Let's Shut This Circus Down !!!

              I’ve followed the Senate Impeachment Trial of IMPOTUS for the last two weeks. It’s been fascinating and distressing, hope-generating and infuriating, all at once. I side with the Democrats, but credit the Republicans for some of their arguments. It does seem to me that the House might have done a more airtight job on their side, and many of the procedural arguments that the IMPOTUS team puts forward might have been avoided.

              I’m disgusted by the hypocrisy of the Republicans who, despite whatever omissions or mis-steps the House made, are committed by their oaths of office to protect the constitution and the nation, regardless of their vulnerabilities within their own electorates. The fact of them shutting down any possibility of witnesses or documents was pathetic, cowardly and unforgivable.

              It’s clear that next week’s vote will clear IMPOTUS, and according to form, he will trumpet that he was found completely innocent, that he did nothing wrong, and will likely increase his various forms of manipulation and intimidation, which served him so well in compelling even Senators who aren’t facing re-election to toe his line.

              But I have had a partial change of heart, and the arguments or Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz played a role in this. I agree that, were Trump to be removed from office by Impeachment, the divide between parties and between Left and Right would widen with each side even more entrenched in their positions. It wouldn’t have surprised me if uprisings had resulted. Only a substantial number of Republicans coming over might have prevented that.

              So despite my disappointment at the way things played out, which amounts to a serious erosion of democratic values, as damaged as they already are, I do believe that the BEST way to rid ourselves of IMPOTUS will be by the ballot box. The only way out of this morass will be for a convincing majority of voters to reject him come November. That’s the only way to boot him without leaving his followers room to call foul and to reject the legitimacy of the next government. When IMPOTUS loses, he will surely cry foul anyway, as will those of his followers who buy into the Deep State conspiracy. But after all the whining they’ve done for over three years, about Democrats failing to accept the result of the last election, they won’t have much of a leg to stand on when they fail to accept the result of this one.

              Which means, WE MUST WIN COME NOVEMBER! I’ve decided on BERNIE SANDERS as my candidate of choice, but I’ll support whichever Democrat emerges from the primaries and caucuses, WHICH BEGIN THIS WEEK! And I won’t just vote. I’ve been donating to Bernie’s campaign, and I’ll probably make some calls, write some letters and other things. I urge everyone to be an active participant in choosing the next President. Do whatever you can, whoever you support.

Democracy is about active participation. Standing on the sideline and crying afterward contributes NOTHING. I’m so tired of people who don’t vote and say that voting doesn’t matter. It’s mattered so much in our history. We wouldn’t have any of the rights and benefits we enjoy as citizens if the politicians who fought for such measures couldn’t count on voters putting and keeping them in office. If less than 10% more eligible voters had gone to the polls in 2016, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now. Because NON-voters prove to be overwhelmingly Democratic, liberal and progressive.

It’s time to shut down the IMPOTUS CIRCUS!!!

       

Re-Reading the Past

           I’ve spent time these last couple of days going through old boxes, trying to clear space, lighten my load. This afternoon, I tackled some boxes filled mostly with documents, and sorting through them has plunged me into nostalgia and bittersweet reflection. Unless you are scrupulous about keeping your papers organized, you can probably relate to the experience. It probably doesn’t help that all the while I’ve been listening to an internet radio station playing r&b hits from my youth and young adulthood.

I made a major life move in 1993, another in 2002 and another in 2015. Each time, desk drawers were emptied into boxes, and small boxes emptied into larger boxes. And the contents of at least some of those boxes have remained unsorted since the day they were packed. Now, with no move pending, and with the leisure of retirement, I’m actually taking time to examine contents I’d done no more than glance at for as much as twenty years and more. Over that long stretch of time, I’d forgotten so much of what I once tucked away, and the reasons why.

Resumes, job descriptions, applications and hiring papers; drafts and rejection slips of submitted stories; outlines and scraps of stories I never finished, or never started; library cards and drivers licenses from the several cities, states, province I’ve lived in; school papers written out longhand with teachers’ comments in the margins; pay stubs and tax forms; work plans, layoff notices and evaluations from jobs both remembered and forgotten; tickets or playbills from concerts, movies, plays and talks; proposals and descriptions of volunteer projects I was involved with. And oh, the photos … and all the cards and letters, many from people still in my life, but so many more from those I’m connected to no longer.

The photos: they bring back wonderful times, sad times, lost times. They remind me of the many places I’ve been, to live, to visit or for work, or just passing through. The overwhelming majority of them bear no date and no names. I can still approximate most of them, but to situate some would amount to pure guess work. There are quite a few faces I remember without being able to attach a name or exact relationship. And then there are those faces I don’t remember at all. Did I know this person? It appears that I did. I can sometimes suss out a slight emotional flutter that suggests the quality of the connection, but sometimes not even that.

Often the photos carry me right into a relationship, a place, a span of time that had a strong emotional impact on my life. Other times, the image makes such a thin impression that I have to second guess the still vivid memories of what a person or place meant to me. Is what I now feel something direct from that experience, or is it something I’ve concocted since?

But it’s the letters that have hit me most. I’m astonished at the wealth of beautiful, rich correspondences I’ve enjoyed over so much of my life. I remember that there was a time when I wrote letters regularly to multiple people, but the extent, the breadth and the duration of them surprises me. A big portion of these letters are from lovers and would be lovers, but there are so many exchanges with friends, relatives, people I worked or studied with for a time or met while travelling. And a few are with the parents or children of my lovers, people with whom the relationship transcended the structure of our beginning. I guess that in some sense, this transcendence is what so many of these relationships and the letters that flowed from them have in common. On paper we began or continued to share deeply and personally, and that sharing got a response, and bonds were formed.

