My usual complaint applies today, “Too many thoughts, too many issues, not enough time to stop and write them down.”
Robert Sapolsky, neuroendocrinology researcher, professor at Stanford..
Why have my posts dried up? It’s that dreaded time of year. I’m gathering my tax information for my tax preparer and that time of year for me is hell! In a few weeks, it will be spring, and I’ll have spring in my step and feel all sexy like the blossoming trees outside, but right now, I’m temporarily (I hope) depressed and deflated. It’s mental with me and leads to horrible procrastination in doing my civic duty and gives me a remendous desire to watch golf on TV, instead.
I’m not complaining about the actual taxes. It’s the calculating them. Please, please, double my rightful taxes but take away the bookkeeping, the paper piling, the reviews of investments, and the deduction tallying, I’d be thrilled. (Well. maybe not. It depends on how much that is.) But it’s my feeling, and that’s what counts the most according to Robert Sapolsky, a professor at Stanford University, specializing in the brain and primate behavior.
I like and encourage the stop-and-think-about-it way this talk between Sean Carroll and Robert Sapolsky went, not so much on any single “Wow!” issue. I wish my children would listen in the right, constructive way to this. They wouldn’t have to believe or accept all of it, just listen with an open mind, like when I go to one of their Deaf Leopard concerts, admittedly with earplugs installed.
Sean Carroll, top theoretical physicist at Cal Tech.
See the video below. It’s rambling but insightful about how our brains are preset in ways we don’t realize. Professor Sapolsky caution us about our skills at rationalizing, skillfully coming up with reasons that are not truly the right neurological explanation. It’s feelings, already planted their the past history of my “animal,” not truly logical, objective thinking. That leads into the question of whether we have “free will.” I marvel that Sapolsky doesn’t seem to realize he’s irrationally rationalizing a few things that he posits. But he’s smart.
I accept that Carroll goes along with some of it but notice he’s encouraging us (or himself) to take our conclusions a certain civilized, modernly Western moral way, which I, too, want, but why. We have an implicit drive toward morality, as if that ought to be automatic with everyone. Do other animals have that? Not a complaint, just an observation.
The video is wide ranging, elite, and liberal. It encourages skeptical thinking, to me the way church sermons should also go.
In a recent interview on Amanpour and Company, impeachment managern Stacey Plaskett, one of the capable lawyer-accusers we watched on TV at Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, covered many of the transgressions perpetrated by the beleaguered former president and his insurrectionist supporters on January 6. That was the day the radical supporters attacked legislators and others including Trump’s own Vice President, on Trump’s orders. Plaskett and Michel Martin commiserated as they took the impeachment trial apart, including the cowardly inaction by so many Republican Senators. It didn’t matter how much evidence was presented. Many of the Republican Senators, while pretending to listen at times, had decided how they would vote in advance.
In the interview, their points were well-taken, but, unfortunately, they didn’t analyze why the Republican Senators decided not to be honest in their assessment. I’m disappointed that this lack of cause-and-effect analysis happens too often even on liberal PBS. We don’t go after the people euphemistically called Trump’s base and how they got that way. It’s not simple to do, but somebody should be talking about it and working on it. I presume the Brookings Institution and Bloomberg L.P. are doing that, but useful output remains invisible to me.
Some senators certainly are inventive in rationalizing why they avoided accountability of the president for his traitorous incitement, excuses to make themselves seem closer to sane to Democrats yet fully acceptable to Trump’s radically right-winged base. However, I do wish someone would go after the disinformation sources that foment the far-right anger, namely FOX News, Sean Hannity and his ilk, and the whole Murdock media empire and its monopoly on the idle minds of entire states.
The question is not whether Trump did something bad enough to warrant an impeachment trial. Everyone already knows he was guilty.
Those Senators were doing what had to be done to keep their jobs, to pander to Trump’s base. The question of right or wrong was not in the equation for them. If the base wants wrong things, they don’t mind voting for wrong things.
This is a lot of words to get to my point. Why doesn’t PBS, CNN, NBC, or CBS go after the Murdock Media with its discordant philosophy against liberality? Diverse opinions may exist in their hearts. They cannot honestly be expressed without suffering the fate of staunch conservative, Jeff Flake.
The question is not whether Trump did something bad enough to warrant an impeachment trial. Everyone already knows he was guilty. The question is how to release the poor conservative Senators from the prison built around then by their radical Sarah-Palin style constituency.
Of course, even if I’m correct, there are no quick or even feasible solutions. The cat is out of the bag. Uneducated, credulous people love it that more than just a few of them are conspiracy-theorists. They don’t feel alone anymore. They have been given permission to be stupid. A whole TV networks is feeding them 24/7 politics that is so one-sided and unrelentingly jingoistic that it will just seems normal to listeners.
The U.S. Senate, sticking to their guns, even after being threatened with guns.
Am I stereotyping? Perhaps, but my opinion of the Republicans involved in acquitting the former president is not high.
To be clear, when I say the Trump consituency, I’m not speaking of all Republicans. I am not speaking of traditional seriously analytical, anti-spending, small-government, free-trade, pro-corporation Republicans who once sat in these same Senate chairs. However, today I personally know too many far, far right, seemingly otherwise normal people who sing the praises of Hannity and the other conspiracy-wonks at FOX News and have swallowed what they hear week after week on that station. I’m speaking of the Bible-thumping, home-schooling Christian Nationalists, the conspiracy theorists I run into in my California neighborhood, redneck Alabamans, hunters and gun owners who have bought into the NRA’s anti-gun-regulation meme, in short, the radical evangelical neo-Republican line. This group has increased in size and loudness alarmingly in the last twenty years, far out of proportion to the intelligence of their often self-centered arguments.
The solution, that’s what’s hard.
I fear Democracy may not work anymore with the advent of unregulated social media. It’s too easy to corrupt it with bad info. (China may have the right idea.)
The internet morphed from an advanced tool of our 1980s military and P.H.D. research at great universities into a nightmare world rife with false memes. Now this tool spreads loud and copious professionally created disinformation, wingnut complaints, artful deception, infantile praying, empty slogans like “God bless America,” and too few real solutions.
