Sailing is both being pushed and pulled towards one’s desires.
His shorts were wet where they contacted the driver’s seat. And itchy. At the next emergency pull-over, he wiggled out of his shorts and underwear and pulled on a dry pair of tan cargo shorts, zipping the fly carefully. One of his towels, folded, was between him and the now-wet seat. His wet clothes had joined the shoes and socks on the passenger side floor.
His driving sunglasses blocked some of the intense white-blue glare. He tapped the edge of the car door. Wind increased as he accelerated to highway speed. On the radio, Elton John sang, “Don’t let the sun, go down on me; although I search myself, it’s always someone else I see.…” Daniel sang with him, tapping his fingers on the door. Sun. Wind.
The fact was, the sun stood still and the Earth, seeming still, was moving fast around it, like always. Relative to the galaxy, the entire solar system, including the sun, was moving around its center. Within the solar system, though, the sun was motionless, although it moved relentlessly across the sky. Maybe it was the movement of his car, the lack of trees, hills and buildings…. Everything seemed bigger, fuller, and stiller. Maybe it was the low horizon and the ocean.
Flat. Open. Water in every direction. Daniel’s Nissan wagon pushed through the wind, on a roadway floating over the ocean, sailing away from the mainland and his past. Eighteen years, fading behind him.
A sign, Islamorada, Florida, flashed by. The Overseas Highway lead southwest over sparkling water. An umbilical of power poles to his right kept pace with his car. The water couldn’t be that deep because the concrete roadway supports had to rest on something. It was like the highway was tracing the back of a sea monster. It looked deep. A lone Jet Ski approached from an angle ahead, its rooster tail of water shooting skyward as it skipped over small waves. Two bicyclists flashed past, pedaling north on the edge of the roadway. The day seemed longer here with nothing to get in the way of the sun. Everything felt motionless. Well onto the islet of Islamorada, a fish hook-shaped key, Daniel rolled to a stop in a sandy asphalt parking lot at Mr. Lobster: Fish Market & Marina. There was a narrow beach between the highway and the eastern ocean. He flipped his sun visor up, got out and stretched, then jogged across the road, following a twenty-foot-long path through scrub grass to reach the ocean, where he stood on a pebble-strewn patch of sand peppered with debris and seaweed. A large, worn log pointed out to sea. There were almost no waves, which surprised him because he’d always imagined there would be surf everywhere there was ocean and shore. The concrete power poles behind him marched in both directions along a narrow strip of ‘dry’ land. There were traffic sounds behind him. The sun was going down over there, behind some palm trees. A breeze from the open expanse of water cooled his sweating face. He knew The Bahamas and Cuba were in that direction, beyond the visible horizon. The waning sun warmed his right shoulder and ear. He couldn’t see anything but water out there.
Right right right right right right right right right right right right right right right right right right rightrightrightright.
Ridiculousness meaninglessness. One word in a forest of itself is meaningless. In a row, all in a row is nothing, really.
Gently.
Merrily.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. This most profound, meaningful statement any human mind has ever expressed is embedded in a song we instantly “know” to be meaningless ridiculousness….
Each twenty-year cycle on our planet, within our human species, is a generation, responsible for all innovation, style, and new things—like each spring’s leaves—triumphantly oblivious of the humus of countless decomposed forbearers beneath them.
This moment of periodicity is perceived as a self-evident reality by the newly-arrived swimmers in their part of this stream’s current, to utilize another metaphor. A species of beings with a much longer or much shorter generational period would appear correspondingly “different” from us and our often unexamined generational pattern, which we “know” to be what is, and, is simply—real.
Sanity is a fickle rat with a fixed view of events inside itself and without—without which, nothing Is. Who is sane? Please—point; no, it’s not rude…. An automatic answer is: a sane person does no harm to themselves or to others.
How can I know what you mean by that? I don’t … I can’t. Can you know what I mean? Can you say something without comparing what you say to something else? Is reality only relativity? Is relativity all there is? Largely… yes. How “right” are you? Actually? Can this be discovered? By anyone? If you are right, what does right mean to anyone else? To someone not right? What is your reality compared to a thousand-year-old, somehow still standing, dead tree on another planet in another galaxy or to one of uncounted myriad fossilized dinosaurs in New Mexico’s desert?
“Right,” you nod, sagely.
The boy had some time before the two adults in the house he lived in awoke. He had selected a handful of cold rocks from the side of the road as birds flapped overhead, feet tucked into their belly fathers, bodies streamlined, necks outstretched. His long morning shadow eased slowly ahead of him. His breath steamed. The boy’s left hand gripped a single rock.
