In the power of a Moroccan madman

Marrakesh. Cooler at night.

We needed to get to the train station and the sign on the Marrakech bank said 46° C. My boiling brain calculated for a second...115°F? Yup. No, no way my ex-girlfriend and I were going to walk two miles across concrete oven streets in that. Time for a taxi.

One problem. We’d stepped out of the bus station a few days before to watch the only taxi in sight be chased off by a crowd of shouting men banging on the windows and throwing shoes at the windshield. The taxi drivers of Morocco were on strike.

I believe in unions and collective bargaining. I believe they’re among the essential tools for the progress of our species. But as the sign clicked up to 47°C I was glad to see a strike breaker cruise past in a beat up old Hyundai. My ex climbed in back, I took the passenger seat, and away we went.

We were at the tail end of two months in Africa and had been on a few taxi rides that were, shall we say, exhilarating? Even among a cast of maniacal rides, this one stood out. Hoping to escape the notice of the striking cabbies, he took vehicular madness to a whole new level of cuts and swerves, traffic lights are only decoration, and wrong way on a one-way street, all at the poor little Hyundai’s maximum velocity. The brain-addling heat can’t have helped (AC? hahaha) and it being the middle of Ramadan so he hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since dawn probably didn’t help either.

In situations like that I’d learned to just sit back and relax. Nothing to do about it. Fretting and tensing up were useless, and they say that only adds to your odds of serious injury anyway. So I just sat back and observed to see if we’d survive the ride.

We did! To my delight, we arrived at the train station intact. I paid him and climbed out into the sandblasting sunlight. The second he pulled away my ex broke out with “What was THAT?!?”

“Probably a new record for crazy,” I laughed some precious moisture into the air. “He was an even worse driver than that guy in Dar Es Salaam...”

“No! I don’t mean his driving. I mean what was the deal with that head wound?”

That whatnow? From my passenger seat perspective I’d missed what she had been staring at the whole time. Apparently the guy had a large open wound still leaking bodily fluid from the torn flesh that stretched across the back third of his skull. Oh. I hadn’t thought to check that before getting in.

The ability to sit back and accept the reality of the moment is essential, both in travel and normal life. But even though I tried so hard to stay away from Trump for this post, and the looming danger for America that’s about to break, this, as with everything else, is caught up in the imminent danger of his presidency.

Because when you’re speeding across Marrakech in a taxi driven by a head-wounded madman, it’s kinda too late to do anything. You’re not going to wrest the steering wheel away from him. And to be honest, I don’t think we can wrest the wheel away from the Alt Right either. Not yet. But this is not a time for acceptance. Not a time to sit back and wait to see what form the suffering may take. This is a time for active intervention.

Oddly enough, Morocco was having elections at the time.
Each box represents a party/candidate.

Because this is not normal. This is not my America. This is not something to just accept. I don’t know how to oppose it, and I ask your help in finding ways, because we as a nation are much worse off than unsuspecting passengers in the power of a skull-cracked whacko. Our lunatic has a cabinet of human vileness for an executive branch, a compliant legislative branch, and a vulnerable judicial branch. Oh, and the nuclear codes but no understanding of diplomacy or the realities of the world today.

So no, don’t sit back and wait. Let’s help each other find ways to do better than that. Complacency is for safer times.

(An easy one, if you believe in the core American values of freedom of expression, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, right to clean water, the government’s responsibility to protect and respect its citizens, all that good stuff, and/or you don’t like when police spray protesters with water cannons in freezing temperatures, and you have a Citibank account (or TD, Mizuho) you can tell them you don’t like what they’re funding. It’s easier than you think to switch banks, and money seems to count more than votes these days.)

Figuring out how to live under a Trump presidency

This is not the blog I was planning to post.

After the initial wave of Denial, the “No way America would ever elect that” came the other stages.

Anger. “Those idiots wanted a protest vote against The System, but they’ve sunk the country instead of making their point in a way that would actually work!”

Bargaining. “If we give him a fair chance, don’t oppose everything, maybe he’ll retreat from his platform of insanity and merely be a Republican.”

Depression. That one occupied most of the last two days. Yesterday I discovered at 1:30 in the afternoon that I was still in my bathrobe.

And finally, Acceptance. “The office of the President demands such gravitas and dignity that he’ll shed his lunatic-candidate facade and become a grown up. He’ll act for the nation’s best interests. Because what kind of monster could have that power and abuse it so flagrantly?”

So I wrote up a nice optimistic post of acceptance and brotherhood. Compassion for the voters who have been left behind by the political system that listens to and thinks about only the wealthy, and confidence that we as a nation are stronger than one terrible president.

