Spitshine Me: On Betsy Devos, Amway and the Utter Creepiness of the Unhinged Right

A Cautionary Tale

As anyone who’s been paying attention to creepy doings for the last 40 years or so knows[i], the subject, “the Utter Creepiness of the Unhinged Right”, is too vast to fit into one post. How creepy that ride has been for how long and how long ago we should have jumped off of that spooky train has been, tragically, right in our face all that time. But we’ve--collectively, at least--turned away from it too often, missed too many opportunities to get away and now, alas. The zombies have eaten the last living human. Welcome to the Twilight Zone.

            For those of you who need a quick counter-narrative to what your television set has been selling you these last 40 years or so, I offer up this folksy tale from my own checkered past. My intent, as far as intent goes, is to illustrate what I know of the utter, dismal, creepy danger of one—and only one--of the dozens of utterly creepy Far-Right ideologues Trump and his fawning Congress are now (as you read this) handing out Oligarchy-Appointment-Candy to this month.

            Betsy DeVos is apparently going to be our next of Secretary of Education. As heiress to the (apparently) depthless Amway fortune she and her family have been funding the worst actors of the Creepy Right for decades, including many far-far (far-fa…r) Right schemes to destroy public education in favor of gifting our (that’s OUR) public-education funds to unaccountable, private corporations running religious-indoctrination camps (and maybe a few charter schools if they tow the approved Fundamentalist-Christian line). She’s never attended a public school, nor has any of her kids, and there’s a question as to whether she’s ever actually set foot in one. But let’s not get high-centered on small-mindedness, eh? Let’s think big, like the fact that she’s worth about five billion bucks.

            Now think bigger. Have you ever wondered…these last 40 years or so...how a person like Betsy DeVos (or a person like her brother, Erik Prince, founder and C.E.O. of Blackwater and now consulting Trump on “security” matters) got to be worth so much money, or how our public discourses have been so in the religio-toilet for so long? Well, wonder no more, and look no further than the likes of Amway.   

            So what is Amway anyways, and why are its royal lords and ladies so rich and powerful and… crazy? Isn’t it just a flaky shoeshine company?!? How is it then, that unbeknownst to almost all of you Amway has become the epitome of success at sending whacky-Right extremists to Congress to carry its water all these years and now, a Secretary of Education who doesn’t believe in public education at all?  Is it some religious cult? A pyramid scheme for crooks? A cancer and a pox upon the Land that has never been properly diagnosed?

            Yes, all of that and a little bit more. So once again, welcome to the Twilight Zone. Sit back, and enjoy my little cautionary tale.

In the Spring of 1971, I joined the Navy and was sent to Boot Camp in San Diego. I was 18 and as far as I knew (which wasn’t very far) I didn’t have to join the Navy at all. My parents sure didn’t think so, and they tried their hardest to talk me out of it. A war was raging in Vietnam, I was enrolled in college and I hadn’t even done them the courtesy of finding out what my draft number was. But like so many innocents raised on patriotism and war movies, I signed up anyway, waved goodbye to my weeping mother from the dirty window of the Greyhound bus we were loaded into, and three hours later we were unceremoniously transferred onto the battleship-grey Navy bus that carted us off to camp, where the process began of teaching clueless kids like me that we were nothing which, clueless as I was, I have to admit I hadn’t considered before.

As anyone who has been through a boot camp knows, this is a formal, abrasive, thoroughly-thought-out and effective educational experience, tried and true, meant to save us from getting shot in a jungle…or something…like that...I think…

And that’s how I remember my Navy Boot Camp: vaguely and disturbingly, which brings me to how I met my first Amway salesman.

           

I didn’t know he was an Amway salesman at first, didn’t know anything about Amway for that matter, other than that it was a flaky shoeshine company. I also didn’t know about creepy corporate-religious cults, pyramid schemes or any of that. I had just joined the Navy during wartime, for chrissakes. I, obviously, didn’t know anything about anything. But that changed quick, thanks, in no small part, to an Amway salesman.

