2020

America by the Numbers, Hues and Ballots – Best of TREMR, OpEdNews.com Headline

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2020’s economic woes, friends separated, and lessons unlearned, beckon us before drowning in thanksgiving for Black Friday, to reflect on who we’ve lost, what we’ve gained and the wisdom to recognize the difference.

Donald Trump’s election was not a Russian caused fluke. It was Republican Gerrymandering, Georgia’s Brian Kemp, and Conservative Caucasian males’ hatred for the female lesser of two evils.

It was an overreaction to an oral in the Oval flashback justification of American youth maimed and dying in Cheney/Wolfowitz forever oil wars. 

It was Hoover’s faith in privatization relegating government to a corporate line item, though losing to FDR New Deal, becoming the smoldering infrastructure of Corporatism:  selling out America from within.

It was failing to follow the money of Nixon’s Watergate to, Government is the problem impregnating Reagan’s fantasy, Welfare Queen.

It was allowing one embittered vengeful paleface Kentucky curmudgeon, cloaked in demagoguery to urinate on America’s, Checks and Balances.

While in 2020 it was young black men, understandably waiting weary for what their grandparents’ Democratic Party failed to deliver, and those Latinos taken in by marketing in-your-face Trumpism, concealing the secret’s in the sauce ingredients:  stir-fried McCarthyism and Mussolini’s thumbs down.

2016 was less foreign hackers in our electoral process and more domestic Jim Crow reincarnation:  closing darker hued polling places, tampering with voting machines, straining the ignored.  Nonetheless we persisted.

Unlike, 2016, 2018 was a course correction, and 2020, a putting away of childish things – not, however, if we delude ourselves into believing America’s ill-gotten swamp gains is a one-man bog.

It is our insistence on habitually basking in the simplicity of simple answers to the complexities of United We Stand.

It’s our post moment of courage, mesmerized by media herd mentality,  convinced by Fourth Estate descendants, to ignore hyperbole proving we could fit the Grand Canyon in the abyss separating real news reporting, from conjecturing talking heads gossiping about a current event or two, to the detriment of information that educates all, on all else.

Greater factual information providers have no Cronkite follower than this, that a standup news reporter wannabe network anchor, lay down his, Breaking News misleading leads, for the education of, just the facts ma’am, leaving showbiz to talented actors, rather than a reality show host hoisted up, by the laziness of repetition, masquerading as news worthy.

2016, 2018, 2020 reveal:  it was us.

Prioritizing beyond mass appeal, what we count and ignore defines us:

  • Glazed over by TV’s stagnant electoral votes, 123,000 new COVID-19 cases hardly noted  
  • 9.83M American COVID cases due in part to super spreaders, not wearing masks
  • 237K COVID deaths due in part to unpresidential criminal negligence
  • 545 refugee asylum seeking families dissected by our 45th president
  • 37,085—37,878 Veterans experiencing homelessness
  • 20 Veterans committing suicide, every day

Proving the only poll that counts, both Democrat and Republican candidates won more votes than their predecessors, which says more about We the Divided than either candidate.

Continuing to succumb to Red States v. Blue States manipulation yields self-victimizing.  Victory, strength and wisdom come from unity of purpose, thinking for ourselves – but for and about all others.

If only we didn’t need to label everything, especially as the .1% of the top 1% goose us with that cattle prod every time we swipe a credit card.  Because we out-number those whose existence depends on dividing us:  pitting Right against Left is the means to end our balanced core values.

It is not radical when both Republican and Democratic Governors defy Trump to protect the integrity of our vote counting process.  What’s radical is allowing corporate factory farms to decimate family farms.

It’s not radical to want affordable healthcare for everyone, everywhere, but denying millions this common good is radically anti-American.

Radicalism isn’t Left or Right, but people centered on the falsehood that another’s good, diminishes their opportunities.

Believing in protecting the planet isn’t radical, but Biblical

Embracing Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ Rights and Gender Equality, is evidence of, Love thy Neighbor as thyself – not QAnon.

Corporate air polluters and Nestle’s attempt to privatize ownership of water is what’s radically inhumane, not society’s working together to guarantee all have clean drinking and bathing water, safe from coal ash and oil spills.

Healthcare pros and caregivers are radical Good Samaritans, but not wearing masks, recklessly irresponsible.

To survive transition and pandemic, best we choose peace over conspiracy and unity over violence, and for individual protection, familiarize ourselves with Public Services’ reality check:  Public Schools, Post Office, Fire Departments, not defunded Police Departments but supplementing them with mental health professionals, united for the collective Public Good is Socialism.