He walked on the cracked sidewalk past houses with cars in driveways, bikes on their sides in yards, with portable basketball nets and scooters left leaning against bushes. After two intersections and more than twenty houses, he came to the old worn-out single-wide trailer. A faded, algae-covered red car perched precariously on four jack stands in the sloped asphalt drive. The fourteen-year-old boy crouched to peer under the car. All the wheels were still on, surprisingly, and rusted parts, just lumps under leaves, really, were lined up on the edge of the asphalt driveway, partially concealed by tall, unmowed grass growing there. He felt certain that the car would fall easily over if he pushed it slightly in the downhill direction.
Examination over, he stood and resumed walking. After the trailer’s overgrown yard, a tall leaning tree stood twenty feet in, past the wide, deep drainage ditch. He jumped over the ditch, which was free from water for now, though the grass was dewy and almost frozen. His footprints followed him into shin-high frost-covered grass. The pale, dark-haired boy looked up at a large branch where a mottled grey elongated globe, almost hidden by leaves, loomed. Lingering predawn stillness was giving way to a slight breeze as the sun crept higher over the horizon. The uppermost leaves in the tree were already bathed in the morning light; those around the hornet’s nest were still in darkness. He didn’t see any flying hornets, but that probably wouldn’t last.
Situations Of I has been here for eight years! That’s how long it’s been since I’ve been here…. Lots of water under that old bridge.
You may obtain a copy of this book, as well as three others I’ve published, on Amazon, or from any bookseller. There are Kindle versions of all my books, too.
Happy reading.
Here is a book description from the publisher:
A time-traveling salamander; a UFO abducting a vintage covered bridge; an autobiography of light; musings on dinosaur religion and explorations of life, meaning and existence are among the subjects of Weimer’s fourth published work.
Profane and profound, “Situations Of I” is, in the author’s words, “centered on the unique free-floating magic reality I take completely for granted—individual awareness.”
This collection of philosophic essays, speculative short stories and prose poetry emerged from the author’s life and observations while living in the village of Flushing, Ohio.
Each chapter is a stand-alone vignette with arguably more question marks per page than nearly any other work of its size. With titles such as, “Home is Where I Live,” “Gasoline Planet,” “A Blade Hanging, Overhead,” “Eternal Burgers” and “Hollow Houses,” each piece challenges the reader, as well as the author, to delve within and to question intently what we all “know for sure.”
The normal boundaries separating a writer, narrator, characters, story, and the reader are oddly permeable in tHe. As though accidentally looking through the wrong end of a telescope, tHe’s reader will find themselves gazing down, into, and through a squinting eye peering up at the night sky.
After lying patiently on my operating table for ten years, tHe is finally stitched together. It’s my first novel, and fifth published book.
“Hell is other people,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his 1944 play, No Exit.In the context of the play, the phrase doesn’t mean what is easily assumed—that would be the audience, or the reader, making it mean something that the author hadn’t intended.
Each catch-phrase offers a lens through which people or events can be seen or understood. One’s ‘sphere of awareness’ depends upon one’s physical senses, intellectual and emotional sensitivities, and a root ability to notice… anything.
What do you notice?
Do you see accurately through the lenses of your glasses, through your automatic perception process resulting from stimuli striking your physical senses? You see someone missing something that you feel is self-evident; you observe another person’s lack of response to a stimulus that you perceive. Is hell other people? Is hell your pain? Is hell all about you?
Hell is other people, you repeat, frowning.
Daniel and Joe rode to and from school until the start of football practice. The first couple of days, they still rode in together, but not home because Joe had practice, and he hitched a ride home with teammates who had cars.
Pedaling the first morning to school alone again, Daniel felt relief. Joe was cool. But, Daniel treasured riding to school in the dark speed and back home in the daylight, stopping when he wanted, looking at things, and pondering. Whenever they passed each other in the halls, they said, “Hey.”
The fall arrived. It got too cold to ride a bike. Winter began. Daniel was back to reading a book on the bus ride on the way home until the snow melted, the mud dried up, and it got warm enough in the spring to ride his bike again. He didn’t check to see if Joe wanted to ride his unicycle in with him. He assumed not; Joe was older. Daniel got to ride in for a few weeks before school was over for the summer, and then he was done with ninth grade.
And then, visitors came to see him.
Toward the end of supper Mrs. Eisner shot him a look. “A young couple will be here tomorrow to see you.”
