily illegal, paying off someone to hide information that could materially affect public opinion during a presidential campaign is. So is lying about that to the federal government.

Ms. Daniels made clear that she never intended to have sex with Trump. She thought had been invited for dinner and a talk—two entertainment professionals having a discussion that might lead to a business deal. Perhaps he’d offer her a stint on Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice TV show. She even teased him when she showed up and he was in silky pajamas, and told him to go get dressed—which he did before they talked for two hours.

Ms. Daniels asked if he was always so rude as to show up for dinner in pajamas, and not even have any food to feed her? She teased him, shaming him into getting dressed in something other than a satin robe. When he constantly interrupted her answers to his many questions, she asked him if he was always so self-absorbed. She thought she’d set a tone that showed she was in control of herself, and capable of setting boundaries and setting him straight when he treated her without respect and dignity. It seemed to be going well.

Trump and Ms. Daniels talked about work and families. The then-60-year-old man said three times that his then-27-year-old guest reminded him of his daughter Ivanka—both were beautiful, smart, and not given the respect they deserved.

But after two hours of talk, when she excused herself to use the bathroom, she walked out to find Trump in his underwear on a bed, looking at her, obviously ready and waiting to have sex with her. Her stomach dropped. She worried what the bodyguard would do if she said no. Would the bodyguard let her leave? Would Trump? What would happen to her career? She’d not wanted to go dinner with Trump in the first place, but only did so because her manager had said it could be a good career move to talk with him, and “What could go wrong?”

Lawyer Necheles acted incredulous that the famous Stormy Daniels wouldn’t be willing to have sex with just anybody at any time. How could she of all people be anxious when a large, powerful, famous man with a big bodyguard just outside the door made it clear that he expected her to give in to him? Necheles acted as if it were unbelievable that Ms. Daniels, then a married woman who had worked as an exotic dancer and a porn movie star, should have any compunction over, preferences about, or fear for her safety when faced with an potential sex partner whom she hadn’t chosen or approved. A man famous for having sex with lots of young women. A man who had determined that Ms. Daniels was regularly tested for STDs, but who had no such proof of his own to offer about his health.

Necheles acted as if every sex worker is just a careless and worthless person with no right to respect, dignity, or physical autonomy. No need to be concerned for her health and safety. No reason to say no to a married man over twice her age who expected her to do whatever he wanted—and who didn’t even wear a condom during their encounter.

No one should EVER feel pressured into a sexual situation with anyone. Not even a (supposed) billionaire with fame, power, and a reputation as a litigious bully (which he had even back then).

Ms. Daniels says she was not raped, and not forced to have sex. But the power imbalance between her and Trump was huge. Their age imbalance was enormous. The amount of respect Trump got as the star of a popular TV show vs. the respect Stormy got as a woman who had sex on camera for money was vastly different. Ms. Daniels says she went along with his wishes, but that she felt numb, that she dissociated, that she asked herself how’d she’d gotten herself in that situation. She was shaking so much afterward that she had trouble putting her boots back on to leave. Because she’s a human being who felt shame for being in a situation that scared her, and humiliation for thinking that she mattered to Trump as more than a sex toy.

If a person isn’t interested in having sex, says no, asks to stop at any time, or was willing in the past but is no longer, it legally makes no difference whether that person is one’s wife or a X-rated movie star. Pressuring anyone sexually is wrong, regardless of career, personal experience, number of partners, or current relationship. The idea that someone who has sex as part of her job should be totally without preferences about partners, fear about unwanted encounters, or concern or say over who uses her body, is repugnant. And using such a defense in court is outrageous.

History, Politics & Current Affairs

Recognizing the Humanity in Our Enemies

Aw, look at the cheerful, playful, lighthearted colleagues laughing together! They’re just taking a few minutes off from their jobs—they oversaw prisoners at Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi death camp, in 1944. Yes, the happy folk in the uniforms are literal Nazis, members of the Schutzstaffel (aka the SS) taking a break from classifying, torturing, perhaps even killing the sick and terrified people whose lives they oversaw. Because even fascists and their apologists can be happy and have fun sometimes.

These smiling staff members were human, so they were naturally multifaceted, and even had some good qualities. Hey, even Hitler loved his dogs. The noted aviator and aeronautical designer Charles Lindbergh was brave and inspiring—but also a fascist sympathizer and appeaser. Coco Chanel was a groundbreaking fashion designer and style maker—who knowingly romanced, lived with, and spied for a powerful German diplomat during World War II. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an activist and the namesake of his civil rights champion father, started his career as a respected environmentalist. But now he takes money from (and spews anti-scientific anti-vax rhetoric supported by) far-right American millionaires who also bankroll Trump. Former game show host Donald Trump himself makes many people laugh, shout, and feel excited about America—and regularly praises and says he wants to emulate dictators who imprison, torture, and murder their own people.