It’s our right to worship a sore loser, but voting is a privilege.

Better we count like,  89-year-old veteran and share in post voting tears of 104-year-old, patriots.

Trump Racism, GOP Cowardice and Climate Denial v. The Impossible Dream – OpEdNews.com Headline & TREMR Staff Pick

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As long as we allow a 24/7 corporate owned Media hooked-up with a human impeachable offense, gluttonously consuming every news cycle, our ability to think for ourselves, declines the opportunity.

However, if we must wear a media post-debate, winners and losers straight-jacket, may I propose, on behalf of, We the People, who care for all:  civil, yet passionate, substantive debate between ten mutually respectful adults, discussing a gamut of solution options, whose policy discussion not only exposed the cowardice of Congressional Republicans swamped by Trump – but also tugged at the prudent, anchor-in-place, Independents- winning the night.

Super heroes and the wealthiest among us share little in common.  The most moneyed connected are those who send the best of us into foreign wars, while tampering with our elections and ignoring gun violence, racism and sexism that remains America’s truest domestic terrorism.

If impossible to see ourselves heroes of our generation, then let us at least prepare a better future for the potential heroism of the next, realizing where we find the exceptionalism of a universally welcoming American Dream depends on where we look.  And it isn’t in the perjury of the Mushroom Cloud weapons of mass destruction inheritors.

If 2020 voters, and non, seek ballot guidance in headline hyperbole, putting America in the hands of its dividers – disciples of Robert Mercer and the Koch brothers – not only the shameless brashness of Jim Jordan, Kellyanne Conway and Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), but the silence of the self-proclaimed lambs, Mark Meadows, Lindsay Graham and Mike Pence, and the treachery of Devin Nunes and arrogance of Mitch McConnell, then…

  • Homeland security will be the euphemism of racists
  • Health-care, a myth
  • Gender and sexual equality sacrificed
  • Privacy absorbed by The Cloud, Alexa, iPods, iPads, Equifax, Student Loan Bankers, cellphones, online surveys, GPS
  • All Tweets, Instagram, Snapchat, bathroom sounds, medical conversations, passionate missionary spooning – stored for marketers profiteering from collusion with Wall Street, K Street and secretly funded politically Conservative political advertising

We don’t need no stinkin’ Russian Johns.  Fingering our climatic devices, we give it away, for free!

People like Dan Coats and Robert Mueller, who seem to those needing quick and simple sound-bites, to be hauntingly hesitant, are patriots knowing their words have rippling legal and moral consequences, and so are examples of thinking carefully before speaking.

Failing to emulate patriots like these and our Founding Fathers, renders us incapable of venturing toward the impossible vision of what should be possible, thus probably failing to achieve what is possible.

Trump has no strategy beyond the last mob chant ringing in his ears, but be assured, his fear of another dawn exposing the crushing truth that, it isn’t just the words he speaks and excuses he makes, but the very life he leads that is the lie – and it’s the devastating realization:  Trump did not make us, nor the foundation upon which he stands.  We did that, and the frequent ferocity of our national political pendulum swing, is proof of our fear of forward moving change – that waits for no person, place or thing.

Mesmerized by the repetitive superficial take-aways levied by talking heads, we play a most reckless game of Roulette with the lives of children already alive in 2019.

Aided and Abetted by government climate injustice and Pharmaceutical and health insurers climate indifference – ignoring foreign children in cages as prequel to an American experience of lost habitat, stench of polluted air, nation-wide Flint-like water and deadly food that Climate Change denial bequeaths all American children.

The leaders who fail to be a shining beacon of law-abiding ethics are the direct result of those of us who fail our highest judgment call for Justice for All:  verifiable elections.

The Presidents of Russia and the United States know who the purveyors of hate, white supremacy and fanaticism are, and they make pawns of them to destroy the freedom of thought a multi-cultural American society produces.

So, The Don conveniently dons himself in the cloak of bigot racism to solidify American fascists who, unable to distinguish between Socialism and Communism, slip out of their bedsheets to dance with Neo-Nazism – because minus an, Out of Many One core, they see only a Blackhole future.

Laws alone are neither solution nor salvation without incorruptible lawmakers.  Our Civil War and first presidential assassination did not defeat America’s inner domestic struggle with racial hate, sexual prejudice and gender bias – as Jim Crow and the assassinations of the sixties proved – because the pain we’re seeking to cure is rooted in the fear that we are not good enough, unless proving ourselves better than those who differ from us.

The real 2020 question is, will we hold these truths to be self-evident:  all are created equal.