January 29, 2017 - Juneau, Alaska. It's been over a year since I have written here. The lost days of 2016... I travelled, I wrote music, I wrote poems, I performed, I worked in justice, I helped on campaigns, I ran for State Senate in Alaska and I won... a busy year. It is a new age, right? So focusing on my activities would seem to fit... But it doesn't. I want to enjoy these moments, but I can't. With a sickening horror over the last twelve months I've watched the worst of 'Merica come out. 'Merica - I saw it stenciled in the back window of a pickup with a "Trump that Bitch" bumper sticker stuck right by it. I guess it's easier to contract, create new words, fake it. It's the new norm. It would be funny, if it wasn't.
I reread that entry from 2015 tonight - written after a long night of driving, as I headed west to pick up my Mother in Carson City and drive her to Alaska where Sarah and I had a wedding party. We'd invited our friends, played music, drank wine, enjoyed time and I left behind that entry. I intended to write here, I intended to act, but I did neither. Like so many of us, I watched a slow train wreck cruise through the American political landscape, wobbling, de railing, appearing to right itself only to derail again, and again. The full impact dawned on me when I drove from Lakeland, Florida to Austin, Texas in late October. My Father-in-law would take his Clinton sign in at night for fear of it being stolen or damaged. I didn't see another sign of Clinton until just outside of Austin. But I saw a lot of Trump - including hundreds of signs and a two mile line for a rally in Tallahassee. I was heading to a reunion of friends in Washington State and, by the time I got there it looked like it might all be over. Compounded error, an angry and misled public, confusion - it all added up to 50,000 people in three states making a choice they'd not made before. We'd done our part: Not fighting back hard enough against a group of Senate charlatans who were more interested in screwing the country for their hollow ideology than they were in serving their country. Denying a Supreme Court appointment for 11 months? Thwarting every effort at stimulus because they claimed to oppose a deficit? The shear level of disingenuous dialogue will be swept away by short memories and new levels of outrage spit at us at ever-increasing rates of speed. Designed to wear us down and wear us out. Us. Those who still care for a constitution and a country. What really does make a patriot?
Yes, I reread that entry tonight, from last year, and now that warning from the past, a warning I ignored myself, has come to pass.
We are on the brink of a crisis, much greater than any we might have foreseen. Federal Courts have said this new Presidential Order that would single out Muslims, hold them against their will - even when they are carrying Green Cards, or Visas, or even holding citizenship - must be stayed. But Homeland Security and the Border Patrol ignore the courts. What are the historic outcomes of this behavior? Trail of Tears. Civil War. Internment camps. Alien and Sedition acts. The muzzling of the Press. We have survived these things in the past, and we have rebounded, but sometimes at enormous cost. Will we this time?
I had promised Matt in Austin that I would begin to write my thoughts when they had crystallized. They are beginning to do so. There really will be more to come because this is not over yet. Far from it.