The Guy Is a Patsy

And Conceptually Challenged to Boot

Well, I am packing my bags. I am of immigrant stock born on American soil. Are you or do you know of anyone who is NOT of immigrant background? Native American Indians don’t get a hall pass. Until such time as science establishes the American continent as the birthplace of our species, they are immigrants. Therefore, so far as we know, no human living on the soil of the United States of America this fine day is exempt from the threat of the edicts Trump’s sharpie made clear and present during the first week of his return to high office. Unless, as some members of the MAGA cult would believe willingly, our 47^th president is the product of divine conception and exempt from protections otherwise offered him under the 14^th amendment, he just put himself on his own hit list. Big Dummy.

So Much Fury for No Real Reason

Here are the statistics from the latest census of the population of the United States:

Population

White non-Hispanic, percent

58.4%

White Hispanic, percent

16.9%

Black alone, percent (a)(a)

13.7%

American Indian and Alaska Native alone, percent (a)(a)

1.3%

Asian alone, percent (a)(a)

6.4%

In the 249 years since we declared ourselves independent of a distant monarchy, we have managed to parlay our real estate holdings and our framework for governance and commerce into a position of global dominance. We are justifiably envied.

So, why oh why, has it become fashionable for We the People to destroy ourselves from within? To become fearful of and viciously hateful toward each other? What happened to understanding our diversity is our strength?

Yes, it is true that non-Hispanic white population has been declining in the United States for decades, due a lower birth rate, increased number of deaths, and low immigration rates when measured against persons of a different cultural background or skin color. The non-Hispanic white population is expected to fall below 50% in the next twenty years (2045). Where’s the problem?

Oh, there.

A Mandate for Madness

Election 2024 did not give Trump a mandate. It did bless an insecure, repeatedly bankrupt huckster with the survival skills of the common household roach another bite on the apple of self-aggrandizement. He convinced a plurality of active voters to be afraid of each other. He is our 45^th and 47^th president. The guy who’s going to fix what ain’t broken. By destroying the integrity of a working democratic republic to refashion it to the benefit of a greedy autocracy.

Anna Ruth Quelisch Childs Lane

My maternal grandmother was born on 08 Aug 1898.

Credit. Flickr

The certificate attesting to that fact was written in German and she was reared in a German-speaking enclave in St. Louis. She attended an American public school which she left after completing the 8^th grade. She discontinued formal education to work sizing cloth to earn the money needed to help feed and clothe her younger sister and brother. As the years passed, she absorbed the social graces of the debutants for whom she designed and made clothes for every reason in any season. She married an Englishman several decades older than herself and lived in a grand house in University Park until the divorce. She followed our mother, her only daughter, to Texas in 1954. She had a brilliant mind which she educated independently and very well indeed. She blended seamlessly with women of her generation whose families were powerful enough to secure and afford a college education opportunity for a privileged daughter. She was 110 percent American in her loyalties and technology’s child in her attitudes. When asked what was the most significant event of her lifetime (which started with horse-drawn vehicles and included walks on the moon), she answered without hesitation, “Electricity. We knew we really had something there.”

Here is the immediately pertinent point. On the afternoon she buried her first husband, there was a knock on her front door. There stood two agents from the US government. They told her to pack. Her husband was a citizen of England. The protections he had provided her in his life were now six feet deep. She and her child were to be removed.

As she told me the tale, she straightened her back and said, “Get off my porch. My child was born on American soil and I have lived here all my life. You have no authority over our place of residence.” The men departed.

My memory now notices for the first time her clever phrasing. My ever-honest and truly sainted grandmother did not claim in her recounting of the traumatic, callous, and ill-timed attempt to remove her and my mother that SHE was born on American soil. (Whoopsie.)

Carnival

I was stationed in Louisiana from 2005 to 2017. Take almost any common word in the dictionary and add “fest” to the end of it to derive the celebratory event of any given weekend. The constant carnival known as New Orleans included food, music, dancing, drinking, smoking, singing, and casual sinning in a rollicking gumbo of different skin colors, ages, genders, and cultural loyalties.

