Things Fall Apart - It's Time to Put Them Back Together Again

 

On last Sunday the two biggest stories in the media were the evacuations in Kabul and the super storm Ida, crashing into the Gulf Coast. After digesting the news, one might conclude that the threat posed to us by one is much greater than that posed by the other.

While this is undoubtedly true, in general, the media is pointing the finger in the wrong direction. They hype the sudden collapse of the Afghan government that the US spent 20 years trying to impose on that country (attempting to win the hearts and minds of the Afghani people by killing them) and the entirely predictable chaos that ensued, while giving short shrift to the current effects of global warming, which in the lifetime of our children will cause chaos over the entire globe that could possibly dwarf anything humans have ever experienced….

I started this post a few days ago, thinking these stories would be the most significant items for the next few days and then things would calm down. I was wrong!!!

I was in New York in the early morning hours of Sept. 2, when the skies opened up and Ida dumped almost 4 inches of water in one hour, setting an all-time record, and breaking the former record which had been set just 2 weeks earlier. Then came the SCOTUS ruling on abortion which opens the floodgates (pardon the pun) to overturning Roe. Coupled with an earlier ruling ending the moratorium on evictions during the pandemic and the failure of the Biden administration to extend the pandemic unemployment benefits (Is the pandemic over? Did I miss that story?), it appears to me that our leaders in the federal government are not up to the tasks for which they were elected.

Not to mention the fact that the most villainous drug pushers and mass murderers in our nation’s history secured personal immunity for their crimes for a pittance of their ill-gotten fortune.

“These are the time that try men’s souls”. The crises that we are facing require bold action, not tinkering around the edges. The Republicans will do anything they can to delay, obstruct and sabotage any efforts to make headway in dealing with these issues. They are no longer a political party interested in governing, they are a cult. Their goal is to prove that government does not work by keeping it from doing anything to meet peoples’ needs.

The only way forward is to marginalize them (get rid of the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court), to out organize them (2022 here we come) and eventually to consign them to the scrap heap of history.