These are not the words of an intelligent person

But then I got up this morning and saw that Trump’s choice to head his EPA transition team is a well-known climate change “skeptic.” Climate change (in addition to being agreed upon by basically the entire scientific community and every developed country except us) is something the majority of Americans agree is happening, and is a problem.

So what did Trump do? He chose a climate change denier, clearly showing the same truth that’s always been blazingly clear about him: Donald Trump does not care what Americans think. That’s the nature of a narcissist, the beliefs and perspectives of other people do not factor into his thinking. That is not a president.

And a corollary of that is even scarier. Donald Trump does not care that his violent rhetoric of hatred is dangerous. This is the one of the things that keeps me up at night.

After the Brexit vote, which was far less explicit in its endorsement of racism and xenophobia, hate crimes in Britain rose 40%. That is truly troubling.

And might that happen here? It already is.

Those people who voted for a change from The System chose to endorse, justify, and encourage the racism, misogyny, homophobia and intolerance in our country, and innocent people are going to suffer for it. (And the same goes for those who did not vote, or gave Trump their “protest” vote via a third party candidate in any swing state.)

I’m a big fan of respecting other people’s opinions. It’s one of my core values. But Trump Brand Bigotry is not an opinion. “Mexicans are rapists” is not an opinion. “It’s okay to grab women by the p***y” is not an opinion. They are moral deficiencies. They are dangerous failures of the mind, soul, and character, they are outrages against the ethics and humanity of this country, and I will not respect them. Ever.

I want to preach cooperation and healing. I really do. But this person, this disgusting narcissist is not someone I can cooperate with. Maybe I’ll get there, maybe he’ll prove me wrong. But right now? He is not my president. Democracy is not something that happens every four years in a voting booth, democracy depends on the people of a nation standing up for what’s right every day of every year. So that’s what we should do.

I don’t know how to oppose Trump yet. Smashing the window of a local business as my fellow Oaklanders are doing tonight does not strike me as an appropriate response. But as long as Trump is what he has always been, I will oppose him in every way I can find.

Trump won. Now what? Dear god, now what?

What do you do when your country elects a racist, misogynist, morally bankrupt unsuccessful businessman as president and national humiliation?

Breakfast of the terrified. With yesterday's
tea bag from when the world made sense.

Well. I don’t know about you, but I had ice cream and wine for breakfast.

What next? Beats me. I’m tempted to stock up on canned goods in preparation for civil war. Or just start drinking. My brain keeps suggesting the names of countries around the world not populated with racists, misogynists, xenophobes etc. Or maybe I just give up hope for this country, it was good while it lasted, and laugh while the whole thing burns.

I find myself waiting for an FBI report to come out saying “Russia rigged the election! Don’t worry America, you ARE better than this!”

But no, time to face facts. Trump won. Against all reason or logic or moral consistency, Trump won. So how could this election be a good thing? There has to be a way. Some light of hope. A couple ways come to mind.

Even the Republican Party knows how awful Trump is. If they have any shred of decency left, they’ll oppose him from within. That could reclaim the GOP for sanity. For the principles they claim to support, but have strayed away from. They played a dangerous game when they harnessed the power of racism and ignorance through the Tea Party, and it’s turned out that they were tying themselves to rabid dogs. Will they cut the cord now?

And maybe it will be the salvation of the Democratic Party to lose this election. For too long the Democrats have been a substandard semi-Republican party. Lapdogs to Wall Street, unwilling to take real positions to improve the illnesses of this country, tax cuts and ignore the poor. Maybe now those political minds will wake up to the changed nature of reality. Stop pivoting and start telling the truth. Which would mean actually pursuing honest policies. That is, find their souls and their cajones. (Hint: look to Bernie.)

Maybe we on the left will demand they be better. Maybe We of the Sane will mourn for a moment, then organize instead of just bitching. And who knows, maybe it would even work?

For too long the political class in this country has ignored the masses and treated them like idiots, assuming they would never get their act together enough to threaten the status quo. After all, democracy is not a threat when the elite chooses the candidates. They dumbed us down until we were more focused on American Idol than America.

Remember this one? Paint an orange toupee on that mean fish

But that was their mistake. Because it taught too many of us to vote for the shiny, with no criteria for intelligence or substance. Those on top taught the middle to blame the low, and the low to blame the bottom. But they never expected the masses to demand the lowest intelligence, the most impoverished morality, the (let’s be honest) scum of the nation. The lowest common denominator, which has been the centerpiece of reality TV for 20 years. It’s only poetic irony that the fool they elected is actually one of those idiotic centerpieces.

Yesterday the flawed system collapsed. I would have preferred the tower had tipped over to Good, but either way, America today is different than America yesterday. The question now is what will we build for tomorrow?