Daniel was mopping up gravy with a piece of homemade bread. His heart lurched. Brussel sprouts with butter and salt remained on his plate. Like bread and gravy, they were his favorites because everything at the Eisner’s table was his favorite thing to eat. “Um… do you know where they’re from?”
For eight years, the despicable orange Pied Piper has blown his sexist and xenophobic dog whistle long and hard. As a result, the majority of Americans who voted in this election chose evil over decency, morality, and justice.
Before daylight, at the Detroit Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) in Troy, Michigan, I was standing in line. This morning wasn’t just signing all the papers that the staff sergeant recruiter put in front of me and my parents the year before. I’d ridden a bus through the dark from Howell with a bunch of strangers. After a long series of medical exams, I found myself standing in a large room with other young people, my right hand raised, repeating the words, “I, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic….”
I worried that my oath might be a serious commitment, but then, I felt consoled by the fact that I was willing to defend my side—my nation—against foreign enemies. I was eighteen. It was 1985, and the Cold War between the US and the USSR was real. Months later, I was stationed in Germany setting long-range artillery firing points in the Fulda Gap.
This cool October morning, decades later, I entered the City-County Building on Chapline Street in Wheeling, West Virginia. After going through the metal detector and collecting the contents of my pockets from a leather bowl, I waited in line, got my ballot, and found myself in a voting booth constructed of PVC pipe and curtains, using a pencil eraser to make my choices on the display screen.
Between the two mornings, I served twelve years in the military, lived in three countries and six states, raised two sons, was married for twenty years, and worked as a self-employed contractor for the past two decades.
I never dreamed I’d be a civilian, middle-aged American man, “supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States,” against a domestic enemy. A “domestic enemy” was what there was during the Civil War and the American Revolution. After these past nine years, though, an ever-ratcheting-up of utterances and actions by the party leader I wasn’t voting for have made these two words real.
In West Virginia, I’m confronted with the fact that many of my fellow teammates have aligned themselves with a caricature that walks and quacks like an autocrat. It baffles me, even though it shouldn’t because my fellow Americans have been shouting, increasingly loudly, in all caps, just like their leader. I just can’t relate to what they’re shouting.
Although they seem to think that they’re fighting for their country, their country doesn’t sound like mine. They seem to hate a lot of different types of people, like their long-red-tie-wearing leader.
The American Way, in my book, is about solving problems, getting things done, and reaching goals. Improving things that need improving. Not endlessly complaining.
Like writing these essays that I’ve been posting here, or raising my sons, or doing my best work for other people, I’m doing what I can. This morning I voted.
In writing these ‘essays,’ I’m urging one other person in my life to vote blue this election. Someone who wasn’t going to vote either through disinterest or apathy. I thought I had a chance of being able to do that.
I wrote essays on themes relevant to what I feel is at stake in this election, posting them on my Facebook page and WordPress writing blog site. I contributed small amounts to the blue campaign. I talked to people I met, urging them to find one person in their lives who wasn’t going to vote…. I did what I could, using what I had, where I was.
I believe in America. It’s my team, after all. I hope you vote, too.
[The following factual statements appeared on Facebook. I’ve tried to make this a little briefer. At least it’s only one sentence:)]
I owe my Trump-supporting acquaintances an apology. I’ve been critical of his presidency since 2016, and am still exhausted from the experience.