He was the "commanding officer" of one of our sister recruit companies. This meant that he was a fleet chief petty officer who had pulled shore duty as a boot camp “drill sergeant”: which meant he fit the definition of a Frustrated Man. San Diego was graduating out about 1000 recruits a week into the fleet in those days, with about 100 recruits to a company[ii]. Any given company had about 9 sister companies, then, working their way through the three-month program, all to graduate on the same day and each with a frustrated, usually angry, fleet chief petty officer at its helm bulldogging them through.

One of the most common methods used on naïve kids who could end up being shot at by strangers in mere months was to teach them impossibly obtuse minutia about how to fold their clothing and shine their shoes and then to punish them severely when they screwed up which, because it was bootcamp, was inevitable.

We were taught how to properly fold our Navy-issue underwear (“skivvies”), and where to properly place them in our locker. Then we were inspected on how well we had learned these new life skills. If we missed a fold or creased them crooked, or we placed them on top of the properly-folded dungarees instead of the properly-folded t-shirt we were punished. Dehumanization was a seamless vapor that enveloped us like a winter fog we forgot how to live without --and since our commanding officer/chief often slept in the same barracks with the recruits and therefore had to maintain enough good will with us in order to not get murdered him in his sleep, he worked in tandem with this chief from a sister company in the classic “good-cop/bad-cop” scheme.

We saw this bad-cop chief often because, in spite of the “good-cop” persona our own chief tried to project to us, he was really kind of a sadist. This other chief would come over about three or four times a week, whenever us “worms” (the endearing term used in Boot Camp for recruits) needed to be shaken down a notch or two, when a hundred push-ups needed to be meted out for the insubordination of neglecting to dust the top of a WWII-era light fixture 15 feet off the barracks floor, when a non-functioning, WWII-era M-1 (read: heavy) rifle needed to be held at arms length for an hour for the outrage of forgetting where your skivvies went and where your socks didn’t, or when a double-time jog around the camp was called for to impress upon us the importance of having immaculately-spitshined shoes which, as you might have guessed by now, was this chief’s particular fetish. In fact, during personal “inspections” he would step on the toe of a newly-shined boot and grind it down into the pavement until the wearer winced, or until he knew he was not only ruining the kid’s spitshine but hurting his toe, and then he’d yell at the top of his lungs to drop down and give him fifty push-ups.

           

There are a few things about shining your shoes in a Navy boot camp that need to be mentioned here. First, Navy-issue boondockers were made of coarse leather and were not at all shiny when they were issued to us along with our other clothing items shortly after arrival. They were work boots. They weren’t designed to be shiny. That’s important to remember.

Second, special attention was paid to the toe of the boondocker, at least in Navy Boot Camp, which was required to be shiny enough to reflect your commanding officer’s evil grin whenever he so chose, which meant always, which meant that young kids who were just beginning to get an inkling that they were expected to think of themselves as shit developed an entirely-unhealthy fetish for shining their coarse, unshineabe boondocker toes. This is also important to remember.

Third, we were only allowed to use Kiwi bootblack and spit to accomplish this unnatural feat, which led to most of us developing a religious aversion to Kiwi shoeshine tins, which in turn explains a lot about religious indoctrinations in general.

But I digress.

Imagine then, a hundred relatively-innocent kids who hadn’t even figured out what they’d gotten themselves into yet let alone what they were going to do about it sitting in the California sun laboring over the shining of the toe of their work boots for hours. And hours. And weeks. And months. That was Boot Camp.

Okay, so along comes Graduation Day, and ten (or so) companies march perfectly about each other out on the parade grounds in machine-like precision, a thousand whitehats get thrown in the air with a whooping cheer (We’re free!...?) we go back to our barracks to pack our duffel bags with our perfectly-folded skivvies and other perfectly-folded clothes for our first leave and our next duty station, and there we find the bad-cop. He's all smiles now, shaking hands, patting backs and he’s telling us that, now that we’re “out in the fleet”, we can use anything we want to shine our shoes so long as they’re shiny, and that only a worm would continue to do it by the spitshining method he had been forcing us to perfect these last three months, and that he just happened to have a few boxes of Amway shoeshine spray with him to help us along our way to…Singapore, the Philippines, Spain, and, yes, even Vietnam. The world, he wanted us to now know, was our oyster now, and his product was going to help us slip that oyster down our gullets. It dawned on a few of us like a thud then, that, after all the torture and abuse this sadist had subjected his victims to during the last three months, this guy was, in the real world, an Amway salesman.

