Together We Stand, Divided Who Knows?

It's been a while since I sat down and attempted to make some sense of the situation in America today. I have traveled to several countries and most of the fifty states in the United States and never have I seen anything that remotely compares to the present danger we are facing.

You might say, "Willie don't be so hysterical!" But my hysteria is not the problem. The problem is that we have a former president of the United States who after losing. the Presidential Election in 2020 one candidate (Donald J. Trump) set a plan in motion that no doubt had been in the works four years earlier in the event that he lost to Hillary Clinton. The difference between the two elections is that in 2016 Russia did a masterful job of launching a disinformation campaign that targeted the very states that Trump would eventually try to nullify the votes from in 2020. The difference being that in 2020 people were "Woke" to the shenanigans of Russia and came out in droves to prevent this Putin acolyte from serving a second term. 

A man who was documented as telling in excess of 30,00 lies to the American people while serving as their president is no doubt nearing that number as a former president. I emphasize "Former President" because this wannabe tyrant set up a mock Oval Office in his Mar-A-Logo Estate and demands that his employees continue to call him "Mr. President." If that's not enough, some news outlets and political pundits still to this day call him "The President."

My purpose in challenging your thought processes is not to convince you of the danger of re-electing the man but to point out that we as a society have become num to the constant avalanche of misinformation fed to us on a daily basis by those who know the truth but report the lies anyway. I understand that ratings are important to a network and reporting on Trump 24 hours a day 7 days a week keeps them competitive in the Neilsen Ratings but at what cost? I believe it could be the cost of no longer having a functional democracy.

Take a look at this photo. It says, "Never Surrender." This is a mugshot of Donald J. Trump after he surrendered himself to the Fulton County Jail in late August after he and 18 codefendants were indicted by the county's District Attorney Fani Willis for interfering in the vote count in Georgia following the 2020 Election. Not only is the poster depicting a lie it is being sold to citizens of the United States to raise fund for Trum's legal defense.

My focus now is on these citizens of the United States who would be so gullible as to send their hard-earned money (Or, easy earned if you have passive income) to a professional grifter. These people are not all stupid. Some are your preachers, elders and deacons at your church. Some are your neighbors and relatives who say they love this country and only wants what's best for it. Some are innocent senior citizens who would support anyone who claims to be a Republican as long as they totally annihilate and Democrat who has the nerve to oppose the in a general election. You see, the Benghazi Hearings were not to find out the truth but were an attempt to destroy Hillary Clinton. If the Republican Party were really interested in corruption by government officials, they would-be investigating Jared Kushner and the two billion dollars he got from Saudia Arabia instead of worrying about what's in Hunter Biden's laptop.

When a group of people put blinders on and ignore truthful facts right in front of their face, you can only describe this willful ignorance as "A Cult." Yes, a cult where the Speaker of the House of Representatives is a willing participant and just like Trump has no regard for the oath, he took to uphold the Constitution. It now an "Us against Them" as it was during the Civil War when American citizens declared war on American citizen because of a political ideology. Difference being these cult followers have AR-15's and a willingness to use them as demonstrated in the numerous mass shootings and the insurrection on 1-6-2021. 

People around the world are wondering, "What happened to America?" They just like you know the answer. What they should be asking is, "Will America Solve This Problem?" I'm not a prophet and do not claim to have the answer. But, as Abraham quoted from the Bible when he said, "A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand," we have a choice. Will you work to preserve our Democracy or will you with blinders on follow a cult? 

This is my opinion and it won't buy you a $1 mask

I last sat down and offered my opinion on January 1, 2020. Little did I know at the time that three months later the United States of America would be in a state of emergency due to the Coronavirus that has ravished the entire world.

I am not attempting to direct blame on anybody nor am I attempting to offer any solution other than "Listen to the experts." That sounds like a novel thing to do but unfortunately in the age of Trumpism, it's not so simple.

As for listening to the experts, I'm mainly talking about Anthony Fauci who just happens to be the top epidemiologist in the world. The person not to listen to in this pandemic is the President of the United States. Why is that necessary? Here's my opinion.

As a truck driver, I travel to different states throughout the southeast. Most if not all of those states are controlled by Republican governors. Some have accepted the "Shelter In Place: orders while others have flat out rejected any such orders.

The president is openly encouraging insurrection against such orders and has targeted certain states run by Democrats to stage protest against those orders.  You can recognize the adherence to the orders by the number of people you see wearing a mask in public. 

You would think that a $1 mask would be a small investment to prevent the spread of a virus which to date has taken the lives of over 40,000 citizens. Not the case. The majority of these citizens have bought into the idea that the economy is more important than human lives.