He wasn’t that bad, other than when he incited an insurrection against the government, mismanaged a pandemic that killed nearly half a million Americans [… and counting. 1,130,000 US dead from COVID as of a year ago], separated children from their families and lost them in the bureaucracy, tear-gassed peaceful protesters on Lafayette Square [during the Black Lives Matter movement protesting police treatment of African Americans] so that he could stand in front of a church holding a Bible, tried to block all Muslims from entering the country, got impeached for extorting Ukraine to dig up nonexistent dirt on Joe Biden, got impeached for instigating a violent insurrection, fired the FBI director for investigating Trump’s ties to Russia, publically took Vladimir Putin’s word over the US intelligence community on Russia’s 2016 election interference,
diverted military funding to build parts of his southern border wall, caused the longest government shutdown in US history, called Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate,” lied 30,000 times, ejected reporters from the White House briefing room who asked tough questions, vetoed the defense funding bill because it renamed military bases named after Confederate soldiers, refused to release his tax returns, pushed through massive tax cuts for the wealthiest that increased the national debt by nearly $8 trillion, had three of the highest annual trade deficits in U.S. history, called veterans and soldiers who died in combat losers and suckers, coddled the leader of Saudi Arabia after he ordered the execution and dismembering of a US-based journalist,
refused to concede the 2020 presidential election after he lost, hired his unqualified daughter and son-in-law to work in the White House, called neo-Nazis “very fine people,” suggested that people should inject bleach into their bodies to fight COVID, incited anti-lockdown protestors in several states at the height of the pandemic, withdrew the US from the Paris climate accords, withdrew the US from the Iranian nuclear deal, withdrew the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership which was designed to block China’s advances, pushed the leader of Montenegro out of the way during a photo op, failed to reiterate the US commitment to defending NATO allies, called Haiti and African nations “shithole” countries, claimed that he single-handedly brought back the phrase “Merry Christmas,” forced his Cabinet members to praise him publicly like a cult leader,
berated and belittled his hand-picked Attorney General for recusing himself from the Russia probe, colluded with Senate Leader Mitch McConnell to push through federal judges and three Supreme Court justices after supporting McConnell’s efforts to prevent his predecessor, Obama, from appointing a Supreme Court justice, repeatedly called the American media “enemies of the people,” claimed that if we tested fewer people for COVID there’d be fewer cases, violated the emoluments clause of the Constitution which forbids presidents from profiting during their presidency from foreign governments, told reporter Bob Woodward in private that the coronavirus was a big deal but downplayed it in public, called his faithful vice president a pussy for following the Constitution, nominated a corrupt head of the EPA, nominated a corrupt head of HHS, nominated a corrupt head of the Interior Department, nominated a corrupt head of the USDA, praised dictators and authoritarians around the world while criticizing US allies,
interfered with and refused to cooperate with the presidential transition to his successor, insulted war hero John McCain after his death, spent an enormous amount of time playing golf after criticizing Barack Obama for playing golf while president, falsely claimed that he won the 2016 popular vote when he actually lost 2.9 million votes to Clinton, falsely claimed that he turned down being Time’s Man of the Year, considered firing special counsel Robert Mueller who was in charge of investigating the Russian interference in the 2016 American presidential election, mocked wearing face masks during the pandemic to guard against transmitting COVID, locked Congress out of its constitutional duty to confirm Cabinet officials by installing “acting” officials, hired and associated with numerous shady figures eventually convicted of federal offenses including his campaign manager and national security adviser,
pardoned several of these shady associates, had a Secretary of State who called him a moron, forced his press secretary to claim without evidence that his was the largest inauguration crowd in history, tweeted so much dangerous propaganda that Twitter eventually banned him, constantly shout-interrupted Joe Biden during their Sept. 29, 2020 presidential debate while he, himself, had Covid-19 and didn’t disclose this fact to his opponent standing a few yards away, claimed that COVID would “magically” disappear, got into a losing tariff war with China that forced US taxpayers to bail out farmers to the tune of $28 billion, claimed that losing his tariff war was a win for the US, ignored/didn’t take part in daily intelligence briefings, blew off honoring American World War I dead in France because it was raining, threatened to go after social media companies in clear violation of the Constitution, botched the response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, throwing paper towels at Puerto Ricans when he finally visited them,
pressured the governor and secretary of state of Georgia to “find” him votes, drew on a map with a Sharpie to justify his tweet that Alabama was threatened by a hurricane, allowed White House staff to use personal email accounts for official businesses after blasting Hillary Clinton for doing the same, rolled back regulations that protected the public from mercury and asbestos, pushed regulators to waste time studying snake-oil remedies for COVID, rolled back regulations stopping coal companies from dumping waste into rivers, held illegal campaign rallies at the White House, tried to take away millions of Americans’ health insurance because the law was named for a Black man (Obamacare), refused to attend his successors’ inauguration, nominated the worst Education Secretary in history, threatened judges who didn’t do what he wanted, attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, promised Mexico would pay for the wall (it didn’t), allowed political hacks to overrule government scientists on major reports on climate change and other issues, threatened to withhold federal aid from states and cities with Democratic leaders,
