Author: Lake Jackson Citizen

I volunteer as a photographer for our local community theater. I have opinions about politics and believe it should be every American's duty to become informed and participate in the discussion of issues. I began this blog to be able to stay in touch in ways I used to on Facebook. I deleted that account recently and hope to be able to share photographs and information relating to cultural and political events in our community. I am retired after a career in social work and post-secondary​ education.

Day 319 in Coronavirus House Arrest – Watching the Big Kids Play Fortnite

There has been much to see during our 319 days of self-imposed coronavirus confinement. Many were things we thought we would never see:

  • a president attempting to sustain himself in office in spite of a clear electoral loss (there is even a word for it most of us had never heard – autogolpe),
  • his feckless efforts to use the judicial branch first by packing it and then by flooding it with sterile lawsuits hoping he would find appointees willing to advance his case,
  • a significant portion of the population consumed with bizarre conspiracy thinking,
  • and finally, a mob assaulting and desecrating the seat of our national government.

Sitting around in lockdown with not much to do but watch news and drink coffee gives me plenty of time to lie in bed awake at night trying to figure out what has gone wrong in the country of my birth and what we can do to repair it.

The violent invasion of the Capitol by our own citizens just over a fortnight ago was the most jarring emotional upset I have experienced since September 11, 2001. You may say “but it did not result in as many lost lives.” But I would say that the aims of the invaders, if accomplished would have resulted in many more. Extending Donald Trump’s stay in the White House would have extended his mismanagement of a public health emergency that has already, since January a year ago, resulted in over 400,000 deaths. And, even worse, it would have caused the death of a government and way of life many have fought and died to defend and protect.

I used the fusty old word “fortnight” in the previous paragraph purposely because in my late-night musings about the Capitol mob, it occurred to me that the attitudes they betrayed were like those of teenagers who were magically taken inside their simplistic Fortnite gamer world. No longer were they limited by their controllers and broadband speed. They got real world response to their guns and clubs. They roamed the halls and shouted threats seemingly with little understanding of what they were doing.

Of course, some of them knew very well what they were doing. They were the violent thugs from the more organized racist e-gangs who had mobilized followers to do things that were outside the bounds of their usual behavior. It is a well-known phenomenon of adolescents in groups.

My thought was not to condemn videogames. But maybe we should look at the ease with which grown men and women moved from victimless on-line killing of an undefined “other” into one of the most sacred temples of our democracy looking for the very real Vice President and Speaker.

In the games they play night after night, they routinely take out humanoid characters with guns, bombs, and clubs. I have watched groups of teenagers play Fortnite and it was an unsettling experience for me. These were good kids, and they were having no problem moving into this violent world. On January 6, we saw the grownups showing similar ease in moving the opposite direction, from their online dystopia into the real world. Was it every gamer’s dream? The game becomes reality and you get a taste of the power that can come with violence.

Yours Truly Shows Off His Renewed Patriotism and Pride in Having Served

I found it appropriate that our last president (No. 45) was found to be unqualified to serve by a condition that affects heels. I have never made much of my stateside years in the U.S. Army because I actually got more from it than I gave: GI Bill, some great administration experience, and, best of all, a year to live in Colorado. Others gave their lives – whether they believed in the cause or not. Thus I am not inclined to stand and take applause and TYFYSs on Veterans Day. But Donald Trump made me very proud to be a veteran and proud to fly the flag of the United States of America.

Welcome President Biden and Vice President Harris

And

  • Senate President Pro Tempore Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)
  • Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)
  • Senator Alex Padilla (D-California)
  • Senator Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.)
  • Senator Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.)

One & One-Half

THE TWELVE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS DONALD TRUMP HAS TAUGHT ME (Thing No. 1):

That I was privileged to live in America’s Golden Age.

Yes, 2020 was a challenging, no, a horrible year. The Trump presidency wound down toward an election loss to a demonstrably decent patriot who loves America as much as I do. So there will be some better days ahead. But, with so much to be turned around and salvaged, what will our new President Biden be able to accomplish and sustain?

My fear is that you and I, dear reader, have seen the best of America’s days. We are the country that, in my lifetime, liberated Europe, emptied the concentration camps, welcomed millions of immigrants, advanced space technology, outlasted the Soviets in a Cold War and did all these things and still managed to turn out creditable literature, music, and visual art. Government programs provided assistance so that people could eat, become educated and receive a level of health care that, even at its lowest level, was better than people receive in much of the rest of the world.

Our appraisal of history is limited by our place on the time line and by our position in society. When I say we have lived during the Golden Age, I understand that most of the people who were alive at various times in the past probably believed that they were living in their country’s best years. And, of course, that assessment would vary by each person’s place in society. What may look like a golden age to one person, will look like a lifelong descent into hell by someone born without the privilege of color or inheritance. I am sure that my view turns to a large degree on having been born white and in a family where one or the other of my parents was able to work and secure some income most of the time.