In a nation that also thought that owning slaves to do manual labor rather than doing such labor themselves, this idea is not new. Low wage workers are on the front line bagging our groceries, delivering our pizzas, and doing all the jobs that are impossible to do from their homes.

There are people who have bought into the idea that the stock market and their millionaire bosses bank accounts are more important than their own lives.

If you have ever wondered why poor white folk in the South would put their lives on the line so that the white landowners could continue the inhumane practice of slavery, just look around. The next time you are in public and you witness someone openly defying the safety and welfare of the public for economic reasons, this is the "New Confederate." They even have the audacity to bring the Confederate flags out of their closets and attach them to their pickup trucks. What's next, wearing a hood (which now would be a good idea), burning a cross and yelling, "Heil Hitler," Which is interpreted by sane thinking people as being, "Heil Trump."

A new year deserves a new attitude

It's been a while since I sit down and poured my heart out in a blog. But with all the clutter on social media, I've decided to return to my roots and chronicle my thoughts and opinions in a more constructive way.

Looking back on the previous year I noticed that the majority of my posts were in opposition to the current president Donald J, Trump. Even though I feel that my criticisms were justified I noticed a fierce and swift opposition to merely reposting current news articles of the many atrocities this president commit on a daily basis,

The majority of this criticism came from people I considered to be devout Christians. This in itself caused me to do some in-depth investigation to find out why this divide existed among people who would normally be of one accord on any other subject under the sun.

In a nutshell, the problem is the masterful job the Russians did in causing or exploiting divisions in America that already existed but were lurking just beneath the surface. With the help of Trump for President Campaign of 2016, Russia flooded the social media with targeted ads and fake accounts to either discourage people from voting or to vote for Donald Trump. As a result, four battleground states tilted in the direction of Mr. Trump giving him a 77,000 vote advantage in those four states thus giving him the presidency through the Electoral College.

Democrats in the past had relied on just overwhelming the vote totals with so many progressive-leaning votes that the conservative candidate would ultimately be giving a concession speech shortly after the democratic candidate had secured enough votes to put them over the 270 threshold. The surprise to the world and according to those close to the Trump Campaign, Mr. Trump himself, the 270 threshold was reached by Mr. Trump and not Mrs, Clinton. The fact that Mrs. Clinton got three million more popular votes is irrelevant when the design is to win electoral votes. The Electoral College which was the last safeguard in electing a tyrannical president cast their votes in accord with the vote totals of their state thus giving the presidency and the future of our democracy over to a man who admitted himself that he did not expect to win. Once again magnifying the effectiveness of the Russian assistance given to the Trump Campaign.

After the Mueller Investigation and the Congressional Hearings, we enter 2020 with an impeached president and a Republican-led senate who are determined to dumb down the American people to the point that if Trump declared himself king for life with the succession of his throne going to Donald Trump Jr. we would just sit back and accept it as long as the Republican Party remained in power in the House and Senate.

What 2020 will ultimately teach us and the world is that there are more Democrats than there are Republicans. Unfortunately, they live in states like New York, California and the District of Columbia who don't even get to have representatives in the Electoral College thus making them taxed but not represented in this construct we call democracy.

With all that said, (and I could say more) I am relying on the American people to do the right thing and reject foreign interference in our elections. By making this declaration we would be confirming the Mueller Report and support the two Articles of Impeachment voted on by the House and are awaiting arrival in the Senate for a trial. Yes, a trial where the Senate leader (McConnell) and the Chairman of the Judiciary (Graham) have no intention to finding the fact but merely putting on a show to exonerate Trump from any wrongdoings. This is 2020. We have a chance to correct the course of this nation. We have a chance to let our voices be heard. If all that fails we get to do it all over again in November.

Enjoy your day today. It's New Year's Day. We have until November to sort this mess out and make sure the fragile democracy we have is intact when we send the Trump family to Mar-a Logo for good.

Slavery by Another Name "MAGA"

Whether or not you blindly support the impulsive and contradictory policies of the Trump administration or not, you would have to admit that the true agenda of Donald Trump has manifested itself. Trump ran on and some would say won the Election of 2016 by having a “Zero Tolerance” policy against immigrants. Don’t kid yourself, we are talking about immigrants from what Trump described as being from “Shithole” countries.

I had heard about the caravans of immigrants making their way through Mexico from Central America for months. John Kelly and Jeff Sessions have done interviews where they laid out the official policy of the Trump administration as to how they would deal with this inevitable problem. Make no mistake about it, it’s a problem. Now that we’ve concluded that we have a problem, let me offer a few observations based on comments and actions I have observed as this catastrophe of public policy has unfolded.

The overwhelming question is, “How will the kids be reunited with their parents?” I’ve concluded, “Never.” How soon do we as a nation forget, or perhaps refuse to acknowledge that this country was founded on the backs of slaves?

