We often turn to prayer to help us heal from emotional or physical trauma. Prayers can help us achieve inner peace or resolution. Prayers can help us get to a place that allows us to get on with life. In that sense, prayer can be a valuable tool.
But prayer is never a solution to a problem. Prayer is never an agent of change. For example, do you know who was praying the most fervently during the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas? The teachers and the parents of the students trapped in the classroom – and the children themselves. They were desperately praying for God to intervene and save them.
By now, we’ve established a precedent: praying to enact change does not fucking work.
Republican senators and congressmen desperately want their constituents to believe that prayer is a solution. Because they know if people rely on prayer alone, nothing changes. And if nothing changes, these senators and congressmen will continue to fill their coffers with money from the gun lobby.
The only way to enact change is through action. By demanding those who represent us support meaningful and impactful gun legislation. And if they don’t, we must organize, march, campaign, and pressure both candidates and corporations in communities and states where representatives refuse to act.
Rose on tombstone. Red rose on grave. Love – loss. Flower on memorial stone close up. Tragedy and sorrow for the loss of a loved one. Memory. Gravestone with withered rose
I don’t know what to say anymore. I feel empty inside – bereft of hope – drowning in sorrow – swallowed in darkness.
My expectations of humanity obliterated – smashed into the ground under the butt of an AR-15 in the hands of apathetic, craven, and power-hungry lawmakers.
What does it say about our country that slaughtered elementary school children huddled in corners of classrooms, their bodies ripped open, their fragile bones splintered and shattered, their blood smeared on the floor and splattered on the walls, the final minutes of their lives filled with overwhelming fear and terror, and still US representatives refuse to even talk about gun legislation?
This happens over and over and over again. The next school shooting is right around the corner and yet we remain stuck, unable to do anything because the people we send to congress care more about their job than the safety of your children.
The river of apathy that runs through the halls of congress intensifies the futility and hopelessness we all feel for days after a school shooting.
Now we’ll go through the scripted responses from spineless and heartless Republican legislators – the lies about the threat to the second amendment, the outrageous claim that we need more guns to combat this violence, the blame it on mental illness argument.
We’ve heard these responses so many times that we can recite them almost word-for-word.
It feels like the fabric that holds our society together gets more and more threadbare by the day.
Calamity fuels anxiety, and anxiety churns our ideas and emotions into a bitter black butter, clogging the arteries in our brain and preventing us from generating optimistic thoughts.
Hopelessness gathers on the horizon, settling in our collective consciousness.
War, disease, and apathy carry the day, leading humanity down a dark and twisting path, permanently away from light and hope.
But my dog doesn’t sense any of this.
My dog still greets me with smiling eyes and a wagging backside – the same way she did when life was good. She still strolls from the patio to the sun-warmed grass, shoulder-rolls onto the ground, and joyfully wiggles on her back.
Somedays, she’s the ray of light that sees me through tomorrow.
Religious fanatics in red caps and black robes Choice Appomattox and transvaginal probes Beaten and raped, then told what to do Stripped of your voice, no autonomous you
Back-alley midwives with buckets and hangers Forced into action, like fierce Margret Sangers Matt K and Sam A, don’t care what you think Judge Thomas and Barrett drown Roe in the sink
Ejaculate holder, an object, a vessel A fait accompli, with no room to wrestle Your thoughts do not matter; just do what we say Your handmaid’s dilemma, the American way
From pro-choice to no-voice, a Trump court of minions Precedent killing abortion opinions The fetus and soul are what matters the most Your womanly role is to be a good host
America has more than her fair share of fascists and white nationalists.
Some of them even serve in congress.
The vast majority, if not all, vote republican.
Donald Trump is a White Nationalist. That’s why White Nationalists supported his presidency.
When someone says they supported Trump’s policies but not his white nationalist and authoritarian views, its no less ludicrous than a German citizen in 1939 saying they support Hitler’s economic policies, not his views on the Jewish population.
In throwing your support behind a president, you have to look at the totality of the man – not just policy bits and pieces that you can align with and rationalize to yourself and your friends.
As we saw with President Trump, it’s the totality of the man (all of his views and values) that set the tone and attitude of his administration. Under Trump, the party’s platform was built on divisiveness, hate, mistrust, and anger, and that’s exactly what was reflected in most of Trump’s policies and actions.
It’s important to keep in mind that the anger, hate, and mistrust of government and institutions that Trump used to divide America and strengthen his position politically, are alive and well today. Those feelings and attitudes didn’t magically disappear when Trump was trounced in the 2020 election.
Many Americans who supported Trump are simply waiting for him, or the next Trump-wannabee to come along and validate those feelings, while cultivating and promoting policies that weaken our democracy and march us down the path to authoritarianism.
Colin Powel was a lifelong republican, military man, and honorable public servant who understood the danger of authoritarianism. When he saw fellow republicans refuse to stand against a dangerously authoritarian president, he called them out for their cowardice and left the party.