But looking ahead to the future, there are so many problems of truly major proportions that it is hard to be optimistic. The climate is changing rapidly. We know why it is changing. We know how to retard and even stop the process. But we would rather gorge ourselves on material wealth, travel and entertainment. In the process, we have attacked the science capable of providing deliverance. Why? For revealing truths that would demand a level of discipline from us that no government was willing to enforce. The inconvenient truths Vice President Gore warned us about years ago.

We have undermined and exploited public education by privatization and “reforms” designed to reward teachers for teaching their students how to test. We have purposely denied health care to millions of Americans by failing to expand Medicaid to take full advantage of available federal funding. And political leaders have purposely led the public to distrust science, the key to so much of the nation’s progress since our founding.

After decades of progress in expanding the franchise, we are watching Republican majorities shrink the electorate through shameful voter suppression techniques. Technology assisted gerrymandering has made it possible for legislators and parties to perpetuate their majorities in the Congress irrespective of the general will of the voters. As a result, the legislative process is usually in a state of gridlock and unable to legislate for the needs of the citizens.

We have catered to the National Rifle Association as they campaigned to put guns and ammunition into the hands of every right wing voter the industry could reach in order to shake them down for the price of long guns and ammunition. The court has provided them an interpretation of the Second Amendment that arms manufacturers have taken to the bank while consumers take to the streets, armed and dangerous, to make the country safe for the nonsense and lies they have seen and read online.

All of these things taken together make it likely that we have not seen the last of DJT and his “base.” He was not the most competent candidate to lead an authoritarian movement. He may trail off into the sunset but the followers he has stirred will find someone else and, sooner or later, they will find someone with more of the skills and planning abilities to move beyond the entertainer stage of development Trump seemed be stuck in. It’s a job my junior United States senator seems to be auditioning for with great relish.

I look to the future of our country with foreboding. There may be another “Greatest Generation” out there. It seems odd to say it, but it may be us they have to liberate this time.

For the last fifty or so years, I have suppressed my pessimism. But my visions of the bad things that could happen have come true more often than not. I wish I had something more than thoughts and prayers to offer the young ones who have to try and deal with the mess we are leaving them. But I am afraid it has come to that.

Thoughts and prayers – and Joe and Kamala. May God bless them in their work.

Two & One-Half

THE TWELVE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS DONALD TRUMP HAS TAUGHT ME (Thing No. 2):

The beauty of the symbols of our democracy, freedom, and rule of law.

I came of age just in time to face the draft for Vietnam. I voted for Lyndon Johnson in my first presidential election in 1964. I was an enthusiastic supporter and was proud of his commitment to the Kennedy legacy in civil rights. I was even more in his camp after he signed the voting rights legislation the next year. By 1968, I had soured on LBJ because of the war in Vietnam. That was the year I was drafted. (Disclosure: Not a war hero. My service was stateside.) Until 2020, I looked upon 1968 as America’s worst year during my lifetime.

It was hard to be in love with America during those times. If you didn’t like the idea of torching villages in a country that had the audacity to opt for social and economic policies different from America’s you were told that you could “love it or leave it.” Super-patriots were waving the flag as if they owned it and they dared anyone else to defile it even as they defiled it themselves. Americans who viewed their citizenship as something other than slavish devotion to the policies of Johnson and Nixon administrations were made to feel like outsiders, even in the country of their birth.

Richard Nixon pushed me farther away from old-style patriotism with his efforts to undermine rule of law and set the presidency up as the dominating branch of government. It wasn’t easy to be proud of the symbols of our nationhood during that era. We came to associate patriotism with the pig-like grunts of “USA, USA, USA” that we heard at the Olympic Games. America wasn’t showing its best face to the world.

Donald Trump, oddly, has restored in me that spark of pride in being an American that lived in my heart and mind before Vietnam and before Nixon. I grew up with all the same mythology around the founding that the super-patriots learned as children. After shedding the emotional appeal of the symbols of nationhood during the sixties and seventies, it gladdens me somewhat to have it restored, although I would have preferred another way of coming home.

Trump’s rule has led me to a warm embrace of our tradition of openness to immigration and the welcoming hand we have traditionally extended to folks from troubled countries around the world. It took Trump’s putting children in cages at the border to help me appreciate the importance of America’s role in the world as one people who could extend the hand of freedom to those suffering the oppression and poverty of dictators. And it took Trump’s literally embracing the flag onstage to make me want to take the beautiful symbol of our union into my own care to save it from his lecherous fondling.

To celebrate my return to patriot status, I have purchased an American flag and installed a bracket on a front porch column to let the neighbor’s know that the folks who had the Biden-Harris signs in their yard are as entitled to fly the flag as are the neighbors who still fly a Trump 2020 flag. And just so they will make the association, we are saving it until Inauguration Day to raise it for the first time on the property.

Who knows? At noon I may take it in hand and march around the neighborhood and sing “Hail to the Chief.” I’m still trying to decide.