The time to reBLUEvinate is now.<\/p>\n
I lived in Europe during the Bush years.\u00a0\u00a0 Time and again, I had to differentiate myself from their perceptions of what an American was.\u00a0 I wasn’t dumb, brash, arrogant, and I didn’t expect the world to revolve around me.\u00a0 I just watched the president and the vice president launch an ambush on a world leader and declare for the world to see that view of us is not only warranted, but that’s being nice.\u00a0 Trump openly declared the USA no longer is the leader of the free world, undoing decades of established world order.\u00a0 Trump announced MAGA is full mask-off authoritarian, and it can no longer be questioned.<\/p>\n
Nixon got the ball rolling with his infamous “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal” attempt.\u00a0 As we know from Watergate, Nixon tried to cheat, but it, perhaps, could have ended there.\u00a0 Nixon could have faced accountability for his actions but was instead pardoned by Ford.\u00a0 I think that moment wherein we announced accountability was optional was the turning point.\u00a0 From there, the seeds of things like Fox News were born, and the ball was accelerated.<\/p>\n
Reagan’s acceleration is hard to sum up succinctly.\u00a0 The devastation of Reaganomics is still being felt today as the House GOP just passed a bill that gives the billionaires even more tax cuts at the expense of services for the everyperson and is projected to add between 3 and 4.5 trillion to the deficit at a time when people struggle to afford housing, groceries, and healthcare.\u00a0 Trickle-down has been demonstrated to not work again and again, but somehow, we have three people (Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerburg) with a combined wealth more than the bottom 50% of the country.<\/p>\n
Reagan’s infamous and terrible ‘War on Drugs’ can be summed up by his own domestic policy advisor, John Ehrlichman, “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing them both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.\u00a0 We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night in the evening news.\u00a0 Did we know we were lying about the drugs?\u00a0 Of course, we did.”\u00a0 Hey, at least Reagan was tough on the Soviets, yeah?<\/p>\n
Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich pushed the acceleration further by making politics increasingly incendiary to the point of aggressively lying in their attacks against the opposition (read, Democrats).\u00a0\u00a0 By the Mid-Nineties, hostile attack politics were here to stay.\u00a0 Gingrich, fun fact, was also having an extramarital affair while he was going after President Clinton.\u00a0 Party of Family Values indeed.\u00a0 The success of the GOP’s attack politics gave rise to people like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and others who would be a mouthpiece that divorced people from reality even further.<\/p>\n
Bush lied about WMDs to get us into Iraq, saying later Saddam Hussein “had the capacity” when pressed by journalists and when asked about the link between Iraq and 9\/11, Bush said, “Nothing, except for it’s part of \u2014 and nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack.\u00a0 Iraq was a \u2014 Iraq \u2014 the lesson of September the 11th is, take threats before they fully materialize, Ken.\u00a0 Nobody has ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq.”<\/p>\n
Now, up until this point, despite huge glaring problems that compounded upon each other it can be easily argued The USA was committed to its allies, treaties, and place in the world.\u00a0 Even Bush’s “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” line was never followed by spiteful policy decisions and petty public arguments like we just saw today.\u00a0 The Oval Office Ambush even had Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend ask why President Zelenskyy wasn’t in a suit. \u00a0Still, Elon Musk can roam around in casual clothes, hat included, and even bring in his kid to shush Trump, and it’s fine.\u00a0 Furthermore, President Zelenskyy has dressed like this since his country was invaded, so the cheapness of it all was even more tragic to see, almost making you forget the backdrop of this was The USA arm-twisting Ukraine into a minerals-for-arms deal, which wasn’t signed because of this embarrassment.\u00a0 After the ambush was over, Russian State Media (TASS) was escorted out of the Oval Office, but the Kremlin got their show already.<\/p>\n
I’ve struggled with the question, “What meaning does\/did my service have?” for some time.\u00a0 Seeing Trump align The USA with Russia so brazenly \u2013 the invading and occupying force, after Trump abandoned the Kurds in his first term and threatened to turn Gaza into some gaudy tourist trap gives me an answer: \u00a0To Help Resist. All this acceleration of division, of hostility, away from any principles we even pretended to have has to be fought, and anyone who says both sides are the same is lying to your face (or is willfully ignorant).<\/p>\n
reBLUEvinate is something I just came up with, but I don’t think it’s hard to understand.\u00a0 The lines in the sand couldn’t be any more clear.\u00a0 You’re MAGA, or you’re on the side of The Rule of Law, The Constitution, Our Allies, Objective Reality, and basic human emotions like empathy and compassion.\u00a0 We\u2019re all in this together, and isolating ourselves is not the answer to how we\u2019re going to solve our problems.\u00a0 The road ahead was always long, but it just got longer and much more difficult.<\/p>\n
So, how can you help reBLUEvinate?\u00a0 If you have that feeling in your gut that says this is wrong, but you haven’t expressed it yet?\u00a0 Now’s a good time to start.\u00a0 Be intolerant of the things we used to just keep quiet about because we’ve let it go too far.\u00a0 What’s happening now is not normal; it’s not right, and it’s ok to not only be angry about it but act.\u00a0 Anger is an actionable emotion driven from a desire to protect.\u00a0 We aren’t just protecting an ideal of ‘America’ as a vague concept.\u00a0 Trump’s tariffs, tax cuts, government purging, and authoritarian alignments are going to have real-world impacts.\u00a0 Trump is going to hurt you \u2013 more than he has already.<\/p>\n
You are not alone.\u00a0 ‘Woke’ and ‘DEI’ are not the causes of whatever happens to be in the headlines right now.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0First, let’s address ‘Woke.’\u00a0 Woke has been around since the 1930s in Black communities as a way to describe being awake or aware of racial and social injustice, with the Blues musician Lead Belly using ‘stay woke’ as lyrics in 1938.\u00a0 It’s a term that’s been around and has resurfaced over time, such as the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Lives Matter movement.\u00a0 DEI can be seen as just an offshoot of Woke in terms of social and racial (in)justice.<\/p>\n
reBLUEvinate.\u00a0 Now is the time for outward expressions and actions of support of one another in the face of this onslaught.\u00a0 Whether we’re protesting, checking in with each other, bringing someone back to objective reality, or just being kind in this age of needless cruelty \u2013 you are not powerless.\u00a0 The stripping of Human Rights (Women’s, LGBTQ+, Immigrants, etc) is not a foregone conclusion.\u00a0 You are not only just a cog in a machine transferring wealth endlessly upwards.\u00a0 The United States of America is not just for this generation’s brown shirts, the red hats.\u00a0 The USA is not some island that has turned its back on the world despite the Russian Asset-In-Chief.\u00a0 Now is the time to show it.<\/p>\n
reBLUEvinate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The time to reBLUEvinate is now. I lived in Europe during the Bush years.\u00a0\u00a0 Time and again, I had to differentiate myself from their perceptions of what an American was.\u00a0 I wasn’t dumb, brash, arrogant, and I didn’t expect the world to revolve around me.\u00a0 I just watched the president and the vice president launch […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[338],"tags":[334],"class_list":["post-29071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-considered-thoughts","tag-334"],"yoast_head":"\n