But it’s important to remember that people who do such things are still human. If we fully demonize and refuse to engage with those whose goal is to oppress and kill us, and show no respect to those who love them, we can’t get through to the millions of independent voters who are on the fence. If you demonize and dehumanize them, you fail to show them how people of good will can see and honor the humanity in those who disagree. You risk making yourself look like an ugly, irrational opponent. And you make compromise with dignity harder.

If you paint your opposition as less than human, you give strength and a rallying point to your enemies. Nobel Prize-winning diplomats like Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu made this clear, many times. Their ability to help long-term foes find common ground and face each other as human beings deserving of respect allowed them to broker peace and reconciliation deals that had long been inconceivable beforehand.

That doesn’t mean we should ever let down our guard, trust would-be oppressors or their apologists to have our best interests at heart, or fail to fight their dangerous, dehumanizing rhetoric and efforts to gain power. We must use every tool against their actions that the law allows.

And we can’t refuse to fight or take sides against our internal enemies just because their opposing candidates aren’t perfect. Lofty ideals sound lovely, but when a would-be dictator is at the door pointing an AK-47 at you and telling you how he looks forward to dismantling your democracy with his fascist friends, you don’t wait for Superman and Wonder Woman to show up. You push back, you support the candidates who are least objectionable, and you fight like hell to keep the fascists out of power.

Pragmatism is called for in such circumstances. Being “pure” and refusing to vote for a less inspiring (or even mediocre) candidate is no virtue when the alternative is a vote for a candidate who is an active danger to democracy. Nor does refusing to vote keep you clean in such a political environment. Refusing to vote is still a choice, and that choice has consequences, up to and including allowing the election of a dangerous person by an active minority of people. Don’t let fatigue, boredom with the news, or a temptation to be passive let you give away your ability to keep fascists out of power.

It’s such a delicate balance, remembering the humanity of the opposition and understanding their appeal while not underestimating their strength, letting down our guard, or failing to stand strong against lies and fascists. But we MUST do these things. Because eternal vigilance really IS the price of liberty. 

Articles, History, Politics & Current Affairs

Hatred of “The Other”—Our New Plague

Ireland’s Great Potato Famine

[Originally published in July 2018]
During Ireland’s Great Potato Famine of 1845-52, one out of every eight people in Ireland died of starvation or disease. The famine resulted in more than a million deaths. Because potatoes were the nation’s staple food, untold numbers were reduced to eating grass or nothing at all when every year’s potato crops failed. Those who ate the rotted potatoes pulled from the ground became ill. And yet, British landlords made peasant farmers gather their wheat crops and send them to Britain while the Irish became walking skeletons, or ceased to walk at all.

Many who could gather together enough money to leave came to America, resulting in nearly a million poor Irish immigrants arriving on American shores during the famine years alone. These huge masses of desperate, often uneducated Irish made up the first large migration of poverty-stricken people to the U.S. This caused an upswelling of nativist hatred, bigotry and violence toward the Irish that took decades to abate.

Back in Ireland, British landlords evicted the starving Irish farmers and sharecroppers from their modest huts and houses when they couldn’t supply the promised number of bushels of produce from blighted land. Landlords kicked starving children, disabled elderly people and everyone in between out of their homes. They took every grain away from dying Irish babies and threw families out into the harsh elements, where hundreds of thousands of children died.
 
Why? Because rich landowners convinced themselves that vulnerable people were worthless people, that affluence is next to godliness, that some people are just born dirty and disgusting and disposable.
 
We have recently seen men kidnap tiny victims of war, call their parents murderers and rapists, and send them back to the countries that killed their family members and threatened their lives. Powerful Americans prey on victims of war, legal asylum seekers. Poor, battered, sick and exhausted people offer themselves up to our mercy, thinking the great and powerful United States will keep them from dying. They think we will shelter them from the gangs that torture and murder their loved ones in their home countries. They hope to get jobs and work hard and have a chance to be safe and stop their nightmares. Because they thought we meant it when we said that our nation reveres liberty and justice for all.
 