Weaponizing of media with the goal of decreasing thoughtful skepticism, denigrating science, increasing credulity, planting religion in secular events, making a religious state with small-minded focus on God hardly discernable from Iran or Saudi Arabia has been made too easy by technology. These days, most anyone can make explosive devices that are easy to conceal and too easy to get into the wrong hands. The internet is too powerful in the wrong hands. Such a country, run by Trump’s base, surely will be anti-progress and will be run by people unlike our founding fathers could have envisioned. Trump’s cabinet, such as Bill Bar and Mike Pompeo, and Trump’s pander-to-the-base Supreme Court Justice picks are perfect examples of these Bible-thumping Trumpers.
Now, radical left-wing progressives and BLM supporters have hopelessly muddied the water with their total rejection of color-blindness and embracing black victimhood, also amplified by the internet. To my way of thinking, Martin Luther King’s idea of not considering the color of the skin but the content of one’s character is a good idea. It would lead toward fairness and more equality for today’s hardworking disadvantaged, the law-abiding ones, I mean. Victimhood leads black people to a black hole.
It is hard to have a lot of hope, speaking of us people not inside that prison of ignorance and hyper credulity of America’s far right. The Trump base reveres anti-establishment, autocratic, double-down speech that appeals to knee-jerk emotions and populous sentiment instead of intelligence. Popularity, after all, is what makes Murdock the most money. That seems to be what Murdock and FOX News want, popularity among the lowest, even if it destroys the good, fairness-seeking, always improving society we Americans once had only a few years back.
Why do I spend so much time on this blog? I have at least three pretty good answers to that question that work for me.
The first reason is I’m vicariously talking to my two Chistian daughter. Maybe it’s a reheearsal, a dry run. I mismanaged my life enough to allow my two children to grow up attending my wife’s Christian church, and they got brainwashed. So some of these posts, I’m hoping my children will one day read and take them to heart, especially the parts that will help them to convert away from religiosity and the forces of Christian Nationalism, moving them toward healthy nature-based secularism. Actually, they are fairly secular Christians. They are not Bible thumpers in a public way, which is a good thing if one must be religious.
The second reason is 9/11, the nineteen religious zealots involved in hijacking those four airplanes and making a spectacle of the collapse of the World Trade Center, killing 3,000 innocent people, some of them Muslims. In one fell swoop, they made flying anywhere five times as difficult with new, ultra-strict screening. Not to mention the stressful ratcheted up tension all people in the world now have since that sunny day morning in New York City because of extremist religion-inspired terrorism. When my children were getting sucked into the their church-going ways, I asked myself: “What’s the harm?” However, in my own earlier life I have asked myself, if heaven is so great a place as they seem to think it is, why doen’t everyone, especially the destitute, constantly starving or horribly injured for life, why don’t they just kill themselves and go walk the streets of glory? No one sane ever did this, to my knowlege, so no one takes religion that seriously, in reality, right? Well, 9/11 prooved that idea wrong. People do get imprinted with their beliefs, avidly love skipping life, going directly to heaven, and will go there in a minute if they are zealoous enough. Believe it or not, they are sane. It’s only logical if their religion is right. We can’t really live in that kind of society in which they don’t mind dying and taking others with them to get to heaven. People often really do believe of what their parents taught them, no matter how strange.
The “Four Horsemen of Atheism,” Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennet, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris,” together in the same room, a rarity.
My third reason is probably the main driver for continuing writing post after post, even after I’ve convinced myself and most readers. That reason is the stubbornness of blind belief of several of my Christian relatives who display their ignorance every time they go to church and pretend to believe what is taught there, pass it on to their children, and try to sell their “good news” to others. I keep thinking I will find a silver bullet that would clearly show them the wrongness of their thinking. Maybe if I keep watching FFRF’s Ask an Atheist or old Christopher Hitchens videos or pushing back against pro-Christianity Discovery Institute videos on YouTube. Maybe I will hear so much of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Annie Laurie Gaylor that I will effortlessly channel their skills and mastery into my own arguments, and believers hanging around with me will suddenly get it, that science is correct, in contrast to their 2000-year-old religions that are not.
By now, I know that this is a fool’s errand. Most fundamentalist are stuck and won’t change. I keep my hope of learning how to break through, anyway, not completely sure why, perhaps an underlying streak of unextinguished optimism. In a hundred years, I’m sure we’ll have overcome the ignorance. Except ignorance and parental training are powerful. Alas, there will always be populism to overcome.
Oh, well. You win some, and you lose some.
As a distant fourth reason, perhaps some recent converts to atheism who miss the hymns in church and feel alone as an atheist in your neighborhood will feel less alone as they see what other real people really think in their hearts. What you see in nature and the world around you is real and the truth. Belief in magic and the supernatural tricks of religion, for which evidence is thin or nonexistent, provides no comfort you can’t achieve ten-times over by appreciating your present conscious state. Experiencing reality, as your complex and wonderful brain allow you to do, is quite a privilege that worms and rocks and grass cannot have.
It’s all so sensuous, the view, the sounds, the tastes, the smells, the interactions with others. Yet, as Lawrence Krauss explains so well, we are all made of stardust. Mere atoms, really, cobbled to gether by a little energy, a chance emergence of simple germs, carved to shape by dangerous environment and enemies and vast, unimaginable stretches of time. Discover the reality of our universe outside your house, traveling the world (after the Covid thing), and travel millions of light years away through a telescope. Exist. Live. Celebrate. Enjoy it. Nature is amazing.
TOWARD BEING A BETTER SALESPERSON
If, like me, you are looking for ways to convince people who are lost in a meaningless religion, I recommend watching the video below. I’ve seen it before, but I counted at least ten or eleven subtle and interesting points in it I hadn’t thought of for a while, would be showstoppers to the religious people I know if they would only listen to it with open ears and an open mind. It’s probably a repeat for you, but it’s good to have some of these candid points on the tip of your tongue for your next discussion with a believer or in letters to you Senators and Congresspersons. I listen while I wash dishes so it’s relaxing while I’m accomplishing something else that’s also a necessity.
You may have noticed what I write about is non-topical subjects, my commentary coming long after it’s a popular issue. For one thing, I like variety. I like orignality and being off the trail. My essays here may seem an eclectic collection of subjects about religion or atheism with little overall emphasis or focus. I like to wait for most of the data to comes in. A lot of the pundits shoot from the hip, just to get clicks. Being a former quality engineer, quality is more imporant to me.