And what an Amway salesman he was! To repeat: each and every week there were (about) ten companies of 100 recruits each graduating on the same day, and this chief drove around and visited them all with (probably) a carload of Amway Shoeshine Spray. He probably sold hundreds of them a week, making a small fortune off of our boon dockers for Betsy DeVos and her mercenary brother, as it turned out. Rich people getting richer off of our boon dockers, in other words. The Ultimate Ones to become the self-proclaimed “deciders” of which rat hole their client-politicos should aim us suckers down. Our boondockers were of a piece with the massive tax-cuts for the rich that have been dished out since Reagan and common-scheme pyramid swindles and cult-like promotion of grade-B products that should never have contributed to the overloading of our landfills not to mention our Congress, with unnecessary crap. Support our troops, indeed. Like I said, this subject is too huge. Look it up.  

In the meantime, let me share a bit more of my personal history. My daughter is deaf, and we have had to fight every step of the way (under Obama!) to get her the services she needs and deserves and is legally entitled to receive from our public schools, and have found the only safety net we have been able to fall back on consistently when it came time to threatening school officials who have found it so hard to find time and money for our child has been the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the bedrock law that mandates that public schools throughout the country provide our children with those services (WHICH WE PAY FOR!!). Betsy DeVos, on the other hand, who may or may not have ever actually set a toe in a public school facility, had to admit during her congressional hearing that she didn’t even know of IDEA’s existence and that at any rate “those kinds of things” should be left to the states. "Nothing", she condescendingly admonished Senator Al Franken on the congressional committee when he questioned her about her astonishing lapse of knowledge, "is really 'free'". For me, a simple dictionary-definition for “creepy” suffices to describe Betsy DeVos as our next Secretary of Education: “A feeling as if something were crawling over your skin, shivering, chilled with fright, causing an unpleasant feeling of fear and unease.”

Maybe the Amway Chief was selling product with mere “religious fervor”. This would jibe with the long history of a company built on a pyramid scheme built on the backs of dupes, half of whom make no money at all. Another way to describe the Chief’s—and his bosses’—behavior is this: they’re a bunch of crooks, who use moral relativism as a smokescreen for their crusade in the pursuit of wealth. 

With pyramid-scheme cults like Amway and priests like Betsy DeVos and her brother, Eric, calling the shots these days about whose dogma our kids should be fed at our expense, and what whacky-right "protests" they should be toting their assault weapons to when they grow up (also at our expense) what more is there to say? That we have become nation of dupes hawking wares for rich overlords who promise us a “seat next to Christ” instead of actual wages?

Maybe so.

Shit.

---

[i] Starting with Ronald Reagan and his alliance with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon during the Nicaraguan “Contra” War.

[ii] This is my best recollection. I’m almost sure the companies were 100 recruits each, but not so sure about the numbers of companies per week. It was a lot.

Donald Trump Is A Fascist and a Fraud and Should NOT Be Normalized or Even Tolerated--Starting Now

Don't Refrain or Defer: Trump's a Fascist. Call Him One.

Steven Harper, of The Belly of the Beast, recently put into words what has been on my mind since  the daylight-heist of yet another presidential election:   "...A frustrated plurality who never wanted a President Trump now say, 'I feel helpless. What can I do?' Help is on the way, but it won’t be an easy or quick fight. The winning strategy will test a people whose attention span is short and whose need for instant gratification is profound (emphasis mine). Only an organized, systematic effort can combat the chaos that President Trump is already inflicting from Trump Tower…"

There is a rise in the topography within the Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock (the overflow camp on the floodplain where most people like myself ended up camping) dubbed "Facebook Hill". It was dubbed that because that's where you could usually get cellphone reception that was illusive at best in most other places in and around the camp. Cellphone reception, for better or worse, is now part of our 21st century DNA. It's critical, in fact, to counter the narrative of lies and omissions that corporate news depends on for its continued existence in this 21st century world (don't you love irony?!)