Treating the Irish like nonentities was made easier by the prevalence of stereotypes of the Irish people as stupid, lazy, filthy, obscene, drunken, vulgar and subhuman. They were said not to care about their children the way good Christian English people did, not to mind eating rot, to be too drunk to be aware of their misery, to be innately drawn to sin. Many English (and Americans) were taught that the Irish had earned their state because they were depraved and unloved by God. Their Catholicism was considered vulgar, and was held up as one more reason to despise them. This anti-Irish sentiment followed the Irish to America, so even though many found opportunity here, acceptance was hard-won.
 
Now we hear so many of those same epithets and slanderous words flung at Mexicans and Central Americans and South Americans who are struggling just to stay alive. The Irish immigrants who flocked to American in the 1840s and 1850s would certainly recognize the degrading and dehumanizing words that spill out of our president’s mouth, and the rough and degrading treatment given to those who drag themselves here asking only to be given a chance to stay alive. 
 
This is how evil spreads—by determining that those who suffer must deserve their suffering, and that those in hard circumstances don’t feel or care or love as much as the affluent do. By turning away from our responsibility to help the most vulnerable among us, we stomp out compassion. By labeling the destitute and distraught as vermin, as innately criminal, as dirty, dangerous and bad for society, we propagate the rot.
 
We are spreading a new plague. We are setting our own destruction in motion.
 
Many currently in power preach that the poor are bad and undeserving, and that the foreign-born poor are even more depraved—dangerous, too. This is one of the roots of evil—this determination of the worth of human beings based on homelands or ethnicity.
 
For a few decades, we seemed to have gotten better about this. Most in the U.S. who still held filthy, bigoted thoughts (and there were many) knew to hide them in public. But the demons of prejudice and hate walk more openly among us now. They continue to spread the lies that some people are innately unworthy of concern, of help, even of life.
 
Why don’t we learn?
Articles

We Are Already at War

Russia is developing smart rockets that could send nuclear warheads to the U.S. and kill 250,000 people at a go. Recent reports say that Putin already has the ability to shut down parts of our power grid. We now have evidence that Russia infiltrated U.S. voting machines in 2016.  The U.S. just withdrew from a major nuclear treaty with Russia, and Putin has used extensive social media posts and ads to groom the U.S. to be as unprepared as possible for further Russian attack and infiltration. He’s trying to foment a civil war here by backing white supremacists and the NRA and polarizing Americans. 

Russia is already at war with us. And our Republican leadership is actively aiding the enemy. 

We are woefully unprepared for what is coming. Fear has led too many to support a sociopathic authoritarian president who purposely confuses and stokes mass hatred. Our system was not built for a mass breakdown in faith or for takeover by a party that actively subverts the rule of law. I often fear that we may not rally enough to recover, short of civil war and invasion by foreign oppressors that might inspire us to fight back. But the invasion is underway, and all we have to show in response is Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi biding her time and Democratic candidates saying nice words while the president and his cronies dismantle our nation. 

Those who run this country in our names make sure that children are left abandoned in the streets or tortured in cages, ripped away from parents, forced to live in filth, then made to disappear. National agricultural research labs were slated to be dismantled this week as a large swath of the country’s top agricultural scientists were forced from their U.S.D.A. jobs; their experiments and studies will be left to rot. All of Alaska’s sea ice disappeared this week, yet Trump continues to press for more fracking and coal mining. Trump writes love letters to murdering dictators and alienates all of our major allies. He fires heads of major government agencies and never replaces them in a dictatorial move to centralize all power under himself. 

What will it take for us to see what the world sees: We have a reckless madman at the helm who is actively destroying our nation’s morals and infrastructure. He is spitting on the Constitution, on the values of equality and respect for diversity that we hold dear, and on everyone who has sacrificed to build this nation, safeguard it, and uphold its laws and ideals. 

Our country is convulsing, and we wring our hands but deny it the care it needs to survive. We are in an undeclared state of emergency. We must remove Trump from power as fast as is constitutionally possible. We will still have divisiveness and hatred and homegrown terrorism to deal with—we will not be out of the woods. But stopping this madman is a necessary first step.

Congressman Jerrold Nadler says an impeachment investigation is underway. Please let your senators and House representatives know that you support this effort. Please speak out against the evil done in your name. Please vote against the terrorist-in-chief and his enablers.

