Ready to make nice, Minnesota?

All day it's been threatening rain, but no precipitation yet. The same pattern Democrats and very few Republicans exhibit opposing the current regime's asinine initiatives. All threatening talk, no action.

We've grown up through "crisis" after "crisis" and now are watching what once looked like progress erode. Are we among the few who  remember 1968 and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy? How about the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and the Chicago Police Riot, do you remember that?

There were riots and firestorms in many cities after King's killing. The Chicago street were a battleground with about 10,000 protestors. Were the issues in 1968 that much worse than they are today? Did people care more? Have we become so soft that we only protest when it's convenient?

We remember, more than a decade before 1968, reading The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and The Organization Man. Each/both of these were the antithesis of the aspirations most of our friends shared. We related then more to Ferlinghetti, Kerouac and Ginsberg. We still do.

Source: New York Times

That probably helps explain why, as we look about these days, we wonder why the Democrats are not more actively patriotic and the streets aren't filled with protest marches.

We remember that "only Nixon could go to China." We don't believe that "Only tRump can go to North Korea." In each case, the constitutional crises triggered by the individual occupying the office of president, to grasp, manipulate and maintain power, seems largely distinguished by one factor. We drove Nixon from the office while we're, so far, giving tRump too much of a pass. It's time to consider more recent memories: The Dixie Chicks from a decade and a half ago come to mind. They, and we, had issues with another president. That one from Texas. We shared the sentiment they expressed about the president from Texas and renew it for the current occupant of the White House, except we're ashamed he's from anywhere in the United States. (Has anyone checked his birth certificate?)

This particular rant has been triggered by recent actions, by the loser of the popular vote in the 2016 election, at the G-7 meeting in Canada; and the "summit" with North Korea's leader; and the abomination passing for security as his regime deals with immigrants, especially children. Here's how we feel right now, in the words of the Dixie Chicks:

I' m not ready to make nice
I' m not ready to back down
I' m still mad as hell and
I don' t have time to go round and round and round
It' s too late to make it right
I probably wouldn' t if I could
' Cause I' m mad as hell
Can' t bring myself to do what it is you think I should

November 6 can't come soon enough. Minnesota's primary elections precede it on August 14. Please do your homework and VOTE, but for the person, not the party. If you support clean water and a diversified economy, it may not be enough to just surf a blue wave. How long until the ghosts of 1968 have haunted us enough?

America

By Tony Hoagland

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud   

Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes   

Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,   

He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them   

Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds   

Of the thick satin quilt of America

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,   

or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,   

It was not blood but money

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills   

Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were   

Clogging up my heart—

And so I perish happily,

Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—

Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad   

Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes

And I think, “I am asleep in America too,

And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”

And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

“I was listening to the cries of the past,

When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable

Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you

And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you

And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand

Which turns the volume higher?

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