But, as PeeWee Herman once said, "Everyone's got a big 'but'", and mine's this: Mark Zuckerberg is not our friend. This should not be news to anyone, but there is a tendency to give these gizmo-creating techies a pass, because gizmo-worship is so ubiquitous now, and to use these "tools" like Facebook as if they're benign, which they most certainly are not. To be clear, I agree with the analogy of Facebook being a "tool". Of course it is, but it's certainly not "nothing but a tool". A hammer is a tool, and a useful one, too. But try dreaming about someone's sexy selfie while you're swinging one and see where it gets your thumb. There's a much more multi-faceted, and darker side to Facebook than there is to a hammer. We've evolved that much anyway, which proves that we do evolve, if there was any doubt in the first place about that, and I think there has been. It's merely the fate of us humans, I believe, to choose which way we want go with that natural law.

So, Facebook….Below is a Facebook screenshot from journalist Kevin Sessum's Facebook page. He's a mainstream author who seems to specialize in covering celebrities, so he's not someone who you'd think would be tarred as a "threat" by corporate media (which Facebook is a main organ of, like it or not).

Nevertheless, Mr. Sessum was blackballed by Facebook, for a day, for calling Trump a fascist. Facebook told him he had violated their "community standards" policy. In other words, calling a fascist a fascist isn't OK with Zuckerberg now that he's going to have to curry favor with a fascist president and on and on…you know the song and here's the link
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/30/facebook-temporary-ban-kevin-sessums-trump-supporters  

Mr. Sessum's response was to post the below picture and message--on Facebook--and request that others do so. I did, and a day later, Zuckerberg backed down. Nice of him, huh?

I fully agree with Steven Harper's statement that "Only an organized, systematic effort can combat the chaos that President Trump is already inflicting from Trump Tower…" I would, once again, point to the doings at Standing Rock and the deep movement those doings represent as Exhibit A for that flavor of activism. Hundreds, thousands of such doings will be required now, have been required in fact but, due to our collective "short attention span" and "profound instant-gratification need" have not been realized and so we have a lot catch-up to do n'est pas?

Be mindful, then, of these new tools you use. They represent profound technological changes happening within our lifetimes, maybe as profound as the evolutionary development of hammers into weapons. Act wisely and forcefully, and know how to effectively protest within the confines of these new gizmo-infested mediums. 

Post this screenshot on your Facebook page. Keep doing it. Make 'em back down. They won't--can't--do it otherwise.

You're the change you've been looking for. Evolve--toward the light, please.

Politics

A Definition

Politics is a poorly-understood human condition whereby, if you put two people in the same room you may or may not have it, but if you put the same two people in a bathroom, you will.

Standing Rock

Part II

Axmen Firearms
Retail store on Hwy 93 Just South of Missoula MT
Dec. 12th, 2016

I think there's common agreement amonst human beings not unhinged that we don't want to live in a dystopian world, nor do we want to hand off such a thing to our children. 

Why then, has the above-pictured poster-child of such a world been tolerated at the south end of Missoula on the highway for every single car traveling north or south out of Missoula to see since shortly after the Obama election? Why have at least a half a dozen other such abominations directly along that route in the 40 miles between Missoula and Hamilton been tolerated for at least that long? 

Really, have we had enough yet? Have we finally had enough?

Oceti Sakowin Camp from raised grade of Hwy 1806
Morton County, ND
Dec. 2nd, 2016

There's been an antidote to such extremism all along that's been available to everyone who hasn't allowed their fears and bigotries to pop the hinges off the lid of their common sense, and it's been  known for millennia. Anyone who's lived in the Northern Rockies of Montana for any length of time (with their hinges intact, of course) knows this for sure. Just take a walk (or ski) through the trees and listen to them. You know what I mean. We're lucky, is what they say. The Truth has set us free. 

But before I get to that most important thing I learned by witnessing (for the short time of one week) the doings at Standing Rock, as a public service I would like to speak to something a little more pedestrian: public safety. Maybe this could be a connector, a light bulb so to speak, for those who may not have had the opportunity to memorize the map of the night sky yet. Be patient on that. It's all knowable, and all you need is the curiosity and the bit of time it takes a human brain to shed enough of those superfluous byproducts of our commercial culture that are undoubtedly clinging to your perceptions of the world. You can get by all that, it's not that hard, and you can know all you need and want to by and by, so don't worry.