History, Politics & Current Affairs

Let Them Eat French Fries

Yes, it’s true: Trump’s failure to plan ahead and provide hot food for the visiting Clemson Tigers last night is just a distraction. The fact that he had piles of stale, cooling food sitting on the table and as the White House butler lit candelabra around them is as nothing to the horrid things he does each day. The ridiculousness of having staff portion French fries out in tiny water cups with the Presidential seal on them is laughable, but not earth-shattering. The fact that this billionaire was so cheap that he wouldn’t even spring for a hot catered dinner, but made a proud point of serving his guests of honor cold fast food shouldn’t surprise us—it’s totally in keeping with his usual ways.

But we should note his total inability to tell the truth even in the most mundane and verifiable circumstances. To be so incredibly petty as to lie even about the number of hamburgers served, to feel the need for self-aggrandizement and lies in even the tiniest particulars, to say that “over a thousand” burgers were served when he only bought 300—if he did pay any of his own money at all—this is a constantly changing virtual reality that he manipulates in order to destabilize the world. We should never assume that he will be honest or do the right thing in any particulars, ever. We should assume that he will pull the whole world down to make a point if we let him.

Will we let him?

Articles, History, Politics & Current Affairs

Families Belong Together—Help Them to Reunite

Yesterday Boston was 90 degrees and the air was thick with humidity. This crowd-hating introvert was deeply sleep-deprived and had a long list of chores to accomplish. I dreaded the idea of  rallying and marching in that heat with a bunch of strangers for hours. But none of that mattered as much as the fact that my federal government is kidnapping children and torturing families, and I had a chance to register outrage and encourage others to notice and react to the evil being done in our names.

Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions are waging war on vulnerable families who have lost everything. These families have dragged themselves to our doors begging for asylum, the most urgent and elemental assistance that a noncitizen can ask for. The U.S. is using terrorist tactics against children to destroy families who have marched through Hell, and is doing it as a political ploy. This is so shocking, so evil, so much like the Hitlerian tactics of World War II that I am left dumbstruck and sick to know that monsters are terrorizing babies in my name.

The people who come to our borders asking for asylum have lost friends and family members to gangs or war at home. They’ve given up their whole lives and made their dangerous, difficult ways across hundreds, even thousands of miles to pull themselves to our border crossings. All they ask is to keep themselves and their children from being murdered in their home countries. They seek refuge from violence and terror, and a chance to live and work and contribute to a society that doesn’t treat them like insects to be maligned, crushed and destroyed. Their children have already seen and experienced terrors I cannot even imagine; they are fragile, vulnerable, sick and exhausted.

And now Trump and Sessions are quite literally ripping nursing babies from mothers’ breasts, telling parents their babies are being taken away to be bathed (which is just what Nazis told Jews as they were about to be lethally gassed in concentration camps) and then sending the most vulnerable people in the world far away to live with strangers—all while failing to keep track of the locations of the parents or their children.

My government is caging children like animals, giving some of them sheets of Mylar instead of soft blankets and instructing them to lie on floors instead of beds, the cries of other children ringing in their ears as they try to sleep in their cages surrounded by strangers.

Those guarding the children are told not to hug them. At least one recording was made and played on MSNBC of a woman warning children in Spanish not to talk to those who visit the camps (including reporters) about what happened to them, implying that they  might not be reunited if the children speak the truth to reporters or doctors.

Children have been seen changing babies’ diapers at detention centers. Reports say that some children are being drugged.  Central and South American refugees and migrants are raped at very high rates, so chances are great that some of these children were assaulted or knew of (or witnessed) their mothers’ assaults during their escape from their home countries. Stories circulate of children being abused and assaulted at detention centers. Imagine the horror of being stripped naked, washed and examined by strangers after being taken from your family. Think of the terror of knowing that your parents cannot protect you after you’ve seen what happens to vulnerable people. And think of how many kids are being denied necessary medical care because their medical histories are unknown.

This is kidnapping. This is torture. And Trump and Sessions are engaging in this terrorism in our name.

Those who don’t care about the lives of these children and their families should turn their selfish, contemptuous, compassion-free hearts to this thought: Trump and Sessions are breeding hatred against the U.S. in the hearts of millions around the world. They are stoking a desire for vengeance against the U.S. in the minds of many who have been ripped apart from their families, and millions more who are watching this debacle from other countries.

This state-sponsored terrorism will have dangerous reverberations against America for decades to come. It will leave permanent wounds in the hearts and minds of thousands of family members personally affected by these actions, and will turn millions more witnesses to these atrocities against us. Our leaders are sowing the seeds of future terrorist acts against the U.S. by these actions. Terrorism breeds terrorism.