pushed ahead with political rallies filled with maskless supporters in the middle of a pandemic, claimed that legitimate investigations of his wrongdoing were “witch hunts,” demanded “total loyalty” from the FBI director, praised a conspiracy theory that Democrats are Satanic pedophiles, placed a political hack in charge of the Postal Service, suggested that COVID wasn’t that bad because he recovered with the help of top government doctors and treatments not available to the public, overturned energy conservation standards that even the energy industry supported, insulted members of Congress and the media with infantile nicknames, gave far-right propagandist Rush Limbaugh a Presidential Medal of Freedom at the State of the Union address, just before the Covid-19 pandemic eliminated the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, used military soldiers as props, fired any advisor who disagreed with him, demanded the Pentagon throw him a Soviet-style military parade, hired a huge number of white nationalists,
politicized the civil service, did nothing after Russia hacked U.S. government computer servers, claimed that Black people would overrun the suburbs if Biden won, insulted reporters of color, insulted women reporters, insulted women reporters of color, attacked the Supreme Court when it ruled against him, summoned Pennsylvania state legislative leaders to the White House to pressure them to overturn the election, spent countless hours daily watching Fox News, refused to allow his administration to comply with Congressional subpoenas, tried to punish Amazon because the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post wrote negative stories about him, acted as if the Attorney General of the United States was his personal attorney, attempted to get the federal government to defend him in a libel lawsuit from a women who accused him of sexual assault, held private meetings with Vladimir Putin without staff present, didn’t disclose his private meetings with Vladimir Putin so that the US had to find out via Russian media, stopped holding press briefings for months at a time,
led a political party that couldn’t be bothered to draft a policy platform, claimed that Article II of the Constitution gave him absolute powers, suggested that the government nuke hurricanes, suggested that wind turbines cause cancer, said he had a special aptitude for science, fired the head of election cyber security right after they reported that the 2020 election was secure, blurted out classified information to Russian officials in the Oval Office, fired the acting attorney general when she refused to go along with his unconstitutional Muslim travel ban, openly discussed national security issues in the dining room at Mar-a-Lago where everyone could hear them, interfered with plans to relocate the FBI because a new development in that location would compete with his hotel, abandoned Iraqi refugees who’d helped the US during the war, held a COVID super spreader event in the Rose Garden, lost 60 election fraud cases in court including before judges he had nominated, falsely claimed that US factories were reopening when they weren’t, still hasn’t come up with a healthcare plan, still hasn’t come up with an infrastructure plan despite repeated “Infrastructure Weeks,” told the white nationalist Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” intentionally interfered with the Census, withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic,
did so few of his presidential duties that his press staff were forced to state on his daily schedule that, “President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings,” allowed his staff to repeatedly violate the Hatch Act, seemed unaware that Abraham Lincoln had been a Republican, constantly claimed he was treated worse than any president which presumably includes the four who were assassinated and his predecessor, whose legitimacy and birthplace were challenged by a racist reality TV show star named Donald Trump, said that any opinion poll showing him behind was fake, claimed that other countries laughed at us before he became president as several world leaders were literally laughing at him, claimed that the military was out of ammunition before he became President, created a commission to whitewash American history, had a press secretary who claimed that Nazi Germany never used chemical weapons even though every sane human being knows that they used gas to kill millions of Jews and others,
bilked the Secret Service for higher than market rates when they were forced to stay at Trump’s properties, evidently sold pardons on his way out of the White House, falsely claimed Biden wanted to defund the police, said that the head of the CDC didn’t know what he was talking about, tried to rescind protection from DREAMers, gave himself an A+ for his handling of the pandemic, said U.S. rates of COVID would be lower if you didn’t count blue states, claimed he did more for African Americans than any president since Lincoln, forced through security clearances for his family, suggested that police officers should rough up suspects, suggested that Biden was on performance-enhancing drugs, suggested the US not accept COVID patients from a cruise ship because it would make “his” US numbers look higher, nominated a climate change sceptic to chair the committee advising the White House on environmental policy, accused Democrats of “treason” for not applauding during his State of the Union address, claimed that the FBI failed to capture the Parkland school shooter because they were “spending too much time” on Russia, mocked the testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford when she accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, obsessed over low-flow toilets, claimed that migrants seeking a better life in the US were dangerous caravans of drug dealers and rapists, said nothing when Vladimir Putin poisoned a leading opposition figure, falsely claimed that mail-in voting is fraudulent, announced a precipitous withdrawal of troops from Syria which not only handed Russia and ISIS a win but prompted his own defense secretary to resign in protest,
insulted the leader of Canada, insulted the leader of France, insulted the leader of Britain, insulted the leader of Germany, insulted the leader of Sweden, left a NATO summit early in a huff, stared directly into an eclipse even though everyone knows not to do that, called himself a very stable genius, refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and a whole bunch of other things I can’t remember at the moment.
1) Stephen Miller, Trump’s xenophobic senior advisor and speechwriter who is responsible for family separation at the border and the “poisoning the blood” and “enemy within” comments Trump makes at his rallies.