Credit. Louisiana Cajun Mansion

Work was a different matter. I served as a consultant to FEMA, assisting with funding and oversight of the repair, replacement, and mitigation of infrastructure damaged by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav, and Ike. Due to decades of DEI compliance, a reverse plantation system was in full play every day in every way in the trenches of local effort. Payback really is not pretty.

Knowledge is power. A pyramidal supervisory structure erected gates of exclusion (distrust and resentment) along pathways of project pursuit and completion.

The irony to me, as an outsider, was that FEMA was white at the top, black in the middle, and white at the bottom.

Scripps National Spelling Bee

The National Spelling Bee was formed in 1925 as a consolidation of numerous local spelling bees, organized by The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky… The spelling bee has been held every year except for 1943–1945 due to World War II and 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.^[3] The E.W. Scripps Company acquired the rights to the program in 1941.^[8] The Bee is held in late May and/or early June of each year. It is open to students who have not yet completed the eighth grade, reached their 15th birthday, nor won a previous National Spelling Bee. Its goal is educational: not only to encourage children to perfect the art of spelling, but also to help enlarge their vocabularies and widen their knowledge of the English language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scripps_National_Spelling_Bee

Credit. Scripps National Spelling Bee

Except for Erin Howard (eight-way tie in 2019), all winners of the bee since 2007 bear given and/or last names which indicate an Asian bloodline. Pause for a moment to consider the nature and wonder of a tween-aged championship mastery of a language not native to your family. I know I would do very poorly indeed at any age in a contest requiring understanding the question and a detailed response in, say, Mandarin.

One If by Land, Two if by Sea

Until air travel became a viable option, direct access to our streets of gold and our shining city on the hill usually required getting wet feet. From the west, the Pacific Ocean. From the east, the Atlantic Ocean. From the south, the Rio Grande. Migrants from Canada, like my paternal grandfather, had a boat trip somewhere in their family history. Refugees from South America can try to survive the Mexican desert crossing along our southern border west of Texas.

It is to be noted that each culture brings its own flavor of rogues and criminals inside the fold.

Choice or Chance

The cultural attitude that insists upon tying achievement to advancement historically has been most evident among various immigrant communities coming to America by choice. They view our nation as more than an escape hatch. They embrace its promise as a land of freedom and opportunity.

We have one culture with a searing memory of generations of ancestors who were victims of chance--black people arriving and living here in captivity. Advocates seek restitution and accommodation for the suspicions with which persons wearing black skin are viewed to this every day. It is useful to remember that people of their own color captured and enslaved them. Africans were sold into slavery for a second and subsequential time in America. Same race exploitation began at home initially and continues to this day in our country. It’s a persistent problem that brings many of the complaints about exploitation to the bar of public conversation with dirty hands.

Affirmative Action

“Affirmative action (also sometimes called reservations, alternative access, positive discrimination or positive action in various countries' laws and policies)^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]} refers to a set of policies and practices within a government or organization seeking to address systemic discrimination. Historically and internationally, support for affirmative action has been justified by the idea that it may help with bridging inequalities in employment and pay, increasing access to education, and promoting diversity, social equity, and social inclusion and redressing alleged wrongs, harms, or hindrances, also called substantive equality.^[8]…..

“The term "affirmative action" was first used in the United States in "Executive Order No. 10925",^[18] signed by President John F. Kennedy on 6 March 1961, which included a provision that government contractors "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated [fairly] during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin".^[19] In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued Executive Order 11246 which required government employers to "hire without regard to race, religion and national origin" and "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin."^[20] The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Neither executive order nor The Civil Rights Act authorized group preferences… However affirmative action in practice would eventually become synonymous with preferences, goals and quotas as upheld or struck down by Supreme Court decisions even though no law had been passed explicitly permitting discrimination in favor of disadvantaged groups.^{[citation needed}

“Affirmative action is intended to alleviate under-representation and to promote the opportunities of defined minority groups within a society to give them equal access to that of the majority population.^[22] The philosophical basis of the policy has various rationales, including but not limited to compensation for past discrimination, correction of current discrimination, and the diversification of society…