The Constitution that we claim to uphold to this day has a 13^th  Amendment that clearly states that slavery is still legal when it comes to those who find themselves incarcerated. Under slavery when a child was separated from their parents, there was never a provision to have them reunited. The Native Americans who had their children taken away were never reunited. If you can admit that this is true, my question is, “What makes you think that these kids will ever be reunited with their parents?”

With the news constantly covering the plight of the detained kids the fact that Trump is in the process of rolling back the Child Labor Laws is getting no coverage. They repeat the refrain, “What’s going to happen to the kids?” If Trump is successful in taking our Child Labor Laws back to a time when farming was the prominent engine of the economy, it wouldn’t take you very long to surmise that these kids will be a source of cheap labor.

You can call it adoption or whatever fancy name you want to give it but, these families from Central America didn’t give their kids over to be sold (adopted) as slaves. Neither did the parents from the continent of Africa or an Indian tribe that was driven off their land. I choose to call it what it was called from the creation of this country, "Slavery."

Surely this may sound absurd to you but, electing Trump as president was absurd to me. Can we admit that absurdity has a way of becoming American policy? Of course, you can admit that. And if you can’t, well you just might be the genesis of this present problem by helping to elect a man as president who told everyone from the first political speech he ever gave.  You remember, “Mexico is not sending their best, they’re sending rapist, they are bringing drugs etc. etc. etc.”

---

 [WC1]

My People Perish From Lack of Knowledge

Fake News is a term that was introduced into the lexicon by a man who has spent his whole life living in an alternate reality. Norms that have shaped the perception of American citizens have been shattered in a matter of months even though it took centuries to develop those perceived realities.

America was and is an experiment that since its conception has offered an alternative to the rule of monarchs and dictators. The founding fathers dismissed the notion of having a king and instead set up a  Republic that would be governed by the majority. This type of rule is commonly known as a Democracy.

Richard R, Beeman, P.hD wrote an article for the "National Constitution Center" where he said:

If there is a lesson in all of this it is that our Constitution is neither a self-actuating nor a self-correcting document. It requires the constant attention and devotion of all citizens. There is a story, often told, that upon exiting the Constitutional Convention Benjamin Franklin was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was: "A republic if you can keep it." The brevity of that response should not cause us to under-value its essential meaning: democratic republics are not merely founded upon the consent of the people, they are also absolutely dependent upon the active and informed involvement of the people for their continued good health.

When you consider that in the last presidential election there were more people who did not vote as there were people who voted. If this is not disturbing to you consider that the losing candidate received three million votes than the eventual winner. You may ask, "how did he win?" You have asked the million dollar question. It's called the "Electoral College." This system was basically a compromise given to the slaveholding states to give them a more equal representation by counting their slaves and all African-Americans as 3/5 of a human. Yes, they could be counted for the purpose of congressional representation by had no right to vote.

Herein lies the problem in America. African-Americans (and women) were given the right to vote but the powers that be have worked diligently to make their vote of non-effect. Everything from lynching to Jim Crow has been used. The flavor of the day now is Gerrymandering congressional districts. The process went into overdrive by the twice election of the first African-American president Barack Obama.

That election led us headlong down the road to allow the complete antithesis of Obama to emerge. America is a nation founded on racism, genocide, and slavery. We as a nation has never come to grips with this reality and it haunts us to this day. We can occasionally sweep it under the rug but the problem is still there.

Trump masterfully used the racist element of our society coupled with a targeted cyber attack by Putin to defeat all the Republican candidates in the primary and ultimately the most qualified person to ever seek the Oval Office. But, as the Constitution mandates there was a change of power and the new president was seated. The Constitution also put in checks and balances that have been ignored by the party in control.

The only hope for this democracy now is to persuade those hundreds of million voters who didn't vote in 2016 to show up in 2018. How ingenious was it for the founding fathers to put in a safety valve to allow us to correct the direction of the nation every two years instead of every presidential election.

Where's the Governor of Washington, D.C. on the missing girls? What about their Senator?

As you may have noticed from this headline that these are rhetorical questions. I'm attempting to magnify a larger problem and that's the need for statehood of Washington, D.C. I would not have known
about these missing girls until a friend of mine in Houston, TX posted something about it on Facebook.

I clearly understand the rationale of Congress to continually kick the issue of statehood for D.C. down the road because first of all the majority of the residents there are African-American. Once we have agreed on that fact I would have to remind you that the majority of residents in Iowa and Montana are White so what's your point? Are you saying that they are less important because they are Black? Or, is it just routine that when an African-American teen comes up missing that we just naturally assume that they ran away from home?

The point is this, D.C. has a larger number of residents than several mid-western states. D.C. pays more in federal taxes than several of these states combined. D.C. has no voice on a national level which in essence is taxation without representation.

