Catch a Falling Star

I should be happier right now. The Republican Party is imploding rapidly, and Fox News is preceding them down the sewer drain.

But they continue on with their extremely bad badness caused by creepy, crazy corruption. We are running out of time to save the planet. They undermine attempts to convert to renewable energy. Alaska gets opened up to additional oil fields on public lands where they have long been forbidden to preserve the environment. And they continue to legislate in their States with gerrymandered super majorities to hurt trans kids for being trans, making gender-confirming medical care illegal, and forbidding them (all one or two of them) from being in sports with others of their chosen gender. And they pass laws against any kind of school talk about sex education or gender discussions or science class… And then History class. No more black history, or talking about the Antebellum period before the Civil War, or what the “War Between the States” was even about. The works of James Baldwin and Langston Hughes and biographies of Rosa Parks, Roberto Clemente, and Jackie Robinson have been banned or altered.

No one should be allowed to force you by laws to think and feel the same as everybody who is in charge… even if you strongly disagree with their beliefs.

But all Republicans are not like their grotesquely hateful and controlling leaders. The vast armies of the MAGA Minions are made up of people who are seriously misled by the conspiracies of Q-anon and the relentless propaganda of FOX News. Many of them follow the MAGA leaders because they want to believe the lies they are fed and don’t want to hear anything, even factual proof, that contradicts what they want to believe. But most of them, separate from their strongly clutched-to beliefs are wonderful, good people. If they met the two trans kids I encountered in 31 years of teaching, (especially the girl who didn’t commit suicide because her parents supported her chosen gender-identity) would love them. They were real people who acted like the real people they were. The gender issues they had were biological facts that have a basis in the science of genetics. XX and XY are not the only possible gender chromosomes. There are also XXY and XXX and many variations in strength of those genomic effects. They might even have liked the boy (whom, it was discovered, actually had a uterus and fallopian tubes on the inside) had his parents allowed him to be the girl he really was and loved him enough to keep him alive.

And if you talk to them about ice loss at the North Pole, the looming extinction of polar bears, and the death of the Great Barrier Reef, they do care about climate change, and will agree with you about oil companies being the bad guys.

But the hardest one is convincing them they shouldn’t hate the people they fear. They fear Muslims, Blacks, Hispanics, Antifa (who don’t exist in the form they fear,) and, apparently Black History. That comes about mainly because they have never had a chance to interact in a positive way with members of the groups they fear.

But what I am saying is that we must continue trying to separate good people from what the MAGA group has become. They are worth saving. And that’s the only way we can keep from ultimately losing everything to them.

There are times when it is difficult to write.

I am having trouble with my eyes. Glaucoma. So I really want everything to be BIGGER.

And I try to avoid what I can’t really see.

My hands hurt too much to draw as much as my heart wants. So, I reuse a lot of old pictures that I love because I used to be pretty good at drawing.

Because I am old now, I can only seem to think about and fixate on a thing I can no longer do. And not just because Raquel Welch is now dead. The little soldier can no longer even stand up and salute a beautiful woman. And carrying out his essential duty is out of the question. I even make metaphors like a dirty old man now.

Dang it!

And I do not have a shortage of ideas to use. I had intended to write a biographical story about Walt Whitman being not only a poet, but the nudist kind of naturist according to his poetry. But diabetes assaults my thinking machine and putting together complicated themes and ideas becomes too hard to manage in the time I have available.

Of course, I am retired and have nothing but time available. But with all the other issues, I forget to use it before it is too late.

So, I wrote this… some of it large enough to actually see it.