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Citizen Responsibilities

drawing of man sitting on bench in a park reading a newspaper. A U.S. flag is flying behind him.

As far back as elementary school, I remember teachers telling kids that we, as citizens of the United States, had responsibilities to ourselves and the country. I know that a lot of people would prefer to avoid politics and political topics altogether. I get it. Politics is frustrating, angering, annoying, and at times boring (ever try to read a policy proposal? I highly recommend them if you have insomnia and don’t want to take any drugs). But we as adult citizens have a responsibility to keep this country running as well as possible, oppose bad policies, and most importantly, we have a responsibility to pay attention so that we are fully aware of what is going on with our politicians and institutions. It’s our responsibility to pay attention and stop them from going off the rails.

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Freedom of Speech (Again)

Going back over my more recent blog posts, I find that I’ve been writing a lot about freedom of speech and that’s because it is, and has been for at least three or four decades, under ever-increasing assault. And the war on free speech has become far more open and vociferous over the last ten years or so. Make no mistake, “war” is the proper term here. I am a free speech absolutist.

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Videoing Your Tantrum

cartoon screaming toddler

X and Instagram are filling up with videos posted by women showing themselves screaming and crying in a car (usually, sometimes in their bedrooms or living rooms. These videos have several things in common, not the least of which is the toddler-level ranting, crying, and name-calling displayed by the women (and some men) in the videos. The primary commonality is a theme revolving around the statement “this election result means I’m now shaving my head, refusing to sleep with or date men, and not getting married. Ever. So, there.”

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Veteran’s Day

Bald eagle with flag background.

I am the daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter of military veterans. My father fought in the Cold War and Vietnam, his father was a colonel in the Air Force in WWII, including “working for Pan Am” building air fields in North Africa. Hitler declared war against the U.S. and voila! all those Pan Am pilots were suddenly officers in the U.S. Air Force. My great-grandfather was an officer in the Spanish American War and a balloon observer and pilot in WWI. My uncle was an officer in the Navy, and my dad’s and his cousins were in the Navy and the Coast Guard. There were so many active duty military on my dad’s side of the family that my mother, a Quaker , had to request no uniforms at their wedding. And even with that, my mother is descended from Quakers who broke away from the Arch Street Meeting in Philadelphia, so that they could fight in the Revolutionary War, contrary to the Quaker tenet of being conscientious objectors.

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Sackcloth and Ashes

Skeleton in "Scream" pose

The wailing, gnashing of teeth, and the donning of sackcloth and ashes Wednesday morning continued the Democratic trend of disparaging your opponents, questioning their morals and intelligence, and generally promising retribution for the heinous crime of disagreeing with them. It’s very clear that while the Republicans learned the harsh lessons of the 2020 election, the Democrats have not. Of course, Biden won in 2020 so the Democrats just knew they had no lessons to be learned.

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Squirrels, Raccoons, and Government Overreach

Fred the raccoon and P'Nut the squirrel napping together

No, I’m not equating government bureaucrats with rabid squirrels at a rave (that’s totally unfair to rabid squirrels). Yes, I am going to talk about the unnecessary and tragic demise of P’Nut the squirrel and his adopted brother, Fred the raccoon. As most of you probably know by now, a woman in Texas (yes, I’m sorry to say), got a stick up her ass about the Instagram videos P’Nut’s rescuer was sharing. She apparently decided that this was somehow an affront to all that’s good and holy in these United States. So, she filed multiple complaints with the New York state Department of Environmental Conservation regarding P’Nut. I am not privy to the details of those complaints, but I assume she claimed animal abuse or some such. Because a couple of nights ago, the NY DEC decided to RAID the house, with a SWAT team (as one does when confronting squirrel rescuers), tearing it apart (yes, they did, you can read the accounts), and kidnapping P’Nut and Fred, subsequently getting both animals euthanized.

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Let’s Talk Fascism

cat looking thoughtful with caption the definition of politics is from the Latin poli, meaning many, and tics, describing a blood sucking pest.

There is a lot of sturm und drang (storm and stress – thank you, Goethe) these days about how a Trump victory next week will usher in an era of fascism in America. In other words the left is desperately trying (and has been since 2016) to convince the American voter that a vote for Trump is a vote for a particularly nasty form of an authoritarian government. But if you ask people what exactly defines fascism, they can’t really. Oh, you’ll get all kinds of answers, but what it really boils down to when you parse out responses is “I don’t like what he says, and because I know that I am a true and moral progressive, he must be a fascist.”

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Fix It…

A pile of buttons that say vote and 2024

Kamala Harris’ campaign slogan is “A New Way Forward.” I find this fascinating because it implies that the last almost four years are NOT the correct “way forward.” And that’s not even getting into how much that slogan matches the slogans put out by the Soviets and the Chinese Communist Party (that’s a story for another post). Harris and her campaign are trying to convince voters that the problems of the last four years are… checks notes… Trump’s fault. Yes, they are trying to blame a man who hasn’t been in office since January of 2021, for everything that has happened since he left office.

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