In the meantime, let's consider public safety. Use this observation about it as a measuring rod, if nothing else, to size up what corporate news is really trying to sell you about what has happened at Standing Rock so far, what's happening there now and what you can bet your mortgage payment is going to happen there in the future.

Water protectors looking north across Backwater Bridge on North Dakota Highway 1806 at militarized police, razor wire and water cannon blocking access to shortest, safest route to emergency services at Mandan/Bismarck, ND
(Oceti Sakowin Camp is just a little behind the protectors and to their right)

The picture above is what a tax-paying motorist heading north out of Oceti Sakowin Camp on Highway 1806 would have been confronted with on their frigid way out toward Bismarck. The scene itself is dystopian enough (like an oversized assault weapon advertising a hardware store, for instance). But of particular concern regarding public safety during the week I was at the camps was that between Dec. 1 and Dec. 7 the camp was filling up with thousands of vets staging for their anticipated action of collectively shielding the water protectors. Along with these vets were many people coming from across the swath of America's religious, spiritual and cultural denominations who came to lend support during that crucial week before the Governor of North Dakota's "eviction" notice set for Dec. 5th. Nobody knew what was going to happen on that date other than that, if the state was serious about trying to evict the camp, there was going to be another scene similar to the all-but-deadly debacle the state perpetrated on protectors on Nov. 20th on this very bridge. It turned out that, due to the wisdom of the tribal elders combined with the huge show of support--and the massive media coverage centered around the vets'  arrival--the state backed down. For the time being.

But simultaneous to this backing-down was the coming of winter's second blizzard bringing arctic conditions to the camp, which many of the newcomers were not (and I believe could not be) prepared for. Many of the vets came in buses and were "deployed" (put up) in public facilities located on the reservation. But I met many good-hearted, elderly vets and other supporters who came in their own vehicles and were sleeping in them. Given the weather conditions, this was awe-inspiring in its own right and, to a person, the ones I talked to were game to challenging the militarized response to peaceful demonstrators, and to do so as best the could in the teeth of a North Dakota blizzard.

I think it's fair to observe that on this week the locals were particularly overwhelmed with "out-of-towners" and that more than a couple tribal folks I chatted with thought it was more than a little funny that these newbys were putting chains on newer-model all-wheelers while they were skating around quite nicely without them in their earlier-model econo-rigs. In other words and, of course, the locals were expecting such weather. But to these good-hearted out-of-towners who had been sleeping in their cars for a couple-three nights and were not as used to such North Dakota reality, and even to those who were, this was serious weather, with serious consequences for an individual if one of many things went wrong.

Most stayed until the Dec. 5th deadline passed and the vets did their peaceful actions at the bridge and at the Oceti Sakowin Camp and other locations. After that, the weather made it clear that, for those who were unprepared, it would have been dangerous to themselves as well as to the movement for them to have remained and had something unfortunate happen to them. It was time for those to leave, and there were a lot of them.

And here is the key point I wish to make: The state of North Dakota, whose tax-funded employees were paid to protect and provide safe services for ALL citizens, including their OWN, felt it was a more important use of tax dollars for them to harm the movement by attempting to harm their own citizens as well as these newcomers (many of whom ended up dumping untold thousands of dollars into the local economies of Mandan and Bismarck to the north in the middle of this--shall we politely say?--non-traditional tourist season). The state of North Dakota officially blocked these peaceful folks' safest, fastest way north to Mandan and Bismarck with razor-wire and water-cannons. For the sake of a pipeline company.

Repeat that last sentence a couple times in your head. Is your jaw dropping yet?

