Speak, your lips are free.
Speak, it is your tongue.
Speak, it is your own body.
Speak, your life is still yours.
See how in the blacksmith's shop
The flame burns wild, the iron glows red;
The locks open their jaws,
And every chain begins to break.
Speak, this brief hour is long enough
Before the death of body and tongue:
Speak, 'cause the truth is not dead yet,
Speak, speak, whatever you must speak.
~ Faiz Achmed Faiz.
I'm not sure I can adequately describe how both terrified and infuriated I feel.
Terrified because I'm old, and weakening, and poor, and alone. My supposed "fellow Americans" just spit on everything I believe, empowering the worst of our nation's past, present, and future. I am confronted with the horrifying certainty that I will be faced with the awful choice between Vichy and Resistance, knowing the gruesome fate awaiting most resistants.
Yet I am so furious I cannot lie down before this. Especially now that the Traitor Trump has promised to use my Army for the greatest treason since the War of the Rebellion, using my brothers to round up other Americans - knowing that they WILL take them up, innocents alongside all the drywallers and berry-pickers and bodega grannies and the layabouts, petty crooks, and assholes, for the "crime" of just being here - to herd into the camps practically identical to those that we built for the last betrayal, to punish our fellow Americans for the crime of being Japanese.
And I'm insane with fury that I'm forced into this, like a man caught in a moving train, for no more reason than millions of dumb fucks couldn't vote for a woman, didn't understand fiscal reality, or were terrified that the cutie in the corner booth was sporting a cock under her cocktail frock.
I don't want to have to face down angry cops. I don't want to have be arrested, gassed, beaten. I don't want to risk jail, or worse, for standing up for simple human decency and political sanity, and I'm viciously enraged that millions of people have forced that on me.
But I don't see how I can not do all those things, run those risks, and live with myself at the end of the day.
And that's terrifying.
You might find this useful. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/17/how-to-survive-the-broligarchy-20-lessons-for-the-post-truth-world-donald-trump
ReplyDeletePluto
A commentor (Tig) at Task & Purpose said this..."Trump tries to invoke the insurrection act and it immediately gets tied up with lawsuits. A shitload of officers resign their commission. The ones who don’t obviously stick around wait for further guidance. At least half the Governors invoke their own loopholes to not send their states National Guard anywhere for that purpose. A bunch of enlisted sit around staring at their phones and talking shit about the universe and consuming massive amounts of energy drinks. MAGA people get a hard on. Liberals argue the menusha of the whole thing till they are blue in the face. Everyone tries to shame each other into thinking like them. Trump says a bunch of stupid shit. Enlisted still have no fucking idea what is really going on. No kicking in doors in east LA ever happens. Gangs never go away (duh!). And, yeah, American history is a strange thing." Kind of walked me back off the ledge, but Murphy and Hanlon have not yet entered the chat.
ReplyDeleteMate, if all else fails, you're more than welcome in Australia.
ReplyDeleteI've looked into this and it is surprisingly hard to move to Australia for more than a few months.
ReplyDeletePluto
It's the same almost everywhere. I couldn't emigrate to Canada, either; they won't accept retirees. I'm stuck in this fucking looney bin with these idiots.
ReplyDeleteDon't feel too badly about that. The "Canada" of American imagination is a mirage. Up until recently, it was nearly a mirror image of the States. Horrors included. The graveyards outside the ruins of their "residential schools" were at least as large as ours. But recently, the place seems to be going downhill at least as fast as we are, if not faster.
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