Sidetracked Charley

Hold You Head Above the Crowd For anyone paying attention the last few weeks have been very, very, very stressful. And that is the goal of the other party. Makes us afraid, make us angry, make us give up. Surrender is not an option. Because if we go that route the Christian Right will get the Doomsday they have been planning for. Rapture for them, the righteous white, they believe. And doomsday for liberals. But you don't have to focus on the monsters without zippers. At least not all the time.Though an effort to stay totally away from news makes me anxious. So I ration my exposure. And then the rest of the day I watch reruns of comfort TV, garden, paint, take photographs, and tend to my dog guests. In the days leading up to Nixon's resignation I quit all news and quit all activism and the Republican party and Washington, DC. I hid out in the mountains of New Mexico without a TV. If friends had not called me to alert me of his announcement I would have missed it. There...

The day I admitted total defeat. Sorry Germany for all the accusations I have made about you giving Hitler free reign. I now believe that in any country, in any culture there is a percentage of people that will support a dictator no matter how horrid. The one barrier to a Mussolini, Hitler, or Trump is an awake and conscious population which prevents their election. But once seated at the head of a government it is virtually impossible to unseat them in any way other than an assassin.  Our only defense is that we did not actually elect him. We just didn't prevent Russia from getting him elected. More importantly we allowed two parties to so corrupt the whole process that there were no longer any effective checks and balances. A percentage of our population is still hypnotized by this snake oil salesman, and there appears no way to snap them out of it. That said, short of hiring James Bond to handle this problem, what are we to do? I personally am sheltering in place. The Ne...

Don't separate your life from political resistance. Nadia of Pussy Rant Note: The Russian punk rock group Pussy Rant spent two years in a Russian prison for their resistance to Putin and his government. They are still resisting. From the mouth of babes.  Donald Trump was elected president and I joined the resistance again. I had experience with resistance to Richard Nixon. And to save the mini skirt. Sounds funny now in the same paragraph, but saving the mini skirt was serious. For decades men had told women how to dress. Hems up and down, no white after Labor Day or before Easter. No slacks at school or work. Our protests against Nixon, Watergate, and Kent State were more serious. The peace marches against the illegal Vietnam war and the draft were deadly serious. And behind the marches to save the mini skirt were the fights for the Equal Rights Amendment. It was a very serious time even if Time Magazine made fun of the marchers in mini skirts. And I sometim...

We are always so aware of our ends. And so oblivious to our beginnings. Do our lives begin not at our births but at that moment we achieve a conscious memory? And is that memory always of this life? Can it be of the ones before? And are our lives linear or cyclic? We talk of deja vu ; that feeling of having been here before. What if we have? I don't do dates. Dad died in August. I don't know the year. Mother on the day after Thanksgiving, very early some Friday morning. I can tell you my birth date because I memorized it to put on forms ad infinitum (again and again in the same way forever). These people lived, shared my life and moved on. What matters the exact dates? Mother always said I lived too much in my head. Is there someplace else to live? My reality may not be your reality. I was ecstatic when I discovered philosophy high school. I am clearly an existentialist. And I know I have been this way before. More than once I believe. But at the moment it is not ...