Does this depth and honesty of sharing arise via email. Certainly it can, and it does. And yet, it’s different. I don’t remember the last time I penned a letter, but some wonderful correspondence still comes my way electronically. There are even advantages with email: editing is much easier and emotionally freer, emails can come and go so quickly, and you always maintain a record of your own part of the exchange.

But there is something wonderful about writing out – or typing out – a letter. The slowness of the process is as much an advantage as a disadvantage. The time involved – both in the composition and the transmission – acts as a kind of tenderizer and seasoning almost. There’s even something or other that comes from the waiting – from going to the mailbox and discovering that, no, it’ll be at least another day, or conversely, that waiting has suddenly ended.

Today, as I read over so many old, mostly forgotten letters, I was reminded of what a special space letter-writing can create. One that I was especially touched by was from the mother of a woman I had a long, up and down, never-quite-settled-into-what-might-have-been relationship with. The three of us lived in a geographic triangle of cities, and girlfriend took me for visits to mom a number of times, to the point where mom and I became friends, and I even visited when I was there on my own. In her letter, mom acknowledges not having answered my own letter to her more than two years earlier. She and her husband had divorced – which I knew from her daughter – and she shared with me the emotional roller-coaster that she and the entire family had been on.

By then, her daughter and I had each met and married other partners. And mom’s words to me included that she’d always hoped her daughter and I would marry, but also her pleasure that daughter and I were still friends (as we are to this day, a quarter century later). She said that she’d been meaning to write me for some time, and she spent much of the day at the task, as she documented. As I re-read the letter today, I was taken back to that time, to my and our visits, to the warmth she always showed me. And I was reminded of the mystery and the spiritual magic of relationship, family, love and longing. I’m sure that I wrote mom back, but I can’t remember what I might have written. Nor can I find any later letter from her. But I know that she died a couple of years later, and I have the funeral notice that her daughter sent me.

It was reading that letter, and some others, that brought me to this post, that generated this deep mixture of emotion I’ve been feeling these last hours, as much gratitude as sadness. Sure, the paper documents are only the trace artifacts of something much larger, but they are also what remains when the rest is past. And thus, they conjure thoughts of both mortality and of eternity. What’s become of all these connections, all these loved ones? So many, too many, are gone from my life, and I feel guilt about that, because I know I haven’t always kept up my end of what amounts to a labor of love. I feel no animosity towards those who dropped out on their end, but I do miss and wonder about them.

The discovery of one batch of letters from a younger, female co-worker whom I had a wonderful big brother-little sister connection with drove me to seek her on Facebook. And I found her, with lots of photos showing her looking much the same but with the added twenty years since our correspondence ended. Why, how it ended, I can’t remember. I see her in her new life and wonder: is there still room in her life for a big brother? Still space in my own for a little sister? Who knows? Time changes so much. And as Ecclesiastes tells us, “There is a time for everything; and a season for every activity under the heavens”. A time for re-kindling, and a time for letting go. Which shall it be? Yes. Bittersweet.

The End of IMPOTUS?

I watched the opening day of the Senate Impeachment trial, right up until almost 2am, when they adjourned.

How demoralizing it was, to have the House managers attempt time and again to open up the process to allow for the subpoena of documents and the calling of witnesses, and to be repeatedly rebuffed in the effort. It remains unclear as to whether there will be any witnesses at all, and with Trump’s defense team repeatedly dismissing the entire case as unfair, unconstitutional, irredeemably flawed or merely political, it’s difficult to believe that the actual issues will ever be confronted by the Senate majority Republicans.

I’m disheartened. In just the way one can be when trying to get a friend or relative to take an issue seriously that they are simply unable or unwilling to see. It’s like that recent internet meme about the word that people heard in two entirely different ways. It is so blatantly obvious to me that Trump is a dishonest, immature and completely self-interested person with little regard for law or morality. But it’s also clear that others view him as a hero, willing to buck the system and defy meaningless proprieties in support of causes they value. That’s what they see. It’s pointless to call them fools or to simply be angry. But how to make them SEE!

One of the most infuriating things is to hear the charges totally dismissed, as though they simply don’t exist. How many times yesterday did the House Managers deliver a powerful statement, pointing out the undisputed things done at Trump’s direction, the obvious pressure exerted to compel Ukraine to announce an investigation, purely for the purpose of hurting a potential political rival, only to have one of the President’s lawyers stand and say, “See. He didn’t do anything wrong.”; “They have no case”; “There is clearly no grounds for this impeachment.”

Trump’s defenders all seem to have taken up his tactic of simply repeating blatant untruths endlessly, while ignoring all evidence to the contrary. And for at least 40% of Americans, IT CONTINUES TO WORK!

I watched more today – the opening arguments from the House prosecution team. I thought that Adam Schiff, House Impeachment Manager and a representative from California, did a brilliant job outlining the case. He opened with a quote from Alexander Hamilton, in a 1792 letter to George Washington, warning against the dangers of Trump-Like despots:

"When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanor—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government and bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may 'ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.'"

How perfect a reference to Trump, to IMPOTUS (IMpeached President Of The United States – as he was labeled by George Conway – husband of Donald’s Kellyanne. It’s the perfect tag for one so fond of tagging others with insults!). But will any of the devout 40% take any of this in? There have been a couple of times in the last two years when I thought the Trump presidency was on the verge of collapsing; clearly, I over-estimated the wisdom of my fellow Americans. I have much more modest expectations now: that at least enough will be swayed to get his approval rate permanently below 40%. I can only hope.