I figure, if you want to increase your anger and get into the daily wrestling matches of ideologies, there are plenty of places on commercial social media designed to gain maximum number of viewers. I gravitate toward what is not talked about but still important, not the tactical sweat and dirt in the daily fight but the strategic points of what we should be doing. What will be the topics of importance in three years? That and waiting for the dust to settle. But the reality is, I am affected by the daily fights. The short term skirmishes are hard to avoid. We are all thinking more politically than we used to, much more, and we all now have a voice in the din we didn’t used to have. The motivation comes through embracing recent advances in technology and feeling a need to speak out against bad ideas.
I’ve always tried to make it orignal writing. Anybody can repeat talking points. The content ought not to be short slogans, sound bites that don’t solve any problems.
But I find that there are so many topics, urgent ones these days, it’s easy to fall way behind. I lean toward the arguments of Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Sam Harris, and Coleman Hughes and may use their works to illustrate my own views. I consider them honest liberals, though some will say they’re conservative in regards to racial issues. No, they aren’t. Real liberalism describes the truth, not some ideology or fixed set of talking points, not some vague thing called identity politics.
It’s hard not to be involved in the day-to-day discussion (outrage), especially when you see your country being swept out from under your feet, such as the violent people threatening lives of elected public representatives at the Capitol and the President openly encouraging it. This change reflects our diet of 24/7 politics, talking points, and the echo chambers of our silos. I don’t like the change, but we seem to be stuck with it. I don’t think the best thinking, decisions, or actions come from people who are ultra angry and stirred up emotionally.
I am about to launch a series of posts about race, a topic much in the news and on the street. But Pearls of Atheism is a blog about atheism and would naturally contain discussions of science and humans’ knowledge advancement and their conflict with religion. But knowledge is being bad-mouthed. Science is denigrated and ignored by the religious. Sadly, after all our recent advancement of knowledge, religious beliefs are devoutly held by more than half the people on Earth. These beliefs supported by scriptural models of behavior and laws of ancient vintage, which include a lot of poor examples of morality and unnatural magic acts. Unbelievably, they still include actions of nonexistent spirit-beings like angels, devils, powerful spirits called gods, unchangeable things like good, evil, heaven, hell, and a raft of spirits called souls of dead people.
I like to think I strive toward the side of truth. I want to maintain an attitude of being open to debate, discovery, new data, or new knowledge because I am a scientist by training and inclination. So then, although the title Pearls of Atheism seems to beg for complaints about religion, the foundation for my writing here is, in fact, the search for truth.
Religion is a foul ball in the game of searching for truth. While racial issues may not seem a religious question, wrong-headed solutions that ignore facts and data have recently been driven by emotion and mob-think, not careful thought out and calmly discussed alternatives. So my articles are essentially about truth. I attack religion so often not because I want to deprive believers of the placebo effect and the comfort of their habits, but I think the truth helps in life. I feel they should not be teaching their children things that are demostrably false. That’s not good for children. We don’t solve real problems by praying. It takes diagnosis and work.
With science, the total answer is never quite done, but we may know ninety-eight percent of the answer, and so all that remains are refinements that often happen with the passage of time. The scientific method of seeking evidence and data, serious-minded peer review of the hypothesis under test, and comparing the science to reality over time often clarifies ideas that previously were muddy. The result: proposing models of reality that align with the past and present and predict well the future.
Philosophy sometimes will be included in the essays to address the emotional and subjective side of being a human in a largely human culture. Under its umbrella are morality and ethics, and the pursuit of happiness, hopefully with recognition of the right of other people to pursue their own happiness, which includes avoiding emotional pain, unnecessary physical pain, and suffering.
The purpose of life ought to be addressed as should, for example, the best way to philosophically approach a person’s increasing decrepitude with age and death that many people fear, and we all eventually face. There could be good-faith debate as to how to optimize the relative benefit to the human condition on Earth as a whole. I suppose it ought to include the role of religions in achieving human survival, past and present. It’s important how best to compete with other humans and animals effectively to improve productivity of the least productive and reduce poverty among the under-educated.
Martin Luther King (“color of skin shouldn’t matter, but content of character”) and four current skeptics of the popular BLM craze, folks with a preference for data.
While I don’t expect to spell out what we each should do to have the best (or better) life, I may make suggestions toward that end. Most of us have ideas for improvement in the art of living. An easier thing to do is to call out or at least question things that I think work against human happiness and add to suffering.
I find that writing it down helps me think it through. I do recognize there are other views. My knowledge of many subjects is incomplete. However, I proudly admit I’m an elite. I think I’m often more correct than the average or most common answer. Our country’s elected politicians, with rare exceptions, have been from the ranks of the elite.
Starting in on the Third Rail
Now, back to race. I am a white man. When I look in the mirror in the morning, I may make judgment on my wrinkles and bald head. I might need to shave, wash my face, or fix my hair. But never do I think, “Hey, I’m white. Isn’t that cool?” or the opposite, “Isn’t that sad?” I don’t think anything of my whiteness or my blackness. It’s nowhere in the equation. I don’t think that’s unusual or “bad.”
As in the famous movie setup in which a white man suddenly wakes up black and then humorously or, with great difficulty and consternation, tries to figure out how to approach the rest of the day, I’ve tried to imagine how life would be different if I were black. I don’t get very far. The difference on the surface seem slight or non-existent as I proceed with the thought experiment. But real differences do come into play. I would choose different color of clothes to go with my skin tone or in keeping with neighborhood fashion. The neighborhood would likely be poorer. Mostly African American or mixed populations of people would be out working the yard, playing, and walking on the sidewalk, not mostly white or light brown Mexicans like in my present neighborhood. The poorer neighborhood might make me feel disadvantaged as might my empty wallet or low level of savings and investments.
As a white person imagining this surreal situation, it seems the biggest disadvantage I would feel is the level of education and the moral quality of friends and neighbors, too many of whom would have drifted toward crime, negative emotions, and success-snuffing practices like drugs for a quick high. On the other hand, popular black social norms and acceptance of blackness as something cool may make me love the people around me that would not happen in a spic-and-span white neighborhood, everybody in bed by nine. The forces are complex and not all in one direction.
In some sense, survival requires excellence as well as striving to get more excellent.
I tried to picture myself as black in a black family. As that black man, do I wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and say to myself, “Dammit, I’m black. My great great great grandfather was a slave.” I never thought that would be among my most important things to solve daily. I think if I was black in real life, I wouldn’t say anything about my race looking in the mirror just like a white man wouldn’t. Or would I? I don’t really know. As victimhood gains traction, maybe I’m completely wrong. I suppose for every black man it could be different. But I think it would be sad if race were always on my mind or just barely percolating below the surface. Frankly, I don’t think it is for most black people in America. But I’m not black. I don’t know this.