OK. Let's give the cops the benefit of whatever shred of doubt there is to that last sentence for a minute. Let's assume, as I can only guess they did given their behavior, that most of these folks (and just include myself here for the sake of argument) were starry-eyed and naive, similar to, say, your average occupant in an out-of-state vehicle traveling across North Dakota on I-94. How rude, a local might snort, to be so starry-eyed and naive in such weather, right? A smug little snicker under their breath, an off-color joke or two at the truck stop, that would have been the only proper response for publicly-funded entities sworn to protect citizens during exactly such circumstances. But imagine a dangerous storm hitting unwary travelers on I-94 and the state of North Dakota throwing razor wire, water cannons and a militarized police force in the path of their fastest way out????!!!

That's what I witnessed at Standing Rock on Highway 1806. The nearest analogy I can come up with is being caught driving while black in Selma, Alabama in 1963. Think about it the next time you're traveling across North Dakota in a blizzard, or reading anything about North Dakota from now on for the foreseeable future. That state has some long and sincere apologizing to do before any hinged American should take what they officially have to say seriously again.

Water protectors approaching Backwater Bridge on Highway 1806 at night

Burnt vehicle and trailer placed on Blackwater Bridge by law enforcement,
removed by water protectors on Nov. 20th 

Thanks to some epic failures on too many peoples' part, the road we're collectively staring down is distinctly Dystopian now, no doubt. Too bad, but there's no use turning back, and shying away from looking forward is even less of an option. Maybe this is our golden moment. Hard to say and who's to say such a thing even after the fact. But activism's always the best antidote to social despair, and heres what I think:

On the other side of those scary lights is a road where hardware stores wouldn't dare use assault rifles to advertise their knick-knacks in America's heartland. 

Standing Rock

Part I

My main intent in heading to Standing Rock two weeks ago was to witness (to see for myself and then tell my community what I saw) and to try to understand and then attempt to support and follow the Lakota/Dakota leaders of this movement in whatever way I felt I could while I was there. I ended up spending a little over a week at Oceti Sakowin -one of several water-protector camps at Standing Rock—and then headed home for family duties and to better prepare myself for my next trip out into the teeth of the North Dakota winter (if in fact the leaders at the camps still want me to come) 

            My intent was to write up a big, long blog/screed/sermon about what I personally witnessed and participated in because my head was just bursting with impressions and ideas, and I still intend to do that. But now that I sit down to write it I see that the form of the intended narrative is shifting. In just in my short week of being there, I saw, experienced, felt, thought out and schemed up far more than I could fit into one single post that would adhere to my personal standard (not always achieved!) of not boring my audience. This is the nature of writing and of true movements, I think. The birth of true movements (which is what is happening at Standing Rock is) overwhelm its witnesses with new thoughts, paradigms and possibilities, and in that excitement the witnesses who write about it tend to go didactic (professorial or whatever) and then your audience gets bored and doesn’t believe you, can’t believe you because what you have seen and experienced and want to share is so far out of their norm. Of course, I don’t think I’m personally in danger of putting too many would-be activists to sleep because I don’t think I have that big of an audience. But I recognize—and want to call out--the dangers of silo-building and single-issue-defending that the “left” has been so infamous for in the past, and although I know I’m just this tiny little thread of narrative, I also know that you are reading this now, that stories are vital to what lies ahead and that words are what our stories are bricked together with. For me to say that what is happening at Standing Rock is huge would be, I think, an understatement. So therefore it’s crucial, I believe, that  stories coming out of  this paradigm-shifting event are not only believable, but true, and I want to treat you with the respect I would hope all journalists and essayists with larger audiences should but don’t. 

            Beware, then, is the first thing I have to tell you, of what you read and hear about Standing Rock and this larger movement that has been catalyzed there in the corporate papers or hear on T.V. The corporate paradigm is dying, or is at least being effectively assaulted and, being corporate, those outlets want to put you back to sleep, which is one of the only real dangers of this moment, I think. False negatives, lies, willful news blackouts, etc. Don’t believe ‘em, in other words. That's your job. Read this blog. Read others. Get on Facebook. Talk to people who have been to Standing Rock. Sponsor awareness-raising events. Don’t silo up around single issues. The danger of “divide and conquer” everyone in this complex country to the “left” of Attila the Hun will be overridden by your vigilance. Get the best information you can get, and keep the narrative on track and true with what you want our world to become. Take a side. It's that simple.

