I’m not ready (yet) to think it’s all over, or that Trump has no chance whatsoever of winning; a lot can happen between now and November. But, some things that many of us saw before are becoming crystallized, and none of this is good for Mr. Trump.
The GOP Platform
A lot is said about republicans and what they do and do not believe. We can consider how many republicans do and do not agree with certain things, but in the end, the party has a platform, and the platform is on record now. I think it’s worth taking a look…and doing a little fisking (actually pseudofisking, there’s no way I’m covering every single phrase in the damn thing, it’s just too long and a lot of it doesn’t warrant comment anyway). Here goes!
Sad days
[Edit: I’m sure this is rough. I didn’t proofread it before publishing. It’s not supposed to be for anybody else’s consumption anyway. Perhaps I’ll go back and fix it, but if this note is still here, that hasn’t happened yet. For now it’s just a first draft, and a hope at some relief that never seems to come.]
The last week has been full of sadness. We’ve had stories of people dying at the hands of what seem to be poorly trained police officers (although I’m the first to admit that I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a cop), and just last night, at an overwhelmingly peaceful protest about those deaths, madmen struck and shot and killed police officers. Officers who were not involved in any of these horrible stories (and even if they were, it wouldn’t justify killing them), officers who were clearly part of the community, and who were there to help the protesters exercise their first amendment right to assemble. There seemed to be no animosity between the protesters and the police. I’m not sure why that matters to me, but I think it makes it especially sad that the shooting happened there, in a place, Dallas, that has a reputation for making it work, and making it work well.
I try to keep emotion out of this blog, in fact, that’s kind of the rule here, but I’m not sure I can keep it out of this one, and it’s my blog…really my diary, so I can break the rules when I want.
Debating the Obama presidency before it even ended
A friend posted this on FaceBook the other day. It’s a blog post written about a challenge that was made to republicans to “Name any meaningful metric that got worse under President Obama.” The post is very detailed and long, and I’m actually a bit jealous that I didn’t write it first. Either way, this friend, the one who posted it on FaceBook, tagged one of his conservative friends to respond. He did it in a nice way, non-confrontational.
Scott, genuinely interested in your response to this. Not posting this as a provocation – I would really like to hear an informed rebuttal from a smart conservative person who plays fair, which you do.
But please limit your response to 20 or 30,000 words. Don’t want feel like I’ve burdened you with homework on 4th of July weekend.
I like that. Scott responded, and I wanted so badly to respond to his comment, but I don’t know the original poster all that well (the “friend” on FaceBook is really the husband of one of my wife’s high school friends who I’ve known for a while, but she doesn’t fall into the list-of-people-I’d-invite-to-my-birthday-party circle, and neither does her husband. For that reason, and because he specifically said he wasn’t trying to provoke, I resisted the temptation to post…and just relieved myself here. So here’s Scott’s response, and what I so badly wanted to say to him after.
Continue reading “Debating the Obama presidency before it even ended”
Talking to a wall
The last weeks have been a test of my willingness to engage, and have put a bit of a dent in my normal fondness for talking with people of a different mind. In all honestly, I usually like having political conversations with different minded people, more than I like talking with like minded people. I find the former so much more interesting, and I don’t learn nearly as much from the latter. The recent conversations about guns have felt different, and many of them are pushing my limits. These conversations have generally followed a few similar scripts. Of course none of these are word-for-word, and they’re clearly written in a way that gives me more time to think about things, and phrase things more articulated (and probably kinder) than I would when I’m trying to respond before somebody else does on FaceBook. Either way, here’s what they sound like…
Rape Culture
The ways that people, particularly women, are mistreated has gotten a lot of attention in the wake of what many (including me) see as a horrible miscarriage of justice. A former member of the Stanford University swim team, Brock Turner, was found guilty on three felony charges: assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated or unconscious person, sexual penetration of an intoxicated person, and sexual penetration of an unconscious person. Late last week, he was sentenced to six months in a minimum security facility, called a “camp” on the facility’s website. No surprise, people were outraged. I was too. My FaceBook feed was (and is) covered with stories about the incident, statements by the victim, disgust over the statement by Turner’s father, who argued that 20 minutes of bad behavior shouldn’t negate a lifetime of him being a good boy (where’s the vomit bag?). On one of these posts, somebody I don’t know asked an important, but complicated question. Something that I wanted to explore, but didn’t feel like exploring so openly, making Hitting Bregma the perfect avenue.
So there’s the question, summarized as follows: what do we do about this?
Contrarian nation
I don’t know if we’ve always been this way, and social media is making it more obvious, but we seem to have become a nation of contrarians. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I think it can be counter-productive at time, and certainly breeds misdirected anger. This may not be news to anybody, but it feels new to me. I spent some time this weekend listening to a family member rant about a couple of things this weekend…things that the internet seems to be ranting about also. Why can’t men and women just use the “right” bathrooms? Why didn’t they shoot the kid instead of the gorilla? On the first one, it was pretty clear that this family member thought that trans women should use the women’s room, and that trans men should use the men’s room, and that it was just a gut reaction to be angry and argumentative for no good reason. The gorilla thing is an other story, that probably makes this feeling I have stronger.
Pursuit of Happiness
I’m a generally happy person in some ways, a bit melancholy and down in others. Some of it depends on the day, or maybe the way the planets are aligned for all I can figure out. I certainly let people bring me down, probably more than I should. I am deeply saddened by people being bigoted and drawing conclusions based on misinformation. People tell me that I have to let that go, and that I shouldn’t let it bother me, but that requires some control over what does and doesn’t make me sad. Control that I simply don’t possess. It makes me wonder if anybody has that kind of control. Can anybody really decide that something isn’t going to make the sad, and then, poof, it doesn’t make them sad anymore? That seems so foreign to me, but a superpower I would really like to have.
The world is going to hell…um, not really
When I talk to people who support a candidate like Donald Trump, they seem almost completely driven by this crippling fear that the world is on fire, that the United States is falling apart, and that Washington is either helping this happen, or not effectively doing anything about it. I have to say that if I believed all of that was true, I could imagine the appeal of a candidate like Donald Trump. The problem is this: almost none of the fears that these people have are rooted in reality. Let’s take a bit to look at some things that might frighten us.
Continue reading “The world is going to hell…um, not really”
Bathrooms and buttheads
I had been mostly ignoring the transgender bathroom issue, believing in my core that it was simply a function of old, misinformed people running the show in the states where this has become an issue. I still think that’s true, but for some reason, likely triggered by a family member posting something on FaceBook about boycotting Target because of their bathroom policy (which may not even be their policy), this has come to the front of my brain, and this is where the front of my brain comes to the page.
Hitting Bregma 