I did just tell you what I felt about my whiteness, and I didn’t feel much. That’s what I think black people should think about their blackness. In other words, I agree with the “colorblind” philosophy. Not that you never notice your blackness or not notice that you may be in a black cultured neighborhood, but in public endeavors in our present white-turning-brown capitalistic civilization, I would think that treating all colors (all races) of people the same would be an important maxim for everyone to strive for. Yes, black lives matter. But that’s true for Asian American, Native North American, European, Mid-Eastern, and white American lives. It’s obvious. White Supremecists and too many Christian Nationalists are exceptions, it’s true. But should the exception decide the wording of a supportive-of-black-people slogan?
I get it that blacks have a disadvantage. They have to work twice as hard to get half as far, as Condi Rice has written. I see that as a big issue that I hope society improves on. If there is current injustice due to race discrimination, that needs to be called out and corrected if that is not already in progress. It happens more than I can know because I’m not in your shoes. I get it, and some complaints are surely justified.
BLM, reparations, white guilt advocates.
I hear the complaints. Slavery and white masters are to blame.
What I don’t hear is anything about the improvements in the black condition brought about by past amendments to the constitution, black and white activism, Abraham Lincoln’s huge gamble, invisible diplomatic efforts, and sacrifice of northern and southern lives, getting a better nation in the Civil War. Then there’s Lyndon Johnson’s successful civil rights law changes in the 60s. There’s ongoing self-reflection and fairness improvements by whites (non African Americans).
With fogged up glasses on, the complainers seem to expect perfection. That’s not going to happen. Not among white nor among blacks. Do I expect we’ll have no more police shooting of blacks unfairly in altercations with police? Of course not. Why would anyone? I expect the opposite. Perfection is not feasible. Yet the complainers seem to expect perfect fairness or there will be more riots.
It’s silly to expect perfection according to Coleman Hughes. Yet media and the loudest BLM advocates pretends to expect suddenly all tribal (a.k.a.,racial) should be immediately neutralized. Unfairness will happen. That blacks are alone in their victimhood is also not true. Do white people get killed unfairly by police? Yes, only more so, according to Glenn Loury and John McWhorter.
Nor do I hear honest good-faith discussions aimed at finding center-ground solutions. I don’t think the solution is to make whites as miserable as the complaining blacks say they are.
Nor would I ever, in my most twisted dreams, think of telling my black child, “Son, sorry to inform you that the world is out to get you and hold you back. Whitey is something you’ll have to fight your whole life. Police are bad. Today’s America is not trying to improve things for you.” I would never instill such negativity at the beginning of life in my child, such direct, rock-solid victimhood. And I see that happening every day in newscasts, instilling the victimhood card, often by black mothers, as a too-ready excuse for blacks to not prepare or compete well in our capitalist country or to be unreasonably paranoid of police.
I hear next to nothing about black culpability in these so called racist police events. Why are they being bothered by the police in the first place? That question is often glossed over. Yes, some of the cops are racist. It would be odd if none had racist views. But not the percentage popular media or loud black voices would have you believe.
Discuss with me any black culpability of loading the jails with African Americans disproportionately. How can that be fixed? Or fathers leaving families. Or blacks murdering blacks. Or not graduating from high school. Or blaming fellow African American friends for “acting white” because they strive to achieve in school and succeed in a real career, “a whie career.” On the surface, it’s ridiculous: don’t prepare to compete and then complain when you end up poor.
As I noticed the black power movement in the ’60s, the great strides in reducing Jim Crowism in the South (and North), the Civil Rights Act won in 1964, and onward to more inclusion of black faces on TV, the “plight” of black people in America has been improving. Black success stories abound in everyday black families, keeping up with the Jonese while sipping fine wine, without sipping anyone’s spiked Kool Aid. Inspiring models abound in show business, and sports. There is near universal awe of Tiger Woods and his golfing skill. Serena Williams. Condoleezza Rice, Susan Rice, a great president, Barack Obama, and our present vice-president, Kamala Harris. No progress?
I see quite a few African Amerricans on You Tube saying they don’t agree with the victimhood narrative being sold to whites and blacks by activists riding the BLM wave. “What institutional racism?” These normal people of color say to themselves, “This is not the 50s. Racial bias is not any longer in our laws. Sure, there’s the occasional accidental slur or obvious bigot. It’s not great to hear, but I can read, I can work. People aren’t perfect. That’s true in all races. Fat people get slurs, too. Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m fine. I can take care of myself.”
I’m not saying the disadvantages are completely leveled. But I hear and see too little blame or remorse for obvious misbehavior, to little corrective action for the negative direction in life suffered by unsuccessful people of color that only they, themselves, have the ability to recognize and fix.
If we don’t compete, being poor will be the result. That’s capitalism. That’s competition. It’s not a free ride. All animals have to compete. In some sense, survival requires excellence as well as striving to get more excellent. The strongest lions eat well. The fastest antelopes successfully run away and survive. In both cases, it takes work. That all seems obvious, but is it ever heard on the street? No. Failure is the fault of society and whites.
References:
Losing the Race by John McWhorter
“Two Race-related Episodes in My Life,” Jan 17, 2021, Pearls of Atheism (this blog) by Richard Burns, for examples of my attitude.
The cautionary tale of my previous post, “Capitol Insurrection and Christian Nationalism,” the part that mentions homeschooling in an unflattering light, reminds me of when my carefree heathen wife, due to the “Born Again” motto if the mid-70s pushed by CN (Christian Nationalism), suddenly turned into a religious wacko. It seems a born again believer down the block took my wife to her church, and she swallowed the bait at the that evangelical, nondenominational church, hook, line and sinker. No wonder CN was pushing the symbol of a fish to represent a believing follower of 2,000-year-old myths. You’d have to have the intelligence of a fish to bite. (Oh, that wasn’t nice.)
Unfortunately, in our firstborn’s fifth-grade year, my wife’s new church initiated a Christian school, third through eighth grade.
I asked the person who used to be my sound-thinking, sweet wife, “What’s wrong with public school that’s free, not $1,000 a quarter?” She complained about a particularly inept scene at my daughters second grade when the public school teacher momentarily lost control of two misbehaving brats.