2) Steve Bannon, nihilist former Trump administration chief strategist responsible for phrases like, “flood the zone with shit” who is daily pounding a revolution propaganda drum promoting the destruction of “the administrative state,” and encouraging civil war.
3) Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime anarchist advisor and co-architect of “The Big Lie,” where Trump, to this day, denies losing a presidential election after having whipped his followers into a frenzy culminating in the January 6th, 2021 attack on the US capital.
4) Michael Flynn, QAnon conspiracy theorist, foreign agent for Turkey, Russian collaborator, and disgraced former national security advisor who urged Trump to suspend the US Constitution.
These are only four of the many who have glommed onto Trump like ticks. A distressingly large number of similarly “like-minded” MAGA devotees are openly committing to tearing down our country’s fundamental institutions.
By voting for Trump you’ll also get dozens of federal judge appointments, as well as two younger Supreme Court justices to replace the soon-to-retire Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, both Christian Nationalist radical justices who were instrumental in taking away women’s bodily autonomy, who declared that a president is above the law, and who proclaimed that judges know more than environmental, pharmaceutical, geopolitical, and other experts. This younger, more extreme, far-right, 6-3 skewed court will make final decisions on cases brought by radical-right advocates that will affect us all, on matters like global warming, assault weapons, voting rights, and social justice.
Trump’s intentions are awful. He’s an elitist who despises most of US (in the US). He’s lazy and uninterested in details, and he’ll make impulsive decisions on things affecting so many of us, both today and long into the future. Trump is a natural-born divider. When we need a leader to unite us, his first and only impulse is to divide us, to goad us into squabbling and fighting one another. That’s what you’ll get by voting for Trump. But Trump’s not the issue here.
You’ll get Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation plan for a second Trump administration with a lot of bad things in it. The biggest bad thing is the plan for replacing tens of thousands of civil servant federal employees who administer the EPA, the IRS, the Justice Department, FEMA, and all of the other national agencies with Trump loyalists devoted to dismantling these departments and weaponizing them against political enemies.
What WON’T you get by voting for Trump?
A leader committed to the common good. Decency. Honesty. Civility. Responsibility. Faithfulness to our friends and allies. The rule of law. Integrity. People of principle in the cabinet administration who will resist Trump’s illegal and immoral impulses—those people are all gone.
I feel as though I have a good bead on things. Drop me into a war, or a dystopian climate crisis future, though, and my luxury of having a point of view free from struggling to survive evaporates.
I disagree with most of the strident people in this country wearing red hats. I can’t relate to their anger, hate, and antagonism towards others, echoing what Donald Trump, his acolytes, and certain television, internet, and radio propaganda sources broadcast in a constant firehose stream.
I have no choice but to accept that others have the right to their beliefs and values. They are entitled to their worldview.
Although I call them “mine,” I don’t know where my own values came from. Growing up, some of us absorb our parents’ values as being “right.” As teenagers and young adults heading into the world for the first time, some of us gravitate towards contrasts to how we were raised. Our values are also related to our particular genes and our unique personality and physical traits.
As a young man, I embraced recycling because it appealed to my desire for things to be in their proper place. I’ve always been fastidious. I hated seeing trash on the roads. My alignment with ecological causes is my brand of conservatism.
My dad was a union electric substation operator for Detroit Edison. We were raised Catholic. The first president I voted for was Ronald Reagan.
One of my foundational values is the Golden Rule. Treat others as you want to be treated. Don’t do to others what you don’t want done to you.
Do you want to drink or get high, and drive? Fine—you’re entitled to kill yourself through your stupid choices. You’re not entitled to kill me or my family, though.
When my next-door neighbor’s pounding music shakes my house on a Sunday morning, or when I’m following someone in traffic and their THC-laden skunk-dope fills my car, I don’t feel very civil.
I have a strong sense of right and wrong. I’m often wrong. I’m not perfect, but I try to be.
Another cornerstone value is my sense of responsibility towards my fellow humans. If I benefit from the roads, hospitals, grocery stores, traffic lights, police, EMTs, garbage trucks, electricity, and all the rest where I live, then I pay my due. I believe in doing my fair share, whether it’s doing the dishes after someone makes me a meal, or holding a door for someone.
Taxes are how societies collect resources from everyone for everyone’s benefit. I lived in Europe where national healthcare covers everyone. Everyone contributes proportionally in the form of taxes to fund this valuable support system.
My least proud moments in life have been seeing that I’ve impacted others with my self-centered behavior. Often, what we like the least in others is what we unconsciously do ourselves. I’m using the royal “we.” When I realized that I was guilty of doing to others what I wouldn’t want done to me, I determined to not do it again. I’m not a saint; I’m a sinner trying to remember to try my best.
