Monday, January 02, 2017

Speak No Evil







It is impossible and immoral to stop seeing the actual path of the next 4-8 years. Liberals and moderates keep writing about opposition and resistance to Trump, claiming Bernie or Warren or the Senate will halt the coming onslaught. We shall survive Trump, they say. Every day, every tweet, every appointment, every indication points not to a passing few years of trouble, but rather to an irreversible catastrophe. T. and his team stand for and have fought for years to repeal the Great Society of Johnson and the progressive achievements of FDR. We shall see a radical dismantling of social programs. We shall see enormous infringements of civil rights, especially of Muslims and African Americans. We shall see nothing short of war on the environment, undoing protections to water and air, giving free reign to the oil companies, chemical companies, and the military-industrial monolith. It will be a war on science across the board. Religious fervor will be encouraged, especially by the fanatical Pence. Some of T.'s team  want to bring on the religious apocalypse. Really. And that leads to a war on Islam. It leads to a possible nuclear war with Iran or N. Korea. Is that what we shall survive? Will we be able to make everything OK again in 2020 or 2024? The biggest danger of all is complacency, thinking we can weather T. as we weathered Matthew and other natural disasters that will be increasing exponentially. Where is the evidence that Democrats will regain popularity and majorities? The election was not about T. nearly so much as it was about the millions of Americans who live in the South, the Mid-West and the entire middle of the country. They are the ones who have made the Electoral College such a farce; a nod to slavery that has, over the years, disenfranchised millions of voters in both the Red and the Blue states, ignoring a three million vote majority for the other candidate. Most Americans don't even understand the process. We are a stupid, complacent, superstitious people, afraid to admit and face the truth. We have condemned wildlife, threatened the lives of millions of people around the world, unraveled the possibility of saving the planet from ecological disaster. We are not only stupid and selfish, we are evil. Until we see that evil and overcome it, all of our positive thinking, optimism, and professions of love for humanity and the beauty of nature  are delusions and lies.  


Above: My photograph of the Three Monkeys at Toshogu Shrine in Nikko, Japan


--Jameson


From the Guardian:

World on track to lose two-thirds of wild animals by 2020, major report warns

Living Planet Index shows vertebrate populations are set to decline by 67% on 1970 levels unless urgent action is taken to reduce humanity’s impact

 
A victim of poachers in Kenya: elephants are among the species most impacted by humans, the WWF report found. 
Photograph: image BROKER/REX/Shutterstock









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