            Well…this is getting to be one of those long-winded explanations that I maybe should have avoided according to my own rules. Oh, well…people are people are people, my mom always said, and I’m just another one of those. I hope you’ll give me the benefit of the doubt that I’m doing the best I can with a very large thing that I just happened to be blessed with being a witness to, and give me your ear as I try to put it down into as many installments to this blog as it takes for me to feel like I got it adequately out, which may be what I’ll end up writing on for the rest of my natural existence, it's that big, I think. 
            That's OK. At least I know my time could be a lot less productive. I could be neurosing on DC politics for the next 4-8 years.

            Evolve, folks. Read on, please.

On Donald Trump Winning

Whitehall, Montana       July 2016

Who will stand and fight now? Pay close attention because those are the ones who will lead us (and the Land) out of toxic waters of the mile-deep mining pit America seems hell bent to land on. Which of us snow geese will not land in those waters? Pay attention! Those are the ones to follow.

Here's a clue: the least-confortable among us will be the most likely to show the common sense and courage that we all must honor and then emulate. Rebel against the ones who will not hesitate to land in water that looks like…water? Those comfortable leaders who've already feathered their nests and see no problem with sticking to appearances? Yes. Of course, and it's always been that way and you goddam-well know it.

Here's another clue. Those real leaders are already showing us the way. I'll just leave it at Standing Rock. You want a livable world for your children? Think about it. Is an Indian still just some "chief" selling cigars to you? It apparently still is to the town fathers of Whitehall, and Whitehall--or at least Jefferson County where Whitehall exists--went heavily for Trump.

Who will seek comfortable waters of toxic waste to float their poor, weary butts on, and who will not. Who will stand and fight and who will you follow? 

Far past time to decide. The painting's been on the brick wall for long enough for those of us who claimed they needed more time to process these things. What do you think of white privilege now? Do you benefit from it? Be honest! What will you do?

Give the Brick Wall a fresh coat of paint? C'mon. Get real...

Follow the leader, I'd say. Evolve.

Go Bernie!

8000+ people waiting hours to see Bernie/ Missoula Montana/ May 11, 2016

Here's a little paragraph I wrote to the Bernie website I've been contributing to this last year ($27 a shot) when it asked me why I support Bernie. I don't suppose anyone will really read it there, so I thought I'd reprint it here and let five or ten other people see what they think. Ah, the internet! I suppose I should thank Al Gore for all these joys at my fingertips, but I'm still mad at him for not fighting harder the last time the media stole a presidential election. The bastards….

It's hard to express in this somewhat impersonal format how deeply I respect Bernie's efforts on our behalf. Since Reagan, most politicians bow out or wimp out long before the job is done, but Bernie is clearly the politician so many of us hope will be the prototype of the future. My main income these days is Social Security, and I figure if my children are going to have that program when they get to be my age Bernie's campaign is an excellent investment of a couple month's worth of mine now. Maybe the best thing about his (our) campaign is that he woke up so many people—especially the young--to the corporatist nature of the entrenched party and media. The latest machinations and collusions of the corporatists and the media in undermining our democratic process in the June 7 primaries—particularly in California--will never quit smelling like the rotten elk carcass in the hot sun that it is. This brand of open-air, stinking collusion between cozy elites has certainly happened before (the 2000 Bush vs Gore coup for instance) But thanks to Bernie we are finally being given a big enough voice to (maybe) shout them down this time. Maybe not yet, but the movement is building. In fact I feel it’s just the beginning and it’s entirely exciting. What choice do Us The People have but to be “clear-eyed” optimists?

Sincere thanks and…Go Bernie!

I recommend sending Bernie  donations as long as he asks for them. His donation site has about 20 progressive candidates that you can also help out with a credit card number and a push of a button. It's not the hardest thing we'll have to do in the near future, certainly not the only thing. But you can count on Bernie that every dollar you spend now is a real-time investment in your kids' and our Earth's future.

 DireWolf says:

 Get off your butts 

Don't give up 

And give til it hurts

Or your kids'll end up in a tar pit

And then go extinct.

Don't tell me I don't know!!

https://go.berniesanders.com