“The stated justification for affirmative action by its proponents is to help compensate for past discrimination, persecution or exploitation by the ruling class of a culture,^[16] and to address existing discrimination.^[25] More recently concepts have moved beyond discrimination to include diversity, equity and inclusion as motives for preferring historically underrepresented groups”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action

Gird Your Loins, Ladies and Gentlemen

As a bluestocking, I find irredeemably outrageous the convenient exclusion until 1964 of gender in any discussion about leveling an uneven playing field in any aspect of American life. In fact, little girls and big women do need and benefit from equitable treatment in custom and under the law. Controversy over Joseph R. Biden’s assertion that the United States Constitution has 28 amendments cannot help but arise under Trump’s second administration. A Republican congress already is proposing to carve the likeness of a myogenic felon with an history of preying on women sexually into the live stone face of Mount Rushmore.

The Elimination of DEI Considerations and Actions

During his first week back in high office, Donald John Trump used his sharpie to order immediate suspension and permanent elimination of DEI practices in America. A variety of big businesses immediately bent a knee. The list’s biggest surprise was McDonald’s which has offered training and employment to mentally challenged persons for decades. On a personal level, Walmart and Target were disappointing entries on the list of compliant enterprises. Those two firms provided good service during the pandemic to persons in quarantine needing “no contact” doorstep delivery of essentials during the pandemic.

What Level of Outrage Is Appropriate?

We the People are doing a creditable job of pushing back in a timely manner against the most outrageous of Trump’s often cruel, usually clumsy, and uniformly corrosive flurry of Executive Orders. The greatest immediate blessing of this Moment of Intentional Chaos is ironic.

The Heritage Foundation is good at funding election of conservative politicians and judges to positions of power. The Billionaire Boys Club used the organization as to create the Project 2025 playbook that Trump only must hand to minions to implement.

Mitch McConnell used his time as Majority Leader in the Senate to flood the judicial system with partisan justices and lawyers.

It is with some measure of careful glee that I read reports of the despair of legitimate, seasoned, non-partisan judges about not only the illegal actions (of Trump’s second administration in its first 10 days back in power) brought before them for contest but also the very poor quality of DOJ representatives arguing various mean-spirited and constitutionally meritless edicts. “Where are the lawyers?” (needed to avert this folly) Judge Coughenour wondered when presented with the notion that the rights of persons born on American soil no longer had constitutional protection--just because King Trump’s Project 2025 sharpie said so.

Credit. Shutterstock.com Image 106513202

Bad law. Poorly argued by carefully vetted incompetents on public payroll. Perfect.

Time, Tenacity, Inconvenience, and Opportunity

Donald John Trump, The Heritage Foundation, and the Billionaire Boys Club count on the wheels of justice grinding in a slow manner toward a favorable show-down before John Roberts’ Quisling Court. Damage done to the lives of 30,000 persons summarily apprehended and scheduled to be incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay cannot be estimated or condoned. Damage done to women forced to carry to term a fetus compromised by circumstances of conception, fetal developmental anomalies, or maternal health complications cannot be estimated or condoned.

As the time passes, We the People will have to embrace inconvenience and marry opportunity. We will have to make a break with our (now comfortable and preferred) pandemic survival patterns to protest (in person and with our purses) against every attack on our customs of decency and all equitable interpretations of constitutional law. Each stroke of Trump’s sharpie, each vote by the Republican congress, each decision of John Roberts’ Quisling Court will test our faith and our tenacity.

But we will hold true.

In my case, I will pay Kroger, Albertsons, and/or Tom Thumb to bring to my doorstep in as many separate orders and trips as may prove necessary what Walmart previously delivered promptly in one easy trip. I will cut Walmart off my not completely insignificant monthly donation to its bottom line. In short, I will act to give notice I am unhappy with its obeisance to Trump’s DEI edict.

I may not be alone in this protest. My middle sister shops at Target. She reports that the 36 pick-up slots (usually full with waiting cars circling) were empty yesterday.

Boycotts are a low and slow level of resistance, but, hey! it worked for grapes and worker wages in 1965. Why not for eggs and the profit margin of cowards in 2025?

Heads up.

Hearts strong.

We will resist the principles and implementation of Project 2025 every day in every legal way.

We will do more than survive.

We will prevail.