Figuring she would soon snap out of it and to keep peace in the family, I capitulated. I now see it as a big mistake, a bad event for our marriage, setting up early indoctrination for both my innocent daughters. But life is strange and imperfect.
After a few weeks, I found my daughter’s homework and daily school lessons discussed at the dinner table to be increasingly questionable and biased toward spooky action at a distance––the details I don’t remember. Given my ingrained skepticism about the possibility of the fables in the Bible, e.g., the Earth, stars, animals, and people made in less than a week, had me wondering about the quality of that expensive education. I told my wife I wanted to audit my daughter’s class in action. So one day, I did.
As I sat quietly in the back row and watched, I discovered my daughter’s teacher was teaching not just fifth grade but also fourth grade, each separated into different sections of the large, under-lit classroom. I found it difficult to keep track of which class she was talking to or if it was both classes at once. I couldn’t see how fourth grade was staying busy when the teacher instructed fifth grade and visa-versa. It seemed obviously negligent, but I took it no further with the school.
I don’t recall hearing the teacher saying specific things I knew to be false so my complaints to my wife were about the apparent chaos of two grades being taught at once, the teacher doing double duty and the students doing half duty. Also, it being church sponsored, I figured it must have been encouraging belief in the malarkey in the Bible. I just didn’t see it that day. I seem to recall someone telling me there was one hour of chapel (every day, I think).
School is not for chapel; church is not school; Bible study is not an education. I was pissed.
. 1975, me and my daughters. They were trusting. I would never teach them things I knew to be false. I didn’t actively do that, but letting my wife do it had nearly the same effect. Tolerant Christians is how they turned out, not like their mother, thank goodness.
“But this is a school. They are supposed to be learning facts and how to find out things, real things, and how to think on their own, aren’t they? Sunday school for those who insist on spreading nonsense to their kids, takes place on Sunday. That’s excused by society. Sunday is for God and His Son’s magic.”
(I don’t think I used exactly those words. I wish I did. But it sure was what I was thinking.)
My thoughts to the contrary were pooh-poohed as unimportant detail by my wife.
I didn’t insist on my daughter immediately returning to public school like I should have––one of the big mistakes in my life–– as my wife had that moment of faulty discipline in second grade at Latimer Elementary to point to. She was a dominant woman, and I became the hen-pecked husband, both of which became more apparent with time.
Even worse, I peacefully attended weekly church to ostensibly try to get myself reconverted––I knew that to be hopeless. I would end up keeping the peace and attempting to sing the bass part in the hymns, an adjunct to my song writing. I was seriously trying to honor our marriage vows which I took seriously, bending over backward to avoid a permanent split. My wife had many attractive features, but she was deaf and blind to my occasional mild pushback.
I was a good, hands-on father, my kids will tell you. My wife liked and appreciated that. But I had many interests, which included making family home movies, golf, folk guitar, song-writing, outdoorsy adventures such as white-water canoeing, and tap-dancing. Importantly, I was trying to maintain my job as a high tech engineer working on and, unfortunately, holding up progress on the important Space Shuttle missions about to start. I was on a short leash at the time as my product was in trouble. Yes, not everything works smoothly in Silicon Valley.
Our problems were many-fold––not simply religious––but my wife’s enthusiasm for evangelical, fundamentalist Christianity significantly contributed to our eventual divorce and my children’s consequential temporary estrangement from me, extremely stressful for all of us.
Toward the end of the video in the previous post, Chrissy Stroop mentions HSLDA, which I had never heard of, a pro HS (Home Schooling) organization that encourages home-made, unregulated education. I gather it is an anti-education group through encouraging growth of homeschooling because of religious complaints about science and secular subjects taught in public schools Shocking to me, it adamantly opposes any standards, any minimum requirements, or any regulation.
I felt my kids’ educations in a Christian school were somewhat equivalently uncontrolled, but in fact, the church school had high academic standards as you might expect from a suburban California school in an upper class neighborhood. In poor white neighborhoods in the South, I’d expect less parental worry about academics, hence, less emphasis on useful secular subjects, especially difficult subjects like math, science, evolution of species, or explanations relating humans to apes.
A generation later, I saw the lack of quality during homeschooling play out before my eyes over a couple decades with my second wife’s extended family and how one of them took home schooling into her own home when I knew this religion-obsessed mother had no teaching instincts. Rather than instilling curiosity about the world, she smothered it at every opportunity with verses from the Bible. She knew nothing of decimal fractions and algebra and avoided science altogether.
I watched her pretty child grow up in a desert of practical knowledge or diverse socializing experiences. The mother-teacher, I suspect, shouted enough to make any time spent learning unpleasant. I did not witness it first-hand or see the text books she used, possibly from HSLDS, so I am making some assumptions, but I know she had a hair-trigger temper and was not too bright. I couldn’t believe she thought her teaching school subjects was better for the children than a trained public school teacher doing it.
One sweet innocent child of hers grew up into a mother whose main medicine when her children took ill was to pray. She seemed to have no other tool to cope with the real world out there. She asked for prayers on Facebook and tons of people (some of them patronizing, no doubt) said they were praying. It was sad to me, as the sick child suffered. She got more desperately frightened since the illness continued. In her heart, I suspect, she know it didn’t work. After all, it’s frightening to be in a war with no ammunition handy. On Facebook, I tried subtle secular suggestions, but she insisted her kids only see religious instruction and didn’t trust the latest science, shutting me down in a huff.
I could say, “I told you so to her mother, now the grandma, but I don’t. They’d gang up on me. Yes, they’re Trump Republicans, too. I’ve been to their conservative Church of Christ often over the decades, singing hymns, no instruments allowed because they weren’t mentioned in the Bible. They sing parts well. I continued being nice and “understanding.” It’s really sad because we are bonded as a long-standing family, and I loved the kids since birth.
My own instinct is to tell children things that I know to be true. My secular help is unwanted, so I am without satisfying options. It’s tough world.
Without religion in the world, life for everyone would be so much simpler and human suffering would be much reduced. Imagine life without Al Qaeda, ISIS, Pakistan-India mutual animosity, and the false news of Christian Nationalism. But maybe humans of that ilk would look for some other way to mess it up. I’m told religion is dying, but it sure makes a lot of noise in the process.
References:
A) For more about the powerful tsunami of forces driving Christian Nationalism as a pattern of thought and everyday living, see my November 30, 2019 post: “Ch 4. Later Indoctrination––Influences from Groups Outside of the Family.”