We need more republicans of stature to do what Colin Powell did – speak up and shine a light on the dangerous and dark influences taking hold of their party. And more importantly, we need strong and outspoken leaders in the GOP to provide a roadmap for getting the party back on track to decency, integrity, and basic American ideals. Without a roadmap, we’re going to see the GOP continue it’s downward spiral towards authoritarianism.
The four years of the Trump administration laid the groundwork for dismantling democracy in America. Colin Powel understood that and voiced his disdain for Trump and the political cowards who failed to stand up to him.
If democracy is to survive in America, we’ll need more voices like Colin Powel’s.
That was the note he left. A sticky note, actually. Pushed hard and pressed purposefully onto the upper-left corner of the corkboard in his home office, now spattered with brain matter and blood.
He woke that Tuesday, poured his coffee, sat on his back porch, and listened to mourning doves coo and the distant rumble of the early commute – trucks and cars, potholes and puddles. The wet hum and rattle of life.
He would miss his morning coffee, but not enough to stick around.
His kids were grown. As best he could, he’d advised them about life and how to get on in the world. So, in this regard, his “main” job was done.
He wasn’t all that unhappy or in any kind of pain, just immensely bored and intensely uninterested in the grind and pursuit, of what, he never entirely understood.
For the last several weeks, he found himself muttering, “What’s the point? Nothing changes. It’s all the same shit.”
What’s the point?
Nothing changes.
It’s all the same shit.
I suppose if one chews on those sentiments long enough, a sticky note on a corkboard and a gun in your mouth is where you end up.
He was missed dearly by his family, who stumbled numbly through life for the next two years.
For weeks after his demise, his faithful dog waited for him to come down the stairs and give a loving pat on the head. Whenever the house creaked, or the upstairs plumbing clanged, his dog would get up, walk to the stairs, and wait.
That was perhaps the saddest display of love and loyalty ever.
Republicans all over Facebook are trying to hijack patriotism with fake-ass outrage at an Olympic athlete protesting. These are the same people who turned a blind-eye to a lying ex-president who inspired and praised an insurrection against the United States of America.
“Look at me supporting the flag wavers, the anthem standers, the pledge sayers – I’m a true blue American!!”
Blech!
Posts of proud and talented athletes draped in the stars and stripes, don’t make you “patriotic.”
Posts showing disdain and disgust towards the American athlete who protested, don’t make you a “true American.”
And all the patriotic posts in the world won’t erase the un-American act of supporting a President and a political party that tried to overturn a free and fair election and destroy our democracy. That dark, dank, stank envelops you. It sticks to you like white on rice, and you can’t “patriotic-post” your way out of it.
You want to be a true blue American? Speak out forcefully against the big lie, protest voting laws that make it harder for your fellow citizens to vote, and show your outrage at the refusal to investigate a politically-motivated insurrection against your country.
If we’re lucky, our postmortem shelf-life lasts about 2 generations. After that, the story of us fades from existence entirely. When the collective memory others have of us disappears, we move from mostly dead to truly dead.
We might live a few extra minutes a year in the side glances of strangers who pass by our gravestones (on their way to visit a soon-to-be-permanently-forgotten loved one).
A clever quip on a headstone, and the laughter it generates, can raise us from the dead for a few moments. But honestly, that seems like a desperate attempt by the departed to prolong their existence.
YouTube is a heaven on Earth. A digital preservation of the self that survives after we pass. I believe our subconscious desire for everlasting life is at the core of YouTube’s popularity. We’re the modern-day version of the sculptor in Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias, posting digital carvings of ourselves in a futile attempt to stem the tide of our own transience.
As the final memory of us fades to black, we transition from the warmth of humanity to the cold breathless inanimate. In the end, our blood, bone, and guts give way to the flat and dimensionless world of dusty photos, handwritten notes, password-protected social media sites, and, possibly, a couple of YouTube or Tik Tok videos.
Such is our fate.
The thought of man’s impermanence was so bothersome, we invented the concept of an afterlife as as counterbalance. Entire religions have baked the notion of everlasting life into their concocted fairy tales. Most of us were probably raised in a religion that fostered such beliefs.
All of us were probably told by our parents that grandma and grandpa were in heaven, and one day “you’ll see them again!” I’m not sure our parents actually believed this. It’s more likely they were simply repeating what their parents told them, or perhaps they thought this lie would somehow protect us or make us less fearful. Maybe they were just too damn lazy to level with us. Probably a combination of all of these.
I think this world would be a better place if we were just honest with ourselves about our impermanence, and more importantly, honest with our kids about it, from early-on.
Embracing the truth that life is temporary, would make us value and appreciate it more.
Instead of telling our kids that by obeying a set of rules, they’ll get to live forever, we should teach them to live a life that leaves this world in better shape than they found it — so their children and everyone else who comes after them have an opportunity to live comfortably, without undue suffering.
Instead of lying to our kids about heaven, preach to them about human rights and the importance of equity and for preserving our planet.
A philosophy that embraces our temporary nature and stresses a responsibility to preserve the planet for future generations would go a long way towards improving the here-and-now.
All this nonsense about an afterlife has had a negative effect on our culture and our planet. It’s a good example of how well-intentioned dishonesty can be just as destructive as malevolent dishonesty.
bendingtheneedle 