Wednesday, November 16, 2016

My 3 o'clock meeting.

It's been a week since the cataclysmic news that the blind man with a rifle who's been running through the streets, shooting wildly and randomly with an endless magazine of dum-dum bullets was elected President of the most powerful nation that ever existed.

I wish I could say that my mood has moderated since then. That I've progressed--even just a stage or two--in Elisabeth Kubler Ross manner up a notch toward acceptance.

But I'm not there.

All around me--this is only natural--people are back at work. They seem to be successfully back in the workaday world of making meetings and dinner and plans for the weekend.

I know life must go on. That we can't wallow in sorrow at the end of America, the end of liberalism, yes, the end of hope. No, dammit, we have banner ads to prepare for a 3 o'clock and Brian hasn't approved them yet!

Horror!

Let's forget about the horror of fascism and hatred ascendant. Let's forget about the rape of what remains of our global ecosystem. Let's forget about what Elizabeth Kolbert has called the Sixth Extinction.

Let's forget about Putin's tanks heading west and Trump bought off with rubles or worse deciding, like the professional wrestler he is, that he must smash Putin with a nuclear chair.

No, let's forget about all this and make our fucking three o'clock and will you pick up a cantaloupe on the way home we have company this weekend.

We need to find a way to fight more.

Thoreau went to jail in "Civil Disobedience" refusing to pay tax to support the Mexican American War in 1845. But we can't opt out of tax. They are taken from us automatically.

How can we get arrested? How can we stop this? How can we not be the 21st Century equivalent of the 20th Century "Good German"? Smiling and cooperating our way into enormous destruction, despoiling and doom. How can we throw bricks and what can we throw them at?

Someone smarter than me needs to figure out a system of small insurrections that allow us to daily protest what is happening. If the majority who voted for Clinton pledged to boycott Fox and its advertisers, that would be a start, a step.

Something like this, Hans Fallada's postcards (look it up) or the defacement of British coinage from suffragists.




I gotta go.

I have a 3 o'clock.

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