I feel like I am right on the cusp of getting thinks right and then find someone has a better idea than I have. Yesterday I suggested we take care of our citizens who follow Islam and once having finished found the safety pin idea. I am glad some people are more creative than I am. Where your safety pins proudly my friends.
I also feel that my choice of a title for this blog was a little over the top. I was stealing a title from a Steve Earle song mostly to demonstrate that we must begin to work towards steering the revolution that has occurred with the election of Trump in the right direction. We must direct the revolution as it is occurring. Revolutions are tricky endeavors. Few in history have resulted in long term stable governments just as few Civil Wars have. We do not want a violent revolution but we need one to keep the world intact as a Trump Presidency if he commits to all he wants to will be a revolution not the evolution that our form of government lends itself to. Sometimes that evolution is too slow and there are explosions. I would argue that the Civil War was caused in large part because we did not change quickly enough. Trump's election is partly an indication that the last 6 years of governmental gridlock did not allow the government to address the issues that were brewing. The problem with that is while Obama has high approval ratings and Congress low ones the backlash went in favor of the party that controlled Congress. Go figure. I am sure this will contribute to gridlock in the future as the parties continually compete for control by blocking the others programs and never finding the middle ground where most of the population is actually most comfortable. Shades of Gray may have sold well to the public but it is lost in our political system.
Onto to the recent news, People have turned out in large numbers in some cities to protest the election of Donald Trump. Soon they may be joined by Trump supporters who realize they have been had. Already he is waffling on Obamacare although his response on 60 Minutes shows he has not a clue how government works as he said he would repeal and replace it at the same time. Even with Congress on his side which they may not be given his desire to preserve parts of the plan it will take months of wrangling to get such a bill passed. So will he repeal it the first day in office by executive order and is that even allowed? What will his supporters say when he doesn't do that or arrest Hillary. Most of my Facebook friends pro-Trump posts have to do with those two topics even more than the wall or the threat of a Muslim takeover. I guess we will see who is in the streets in the future but it looks like we are going to have to get used to it. Right now the Trump camp is calling them crybabies but had he lost with all of his rigged election talk I am sure we would have seen similar anger but as most of his supporters are scattered in more rural areas it may not have resulted in the same kind of protests.
The protests themselves are generally peaceful but some have degenerated into violence including a city that I really loved on our cross country trip, Portland. This is unfortunate as it gives the incoming group a good excuse to crack down on all dissent, the first step to the dismantling of the American republic. This is how Hitler took power in Germany. We need to follow the wise strategy of Martin Luther King. The peaceful protests he led were often met with force which only further reinforced his idea that the blacks were in the right. Having lived through those times the violent protests against the Vietnam war and Malcolm X's call to arms seemed to harden the opposition. King adopting Gandhi's successful strategy was much more effective in producing change. The current problem is a legacy from the Occupy Movement where the protest are purely democratic to the point of being a whole group of individual actions rather than a coordinated one. The movement needs a leader who will control the excesses and make sure the movement has clear goals and moves in a direction that will achieve those goals. I think that Senator Sanders would be ideal to be such a leader. Elizabeth Warren while she shares his views is now too closely tied to Hillary. Had she come out early for the candidate that she most agreed with rather than sitting on the fence I would trust her more but Bernie has been consistent. Even his support for Hillary was couched in terms of being anti-Trump rather than pro-Clinton. He can lead it for a while and as there gets to be a cadre of leadership types that rise to the top like the NAACP had he can turn it over to others. But we need someone and we need them soon to both keep the protests civil and give President Trump a point person to negotiate with. As an aside I hate saying President Trump. If I wake up in the middle of the night and remember he is President I cannot get back to sleep.
Until the movement gets coordinate please protest peacefully, wear your safety pins and fight the big corporations as much as you can. Until tomorrow peace be with you.
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