This Week’s Musings and Meanderings
Four more installments of Cle Elum Memories are on tap for the next several days (one will roll out each day) but I still want to write, so here we go!
I have really enjoyed “beaming back” in time to recall what turned out to be more than 57 lingering memories of my years in (and following) Cle Elum. What doing so revealed to me, though — once again — is how isolated I was. Not geographically, but socially and emotionally, despite everyone’s best attempts to “socialize” me! (They succeeded well enough, though, as shown by what I did with my life after I left Cle Elum!)
And because I was so isolated, I invented the kind of worlds I wanted to live in. I wrote Roy Rogers and Star Trek stories in abundance, stories where the characters were united in common cause. Sure, there were bad guys to contend with in my stories, but they always lost, bit the dust, or “grew up” and learned the errors of their ways by the end of each tale. And I desperately wanted real life to mirror those parameters. I wanted “bad” people to recognize the truth and start flying right! (Alas! Bad people don’t believe they’re bad. They believe they’re 100% right! They rationalize their cruel beliefs and behaviors.)
I was an idealist. I still am.
That’s why I resonate perfectly with something Mark Twain said when he was in his 70’s (as I am now):
“People call me a pessimist in my old age, but I’m not. I am an optimist who did not arrive.”
Back then and during subsequent decades (as the feminist and civil rights movements evolved), I truly expected that by now — fifty years hence — we would have resolved (educated out of any remaining “Neanderthals”) the racist, sexist, misognistic, xenophobic, white supremacist tendencies that have been part and parcel of the United States and other empire-minded nations. I envisioned a more peaceful, IDIC-type world, where everyone celebrated Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. Especially after we saw images of our beautiful planet taken from space! I thought everyone would “get” that we’re all in this small, delicate lifeboat that has no real borders (other than oceans) except the ones that bloody, genocidal empire-building created.
But today, the U.S. is closer than it has been since WWII to embracing Naziism!
Although most of our fathers and mothers (or grandfathers and grandmothers) went to war to defeat Naziism during WWII, there were enough Nazi sympathizers back then to fill Madison Square Garden and to keep fleeing Jewish refugees from coming to our shores.
And since the 1980’s we’ve been systematically re-indoctrinated into camps of “Us Versus Them,” them being anyone who is not white and male supremacist. As one of them (a transgender, decidely ANTI male white supremacist individual who advocates for marginalized Americans of goodwill in every category), I find what’s happening right now devastating. I don’t see why everyone isn’t having a conniption fit at what is happening politically on the far right!
Fortunately, most Americans Have the Rar Right’s Number
Based on the pushback (politically) that has been happening since the last election (when Trump incited his followers to insurrection based on the Big Lie that the election was stolen) and on the recent proof that FOX promoted lies that it knew to be false to curry favor with its viewers and keep its ratings high, most Americans who have their eyes open and are paying attention (and thankfully there are a lot more of us who are actually voting than there are of Fox voters/viewers) have the far right’s authoritarian, white supremacist number and are having none of it.
Almost every special election held since 2020 has gone overwhelmingly to Democratic contenders. The far right has awaked a sleeping giant, so their ideology is on the ropes, and they know it. so, THEY’RE DESPERATE, WHICH MAKES THEM EVEN MORE DANGEROUS… which is an additional reason to VOTE THEM OUT OF POWER.
As an eternal optimist, I believe this nation’s ideals (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, all men are created equal, promote the common defense and welfare/wellbeing of all citizens) will survive this latest attempt to emasculate them. I believe the present generations will not stand for authoritarian Naziism to become its tragic epitaph.