B) As a reminder of what Christian Nationalists say about their movement, this is from its website. The Christian Nationalist Alliance affirms the following:
Jesus Christ is the Son of God and savior of man.
All life, from conception until death, is sacred and the right to life is paramount.
These United States of America were founded by Christian men upon Christian tenets. Freedom of Religion is not an excuse to divorce the American culture from it’s origins. We will defend our rights as Christians in all aspects of American life.
Marriage is an institution sanctioned by God between one man and one woman.
There are two genders and all attempts to claim otherwise are an attempt to further pervert the glory of the Creation.
The family is the cornerstone of Western Civilization and should be protected from government intrusion and manipulation.
Every American has the right to practical self-defense and the right to bear arms is as important as any of our other liberties.
Capitalism is the best system for social development and Christian Charity the world has ever known. It must be preserved and promoted as the solution to the social and economic problems caused by Communism.
Strong borders are a necessity for a safe and prosperous society.
Islam is a heretical perversion of the Judeo-Christian doctrine and must be recognized and treated as a threat to America and Western Civilization as a whole.
While these ideas may be familiar with Americans who live in its churchy culture, the list should be deeply alarming to anyone who thinks evidence is important, who seeks to know the truth as determined by repeated, reliable observation and data, and who think misinforming children is bad. We ought to be shocked that humans in an affluent, educated Western culture in 2021 still believe in 1 or 3, or who say they think 6 is correct, and then in the same breath insist that the mindless government or a political party take over control of a woman’s body, what she does in her bedroom, her personal health decisions, her complicated family planning as if the government could know what’s best for her better than her and her doctor, seriously jeopardizing her physical health and economic viability, not for a year but for eighteen years.
Skeptics of the dangers and power of the Christian Nationalism threat to our Constitution could profit by a look at the video (below) showing FFRF’s Andrew Seidel and his analysis of the ties between Christian education and indoctrination and the proximate fight for our country’s existence at the hands of extremists. The militants who threatened the lives of our elected congressional representatives and Vice President Pence, at the behest of his boss, President Trump, were influenced heavily by the movement that includes the Christian Nationalist drivers described in Seidel’s The Founding Myth––Why Christian Nationalism is un-American.
Chrissy Stroop’s book.
Among the insidious drivers that will work under the radar far into the future, to my considerable displeasure, is HSLDA and its movement for facilitating and encouraging home schooling. The movement pushed homeschooling, regardless of the qualifications of the parents pretending to be teachers. Christian schools, likewise, are part of the alarming growth of this steam-roller-like threat to rid our country of the wall between church and state.
Discussing the attack on the Capitol with historian and author of Empty the Pew; Christian Alt Facts, Chrissy Stroop, Andrew Seidel said: “… as we learn more and more about this attack, like the Christian Nationalists influence and affiliation of the insurrectionist, the threat gets clarified and it sharpens. Over the weekend, there was a New Yorker release of footage of the assault … reporting on the violent edges of the Trump movement of the scenes inside the Capitol with the insurrectionist’s prayer [on the commandeered podium, which closed with] …
‘[body of prayer not shown] …Jesus Christ, amen. Amen!
Amen for this opportunity to stand up for our God-given unalienable rights. Thank you, heavenly Father, for giving the inspiration needed to these police officers [some of them to let us in, against …] the Communists and the globalists; that this is our nation, not theirs.’
‘Thank you divine creator God for surrounding us with the divine on the present white light of love, protection, peace, and harmony. Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government. We love you and we thank you, in Christ’s holy name we pray.'”
Prayer to their Christian god by insurrectionists.
A side comment by Seidel––he stands willing to debunk the notion that our founding fathers wanted this country to have a specified religion or that they were all Christians. “One of the reasons that we started imprinting, ‘In God we trust’ on our paper money in 1956 was they wanted it to sneak down behind the Iron Curtain on our currency. Seidel added, “One thing that struck me was how comfortable the insurrectionists were when they were doing this prayer in the chamber that they were trespassing on.”
In Wikipedia I found that the motto “In God We Trust” was first instituted on America’s two-cent piece by congress late in the Civil War, presumably as a salve to heal and comfort many people who must have thought God had disserted them. The phrase was not anywhere to be seen at the time of our founding ninety years prior to that, and, in fact, the phrase thumbs its nose at The Establishment Clause in the First Amendment.
Chrissy Stroop said, “Well, there’s a whole lot going on there. There’s a lot of evangelical rhetoric that is very recognizable from my childhood. There’s also a lot a rhetoric that is somewhat new but now very much used and very common among white evangelicals such as this whole globalism thing. Sure, there were some George Soros’s conspiracies going around conservative Christian circles in the 90s, but I think not nearly to the the extent that they are now. This is certainly what the culture-warring evangelical subculture that I grew up in has become. Look at all those folks taking off their hats and raising their hands as if they’re in worship, some more than others, and some look like they’re probably from more Pentecostal or charismatic type churches. Even in the self-described nondenominational churches that I attended, a lot of people would raise their hands when they were singing in worship.”
The following is from my autobiography about a time when the race riots were rampaging in Watts in August 1965 illustrating how I felt about race in those days.
Working My Way through College at a Service Station
Casa de Petrol was a large Chevron station owned by Casa de Cadillac across the street in Sherman Oaks, California. We had several dependable attendants-salesmen, characters I could write a book about, like Ralph, the sarcastic mechanic, who was the expert under the hood, like Mike Altheizer, a good-looking, fast-talking sales guy from Missouri who pumped gas like me but spent most of his time installing new tires and batteries that he had just sold.
Mike spoke with a pleasant back-country drawl, was in his mid-twenties and movie-star handsome. Marty Sanders, not as good a salesman but specializing in lube jobs, was another Missourian who was Mike’s friend from his old neighborhood outside of Joplin. Mike was often in the service bays, changing oil, installing a new battery, or tires. We got commission on what we sold, so his take-home checks were larger than the rest of us made. He had once gone steady with Susie, the blond with the convertible. They had broken up but were still friends.
Missouri is practically in the South, so Mike was good at kicking back and telling stories. He said that while he was growing up back in Missouri, his father sold compost and plant food (and still did) at his store named Altheizer Fertilizer, a rhyme that got a laugh from most people. Mike was married, and although he was till young, it seemed like he had worked at Casa de Petrol a long time. I admired his ease in socializing with most everyone and his sales ability, which must have given him a good wage and job security.