So yes, I managed to get up off the sofa and take half a day away from my privileged life to send lawmakers a message of support for basic human decency when children’s lives are at stake. I left my comfortable apartment to walk with friendly strangers who believe in what America officially stood for not long ago: appreciation for the strength, work ethic and inventiveness of immigrants; a better life for the descendants of enslaved and oppressed people; appreciation and sorrow for the losses Native North and South American people suffered at the hands of white conquerors; revulsion at the thought of racism, terrorism and xenophobia; and compassion for children of all colors and origins.

This last point is so basic to people of all cultures that I can’t believe it even has to be expressed. A just, good nation does not rip children away from loving, caring parents in order to torture families into giving up their only hope of staying alive after fleeing danger at home. Compassionate lovers of liberty do not defy their own established asylum laws to suddenly turn on the people we have for so many years encouraged to come to us for help.

Good people do not choose to harm children. 

If you can attend a Families Belong Together march, rally or other event and be counted among those who oppose the use of federal forces to kidnap and torture children and their parents, I encourage you to do so. If that’s too difficult, phone calls or emails to your members of Congress are very important and can be accomplished in under three minutes. Donations to organizations like RAICES, the ACLU and MoveOn who are working to reunite kidnapped children with their parents are wonderful, too—even $5 helps.

Speak to your family members and friends. Let your voice be heard. You have more power than you realize to do good and make a change—so please use it to help vulnerable children avoid a lifetime of pain, fear and resentment toward an America that let this happen and has not done enough to try to limit the damage.

Friends, please stand with me against U.S. government-sponsored terrorism of children and refugee families.

Bless you. May your family be safe, intact, well and free.

History, Politics & Current Affairs

Fascism in America

Video

Vice News has created a powerful documentary on the murderous fascist violence that took over Charlottesville last weekend. It is hard to watch, but important to see. We must all bear witness to what is happening and not turn away from it but fight it together.

Fascism has been an undercurrent in American politics for many decades and has never been wiped out. But it now has thousands of newly emboldened, well-armed adherents who feel safe leaving their shadows, rifles in hand. They see themselves as part of a holy war. Aided and abetted by Trump and Bannon, American Nazis have gained the confidence to come out, threaten, attack, even murder. They act out more forcefully now because they fear no reprisals—they believe God and Trump are on their side. This makes them a much more powerful force for evil than they were only months ago.

Unless we stomp this fascist uprising down hard and fast with the rule of law, show immediate intervention between sides at rallies where fascists appear, and disallow armed proponents of violence from threatening others and brandishing weapons in the streets and elsewhere—unless we legislate against the legal arming of members of hate groups who actively support the murder of innocents and the overthrow of our government—we may enter an age of increasing white fascist terrorism.
 
The president has spit in the face of all who fought the Nazis during World War II. He has made a dirty joke of the sacrifices of all who were tortured and slaughtered by Hitler and his followers. Trump has all but welcomed the Klan into the White House. He daily proves himself to be an utterly unfit and illegitimate head of state, a leader opposed to his own people and his own nation, a traitor in support of a malign foreign power and a man with a malignant and severe personality disorder that keeps him from thinking rationally or caring about any interests other than his own.
 
If Trump should eventually be impeached and ousted by those in power who recognize his instability and moral bankruptcy, we may hear and see threats made against those who oppose him. Extremists who feel their fascist president was toppled by a communist coup d’etat will go after both liberals and conservatives who finally feel too soiled and disgusted to carry water for an unhinged tyrant who seems to be in league with Putin against the United States.
Whether Trump stays in power or not, he has unleashed heavily armed monsters without morals or mercy. So far, they have been given the benefit of the doubt by police and government agencies when they should have been held back. Legislators in the pocket of the NRA have allowed people with documented mental illness and histories of domestic violence to own and use deadly firearms and even purchase semi-automatic weapons of mass destruction. Our nation has been willing to coddle supporters of violence and support them in their efforts to arm themselves like professional soldiers and build up huge personal armories.
 
Fascists do not stop at threats. They do not stop at murder. There is a good chance that, emboldened by irrational hatred and violent tendencies, some will believe that it is their holy duty to engage in what they see as righteous war against members of the U.S. government. No, they cannot topple our government, but they have already infiltrated it. They are massively armed and exist in larger numbers than we have seen in decades. They are likely to continue to do great damage, and to distract us all from helping those who are in need and watching how international affairs affect us. We must speak against tyrants, demagogues and terrorists. We must change our gun laws. We must be ready to bring fascists down.