I like guns. From growing up hunting, to my time in the military, and just getting a little wiser as I’ve gotten older, I have a strong belief in their proper use. Warfighting weapons are made for war, not playing adult let’s pretend.
I believe in listening to car mechanics, government immunologists, and climate scientists. Like every other person, no one’s perfect, but they do know something. I arrive at my own opinion, but I want the best, most accurate information.
I make a living as a detail-oriented jack-of-all-trades painting contractor. I believe in doing my best for my customers, whether I’m installing a toilet, building a deck, painting a house, or putting up shelves. I believe in charging fairly, not squeezing customers for every possible penny. If you treat people right, what goes around comes around.
I hang the hose back on the hook when I’m done airing my tires at a gas station because I’ve gotten there after someone’s thrown it into a tangled pile or even stolen it. I don’t want to give someone else that experience.
I believe in getting my COVID-19 and flu shots. They cost me nothing. I have to try to not be a part of the problem wherever I live. I work for people. They didn’t hire me to carry something from a paint store filled with sneezing, coughing contractors, into their home.
Human-caused global warming is a thing. It’s getting worse. When I realized this, I quit burning things for pleasure. I got rid of my gas mower and weed-wacker and bought electric ones. I try to recycle everything because it’s less energy-intensive than digging or pumping things out of the ground. When I was living in Europe, I felt encouraged to see how thoroughly the Germans and French recycle and reuse everything from their garden compost to metal, glass, plastic, and paper. They can’t afford to throw valuable things away.
It’s urgent to transition to renewable energy as quickly as we can. It’s the most responsible thing we can do.
I don’t want my grown sons or any children they may have to struggle to live in an unlivable world. If sea levels continue to rise, if parts of the world become uninhabitable because of extreme heat, and if hurricanes, tornados, droughts, flooding, and forest fires become increasingly severe, then the resulting mass migration of humans and every other lifeform will vastly overshadow anything our species has ever seen. It will be dog-eat-dog, fighting over food, and killing others over space to exist. This vision haunts me. No matter what happens, I won’t be affected because I’ll be gone—but I don’t want my inaction today to doom our descendants tomorrow. As much as all of us instinctively avoid working, we can’t shirk our duty to our descendants. We have to be adults.
I believe in doing my best. I believe in hoping for the future. I believe in decency. I believe in learning about new things involving engineering, space exploration, and how things work. I’m curious and enjoy encouraging others’ excitement and curiosity.
I believe that cruelty and bullying are wrong. I believe in competition through excellence, not through sabotaging or tearing down one’s competitors. I believe in honesty, fairness, morality, principles, decency, and respect. I believe in working to fix a problem. If the roof leaks, or the car breaks, work to get it fixed. If a child or other loved one is sick, work to help them get well.
Humans are dishonest, decent, unreliable, kind, mean, and generous. I believe in human nature. I believe in trying to be good. I hope for my kids’ future. I hope that people like me will be voted into office in this coming US election.
Everyone thinks that they’re right. If being mean, vicious, and spiteful is right, then I don’t want any part of that.
I’m voting blue all the way down the ballot this election because I’m saying, “No!” to the behavior today in America represented by the color red.
We can choose to respond badly to a problem or we can try our best to solve it. I vote for the latter.
Here’s an experiment for any Trump follower. Find a Trump video and watch it with the sound turned off. Without the mesmerizer’s voice, you’ll feel an overwhelming compulsion to turn the sound back on because there’s something really wrong with the muted experience.
To understand Trump Derangement Syndrome, go online, Google Trump, and listen to several minutes of him talking at a rally or giving a speech. After a while you’ll shake your head, blink several times, and reach for the mute button, wondering what happened. The man speaks a steady stream of nonsense, while all the while intending to get into the woman’s pants next to him. Keep her attention, keep talking. Keep their attention….
When Trump’s subjects are pliable and unresisting, he can do whatever he wants. He gets, and keeps, the attention of his followers by flashing shiny red meat objects to them, saying “crooked” this person, “build the wall,” and “mass deportations.” Then he drones on and on, using a cult leader’s repetitive droning….
Trump drones on and on to keep the listener’s attention on him. He’s a manipulator. He’s a middle schooler who shows classmates porno images. He knows what grabs attention. Naughty. Nasty. Outrageous. He could care less about the truth; he lies constantly because he’s improvising, feeling his way, and working to get his listeners’ attention. Whether you love him or hate him doesn’t matter. Simply focus your attention on the outrage he’s dangling, while he drones on and on….