From his redneck stories, I gathered that he and his friend, Marty, strongly approved of the Ku Klux Klan. That bothered me like it would have bothered most suburbanites in California, but he was proud of it. I was too shy and afraid for my job to disagree aloud.
The Watts Riots broke out in August of 1965, the poorest blacks violently reacting to purported police brutality near downtown L.A., twenty miles away from Casa de Petrol. Except for some of the workers at the adjacent car wash, there were few if any black people in our area, so it didn’t directly affect us much. In the middle of August, the night skies glowed an angry red-orange just over the silhouette of the Hollywood Hills and Griffith Park. It was an eerie, unsettling, and out-of-place sight, looking like a war in progress only a stone’s throw away.
A few days after the outbreak, during a spell of slow business, Mike and Marty, talking conspiratorially in their Missouri drawls, were shooting the breeze. What Mike said shocked and disgusted me.
“Shit, back home we’d think nothin’ of popping a few niggers just to thin them out.” “Really?” I said. “Yes, that’s right, ain’t it, Marty?” “Shit, yeah. You got your gun in the truck today? Hell, we ought to take us a little trip downtown tonight and see if we can’t bring about a little law and order in California.” “Great idea, Marty, let’s cruise down there and see what’s goin’ on. We can knock us off a few of them niggers while we’re at it.” “Yeah! Put ‘er there,” Marty said, giving Mike a high five. I was beside myself with surprise and anger at Mike and Marty, but I didn’t let on. I was too chicken. I think it was mostly racist bluster. I don’t expect they ever went near that side of L.A.
That was the first whiff I experienced firsthand of anti-African American notions held by some whites, especially obvious in the South. Apparently, racist talk and activities went on where they grew up without much pushback from neighbors. I strongly suspect in conservative, white rural areas of California, one of the most liberal states in the union, many people still in 2020 lean the same racist direction. It’s too bad. To be clear, I did not sympathize much with the violently inclined black people who were destroying their own businesses and houses in Watts, believing they should find a less destructive way to protest and improve things.
Later that evening, I glanced south-east at the hills again, still set in sharp relief by the fiery red-orange glow that lasted nearly a week.
Comments from My Editor
Recently, I asked my editor, who, like me, was white, what she thought of that part of my book.
She replied: “Considering the current racial tension in society, I agree that the discussion between Mike and Marty is extremely relevant to your story and speaks to the open-minded person you were then and are today. I like that you explained racial tension via their conversation rather than your personal opinion–show vs. tell. It also makes the Watts riots more understandable to a younger reader, perhaps even introducing the event to them for the first time. In my opinion, yes, you did it justice. A friend of mine was among the National Guardsmen who were sent to L.A. during the riots as a precaution so I especially liked the way you set the mood by creating an image with words at the end of the fourth paragraph.”
Another Racial Incident a Few Years Earlier
Another incident having to do with race which I included in my book was our trip to visit an East Los Angeles black church. In the 60s (maybe 50s), there was a white Methodist church (near Watts, I think) in an old neighborhood called Normandy. A few blacks had started going to the all-white Methodist church there. A big argument among the elders ensued when too many blacks began attending the church. Quite suddenly, over a few weeks, there was a mass white exodus from the church and it became a black church. It was headlines in the L.A. Times and on TV.
Anyway, a year later, after the hubbub settled down, my dad took me to that controversial now black Methodist church on the east side. It was strange to me, a poor, rundown neighborhood, street parking only. I found the service was quite entertaining, though, especially when loud shouts of “Amen,” “Say, yeah,” and “Hallelujah” and other unrehearsed things were added to the preacher’s soaring rhythmic rhetoric during the sermon and other parts of the service. It was highly memorable, reminiscent of the olden days in the South, as I pictured it.
A few people turned their heads and did a double-take when we walked in, but not many. Anyway, we sat down, listened, and joined in on the hymns we knew. The preacher even welcomed first-time visitors, a veiled reference to us, but no one paid us any mind after the first minute. In a way, it was brave of my dad to sort of refute or, perhaps apologize for, in his quiet, powerful way, the 100% white flight insult.
Not sure why my dad took me, but it was like a trip to a foreign country. Maybe he wanted to find out if I would rather not go. I think he thought it an important lesson or tacit explanation for me in tolerance to show he was interested and tolerant of blacks. For one thing, we lived in an all-white neighborhood, and our school in Burbank had no blacks. Yet my dad worked for L.A. Water & Power, reading water meters all over L.A., likely sometimes in mixed and all black neighborhoods.
Visiting Normandy Methodist that day illustrated to me there were other races than what I saw daily, and they were still okay human beings. Different cultures were all around us. He may have been saying, what was the big deal? They are nice people just like we are, quite normal, and they’re cool to be around. Why did the whites leave? Dad didn’t lecture or talk much about it on the way. With him, actions were more important than words.
I liked the adventure of the visit and had to try not to laugh during the free-style service. I probably would not have liked it if our church started having those loud exclamations in the middle of our sermons. It was eye-opening and an important event for me. Probably, the experience helped me empathize with Martin Luther King, his style, and his anti-segregation movement later on.
Time for me to eat a little crow. Please pass the salt. Scientist reserve the right to change their minds. I’m a scientist.
When one considers deterring future stunts like Trump’s call on “ordinary citizens” to storm the Capitol and pre-emptively prevent the thug from running in 2024, convicting him with a successful impeachment ought to work better than backing off, which might have been read into my previous post.
All along, I felt the attackers, namely anyone scaling the walls or entering the building illegally or disobey lawful orders by police need to be held accountable and thrown in jail. On the face of it, they are insurrectionists and traitors, every one of them and, if guilty, need to be hung or get maximum sentences with no chance of future release or pardon.
Yesterday, quick and efficient, Senator Feinstein (or her staff) sent me the following reply to my “letter to Biden.” (See the previous post.)
Sen. Feinstein; email reply to my letter; 1/15/2021: Senator Feinstein’s response to my cc: of my message (“letter”) to Joe Biden. She’s been a good, hard-working senator and responsive. Here it is:
“He must not be allowed to remain in office, causing more harm and endangering more lives.”