Yes D.C. has one representative in Congress but she can't vote on any legislation, not even legislation that affects her own district. And therein lies the problem of D.C. not being represented by a national figure that could demand answers about the missing African-American girls in that city.

With twenty-four-hour news coverage coming out of Washington you would think that somewhere in the day some coverage would be devoted to this story. There again I got ahead of myself. It's not a story until some credible person makes it a story. It's amazing that one person could tweet a lie which has since been proven to be a lie and we are still talking about it. Four people were killed in London and we got a tweet about it. As of yet, no tweet about these missing girls.

TMZ spoke with police Chief Peter Newsham who says: "With almost every case, those missing have a history of leaving home. He says the number missing is similar to years before, it's just been brought to the light with the use of social media and other platforms to help locate missing people.Newsham says his department's goal is to get to the root of the problem to determine just what causes these kids to leave their homes."

I'm not a resident of D.C. but I can clearly see the injustice that has been perpetrated upon the residents there because of their inability to function as a chartered state in this union called the United States of America. As a result of this injustice, about twelve African-American girls are missing with no updates at all about where or how citizens can help in the investigation.

To me, this should be used as a rallying cry for statehood for that city. Maybe I shouldn't say this but just think, If Ivanka Trump suddenly came up missing in D.C. do you think it would take this long to get some answers?

The Experiment of Democracy is over and Reality has set in

Winter weather has finally arrived across America. Coats, sweaters, and knitted caps are being dug out of the closets. The birds that puke on my car has flown further south and the cat that sits on my hood has found a warmer place to stalk his prey.  This year is rapidly coming to an end and 2017 promises to be the most challenging in American history.

You may wonder why the New Year will offer more challenges than usual and I will attempt to put that question into a realistic perspective. Perspective is one of those things that are subjective to the viewer and unless you are sleep and not staying woke to the changes in our society you may have missed a few subtle changes that are irrefutable.

We now live in a society where the notion of “Political Correctness” is under attack. Facts are no longer accepted but rather merely offer a springboard for someone to offer an alternative and completely opposite opinion. You know the old adage, “Opinions are like a-holes, everybody has one.” Facts and truth are now relegated to who has the strongest opinion on any given subject.

The founding fathers were no different than the leaders of today but with one advantage that has gone unresolved for over 200 years. They strove to establish a more perfect union without defining exactly what that union would look like. They did not have to grovel with “Political Correctness” because whatever they agreed upon was enacted into the Constitution and thereby giving a basis for what we now know as “The Bill of Rights.” It was true in 1776 and it’s true in 2016. There is no law or privilege governing anyone who would subsequently step foot on the shores of America that would supersede that of a White landowners in this New Found Democracy called America. That was their ideology then and that thread of reality is woven into every law or ordinance that has been placed on the books every since.

Yes, there have been times when Blacks, Mexicans, and Native Americans have had their suffrage eased momentarily, but then some vigilant “Constitutionalist” would rise up and remind America that the Founding Fathers did not intend for it to be that way. Now fast forward to November 4, 2008, and we can begin to see more clearly what has happened to this experiment called Democracy.

In January 2009, the 44^th President of the United States Barack Obama tried to fulfill a promise he had made on the campaign trail to put internet connections in every school and every rural community in America. You would think on the surface that such a proposal would go over well in a society that invented the internet and was embarking vigilantly into the 21^st century. To show the importance of internet access and to involve the millennials and get the youth involved, Obama planned a “Live Stream” broadcast to schools across America  and the racist society which was hidden just beneath the surface of Democracy went nuts. I’m assuming you are aware that Barack Obama is identified as being a Black man.

“Political Correctness” tried aggressively to convince us that we were now living in a “Post-Racial” society because after all, “We just elected a Black man as president.” You know how that went. For eight years Obama was obstructed even to the point that in his final year in office his opposition refused to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court. That decision by Mitch McConnell more than anything else the Republican Party had done or not done up until that point solidified the Constitutionalist that, “There is no right that a Black man has that a White man is bound to respect. When you hear the phrases, “Take Our Country Back” and, “Make America Great Again,” don’t be confused about exactly what these people are advocating. Yes, America has made great strides in race relations. Yes, America elected its first Black president. But, the idea of following that up by electing the first woman president was too much for this fragile Democracy to endure.

Rather than to embrace the creed inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, America resorted to its default position on bigotry, racism, sexism and pride. You may ask “PRIDE?” Yes, pride. Remember, the founding fathers intended for wealthy land owners to have control of this Democracy. Who more represented the image of a wealthy land owner vying for control of the hearts and minds of a gullible society who would believe a lie faster than they would the truth?  America’s Constitution which is a living breathing document is solely responsible for
producing and giving us Donald J. Trump.