The things that Trump says are purposely ridiculous, extreme, and outrageous because they have to be. His power over his listeners is saying something outrageous because that’s quite simply what grabs a listener’s attention. Rally crowds let him know when he has them. He says something outrageous, or he swears—and once he gets their reaction his droning, droning, droning can continue. His red-hat-wearing listeners nod, eyes glazed and jaws slack. A tried-and-true hypnotist’s technique is to wear down listeners before giving them suggestions.
Ironically, Trump followers seem to think it’s clever to label non-Trumpers as being afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome. With Trump’s followers—who mirror his behavior—the most honest things ever uttered are projections. “I’m not deluded, you are.”
Trump’s droning, droning, and droning is to lull you into allowing him to do what he wants to you. Although they cluck like chickens and play broomsticks like guitars on stage, the brainwashed should never be mocked. Blame the hypnotist.
Donald Trump, at some of his rallies, when he’s addressing, “the blacks,” as he often calls them, asks, with his arms spread wide, “What do you have to lose?” in voting for him.
I’ll let Bill Nye the Science Guy’s comments made during an NBC news interview today answer for me:
“If you have young people in your family… just try to get them to vote. We have one political party that is aggressively ignoring the warming ocean, the rising ocean, the size and frequency of these storms, and that’s not in anybody’s best interest…. The action to take in the next month or so is to vote, to vote with the climate in mind.”
The political party that likes the color red denies that climate change caused by humans is a thing. It says, “Good, I love warm weather,” when confronted with the fact that our winters are milder. It calls climate change a hoax. Everyone, including the people I care about the most, will be increasingly impacted by rising temperatures, worsening storms, floods, and droughts. Our species must do something about the problem that we’re responsible for causing. We don’t have the luxury of being able to ignore it.
Pray for our fellow Americans who are being affected by the back-to-back hurricanes, Helene and Milton.
We need ADULTS in charge, so please vote for members of the political party that identifies climate change is an existential threat that we can actually do something about—if we act now to transition to renewable energy.
The dishonest guy with the long red tie dismisses the existence of climate change—the same as he minimized the actual danger of Covid—and he’s currently spreading disinformation about FEMA and our government’s response in helping people impacted by these recent catastrophic hurricanes.
Here’s an experiment for any Trump follower. Find a Trump video and watch it with the sound turned off. Without the mesmerizer’s voice, you’ll feel an overwhelming compulsion to turn the sound back on because there’s something really wrong with the muted experience.
To understand Trump Derangement Syndrome, go online, Google Trump, and listen to several minutes of him talking at a rally or giving a speech. After a while you’ll shake your head, blink several times, and reach for the mute button, wondering what happened. The man speaks a steady stream of nonsense, while all the while intending to get into the woman’s pants next to him. Keep her attention, keep talking. Keep their attention….
When Trump’s subjects are pliable and unresisting, he can do whatever he wants. He gets, and keeps, the attention of his followers by flashing shiny red meat objects to them, saying “crooked” this person, “build the wall,” and “mass deportations.” Then he drones on and on, using a cult leader’s repetitive droning….
Trump drones on and on to keep the listener’s attention on him. He’s a manipulator. He’s a middle schooler who shows classmates porno images. He knows what grabs attention. Naughty. Nasty. Outrageous. He could care less about the truth; he lies constantly because he’s improvising, feeling his way, and working to get his listeners’ attention. Whether you love him or hate him doesn’t matter. Simply focus your attention on the outrage he’s dangling, while he drones on and on….
The things that Trump says are purposely ridiculous, extreme, and outrageous because they have to be. His power over his listeners is saying something outrageous because that’s quite simply what grabs a listener’s attention. Rally crowds let him know when he has them. He says something outrageous, or he swears—and once he gets their reaction his droning, droning, droning can continue. His red-hat-wearing listeners nod, eyes glazed and jaws slack. A tried-and-true hypnotist’s technique is to wear down listeners before giving them suggestions.
Ironically, Trump followers seem to think it’s clever to label non-Trumpers as being afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome. With Trump’s followers—who mirror his behavior—the most honest things ever uttered are projections. “I’m not deluded, you are.”
Trump’s droning, droning, and droning is to lull you into allowing him to do what he wants to you. Although they cluck like chickens and play broomsticks like guitars on stage, the brainwashed should never be mocked. Blame the hypnotist.
One and Only Observer 