Dear Mr. Burns: Thank you for contacting me regarding the 2020 presidential election and the unprecedented attempts to disrupt the peaceful transition of power. I appreciate hearing from you, and I welcome the opportunity to respond. In the midst of a pandemic that continues to shake our nation, more than 150 million Americans cast ballots in the 2020 election. The results of the election were clear: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were democratically elected to be the next President and Vice President of the United States with 306 electoral votes and a popular vote margin of more than seven million.
Despite this clear victory, there has been a dangerous effort to promote conspiracy theories and outright lies to undermine the legitimacy of the election and attempt to overturn the result. The Justice Department found no evidence of widespread fraud, and former Attorney General Barr said there were no irregularities that could have affected the outcome of the election. Likewise our courts—including the Supreme Court—have rejected more than 60 lawsuits filed by President Trump and his allies.
Nonetheless, President Trump’s allies in Congress objected to certifying the Electoral College results. Further, the baseless attempts by President Trump and his enablers to undermine a fair and properly conducted election resulted in unprecedented violence and destruction on January 6, 2021.
The world watched in shock as the President’s inflammatory words incited his supporters to unleash chaos on the United States Capitol while Congress was in the process of its constitutional duty to certify the votes. Five people, including a Capitol Police officer, were killed; numerous firearms and improvised explosive devices were discovered; and the Capitol was ransacked.
In the wake of this dark day in American history, I believe that President Trump needs to leave or be removed from office as soon as possible. He must not be allowed to remain in office, causing more harm and endangering more lives. Free and fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power are the cornerstones of American democracy. As your Senator, I will do everything in my power to protect the right of the people to elect their leaders.
[Thanks for you inquiry.] –– Best regards. Sen. Feinstein
Candid thoughts I wrote down upon reading her email
Within an hour of sending a suggestion letter to Biden (also cc: Feinstein and Harris) and well before Feinstein’s reply, I happened to watch a segment of Amanpour and Company in which I heard the possibility of Trump running for president again in 2024. Considering that, impeachment is worth it. I think my softer position has a good point or two, but rushing to impeachment in fact is required. Trump should get what’s coming to him.
It’s a reminder to me of something I preach (or wished I preach) to my conservative friends: the expert (our elected representatives) often know more than we civilians and bystanders give them credit for on many topics, especially political ones.
That said, I think my points in the previous post about moderation, avoiding vengeance, avoiding increasing the split between the liberal and conservative silos, listen to the center more than the screaming wingnuts on both the left and right are worth considering. The occasional holiday from Twitter and Facebook is good for you and being a obsessive political junkie should be looked on as a modern disease to be avoided and cured.
Our country needs a bit of sane normalcy in its citizens that the present capitalistic drivers of social media, i.e., maximizing the number of likes and preferring popularity over truth are working against. Add to that the outsized ratings of outrage news, or more accurately, outrage opinions instead of properly vetted news, and we land in a perfect storm of disagreements, disharmony, and confusion. That needs to change, somehow.
Wow, I sent it today. also, cc: California Senators Feinstein and Harris (FYI). A bit of work, for sure, but worth it.
Dear Joe Biden, I’m a supporting liberal elite college graduate engineer, now retired. I vote on a case-by-case basis but steadfastly have supported equality of opportunity and most versions of civil rights reforms including Johnson’s civil rights actions.
Like many liberals, I hate Trump and thought the previous impeachments should have easily passed any thinking congress. McConnel’s evidence-blocking group seems not among those.
But I do not support BLM as they seem intent on foisting victimhood on blacks as their standard narrative, which I feel is extremely damaging to typical black families trying to get along in a capitalist, competitive society. Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, and Coleman Hughes have opinions concerning race I like and support.
Blacks, especially black children and young men, need to take some responsibility for their own lives and issues, with the help from the likes of affirmative action and inch-by-inch liberal improvements that we’ve done all along, reasonable law changes and sensitivity to needs and ridding us of Jim Crow, but not wholesale buying the BLM victimhood narrative, which, unfortunately, black mother are currently daily instilling in their children! I would never think of telling my child she is a helpless victim of the way things are. How damaging would that have been to her?
But this letter is about resisting the human need for vengeance. Our job as educated Americans is to resist the high emotions of the populists on both sides and look at the quieter middle ground, as I have always seen you as being a part of.
I’m against impeaching Trump for his insurrection because in six days, he already will be history. He’s done for! Impeachment will only keep him and the right-wing silo in the news and fan the flames of hatred on both sides, probably losing us some of the moderate right that we prefer to FOX News and Murdockish populism these days.
We are doing the same childish, take-revenge-thing I chided Trump, his followers, and FOX News for these last four horrible years. Shining a bright spotlight on Trump and divisions between America’s silos is exactly the opposite of your message in the past and is an itch we should not scratch.
I’m in a hurry so this is unpolished, but I need to get it out. Moderation, if in doubt, please. No action is better than an awful action. And look to the future, not vengeance for past insults, the latter clearly being an unhealthy path for our great and generous-hearted country. Btw, it’s a country that has always been great in my lifetime. After all, your people are reading this letter and taking it seriously.
Please consider not pandering to the ignorant and infantile by closing speeches with “God bless you and God bless America.” Find a real way to show unity, which might be difficult nowadays, but we should not encourage the backward direction Christian Nationalists are taking us, i.e., to be a theocracy. I suspect you know or, at least, strongly suspect that God does not exist.
Moderation, don’t impeach, don’t fall for the vengeance urge, and look to the future are my main messages, here. Thank you for tallying my opinion. Good luck.
Relating to the current mob violence at the nation’s capitol, I feel frustrated. One must hold back on saying too much and pouring gasoline on the fire. Besides, too many of my friends on Facebook are avid Republicans and diehard Donald Trump fans. Think. Think. Think. “What to say?”
Today I posted on Facebook: What happened to my beloved “America the beautiful?”
Here are a few more for the coming days if this keeps up. 1) Vladimir must be loving this. 2) Hillary has to be thinking, “I told them so, I told them so.“ 3) The NRA must be celebrating this lawless insurrection. Now the Dems will have to start buying guns!
What good ones have you come up with?
“This is what a seven-year-old boy elected as President might have caused.” “In normal times, this would have just been called a bad dream.” “What the hell, we tried to impeach the gangster.“ Those three are pretty good but didn’t make the cut.
What legally certifying the election looks like in the U.S.A. today. (When I was a kid, the flag meant a good thing.)
Yes, I’ve been accused of being a passive aggressive personality. I can’t help myself.
Pearls of Atheism 