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Our Own Survival Story - How Will It Play Out? [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-29
We’ve survived over a week of a vengeful idiot and convicted criminal as POTUS.
To be fair, those of us who had been watching and warning others of this preventable political nightmare, knew how bad things would get. I’ve written other posts that you can read and I’ve cited sources before. The chaos is not lessened by having an “I told ya so!” attitude, in fact, that just makes it worse.
What do we do with this crap sandwich we’ve all been given?
Perhaps, a best analogy is surviving the arrival of a cruel and abusive stepfather who just married into your family. Or perhaps, the reconciliation of an abusive father after he was driven from the home by a court order or incarceration, only to get released and brought back in to repeat his prior behaviors.
What are those stories people have of surviving their worst fears coming back to life? How do they deal with the repeated trauma and damage? What keeps them going forward, what informs them to not give up?
We’ve survived a year of his hate-filled rhetoric and assurances that he was going to get everything under control and “fix” what in his estimation is “wrong with our American family, all this nonsense!”
“Nonsense” is the catch-all for
DEI, LGBTQ+, non-binary, BIPOC, Native Americans, immigrants, Dreamers, elderly, veterans, homeless, welfare and Medicaid recipients, pensioners, young people, mom’s-basement-dwellers, hospitalized persons, nursing home residents, persons with long COVID or those who have contracted an airborne illness that we have vaccines for, mentally challenged, emotionally disordered, substance dependent, church-goers, church avoidant, people from the Middle East, people from Africa, people from Asia, people from Central and South America, people from India, intelligent people, thoughtful people, people with high emotional capacity, people with scientific curiosity, farmers, truck drivers, fire, police, first responders, soldiers, sailors, airmen, the entire legal profession, the banking system, doctors, nurses, teachers, pastors, priests, ministers, rabbis, imams, anyone who helps, creates, builds or offers their hand to another, people with real badges of courage for events in their lives . . .
I know I have missed a lot of you. I apologize up-front. I’m only human.
Making a country great requires all of these, and more. The ones I’ve missed stating, says I know that I don’t know what I don’t know about so many things and so many different people. It takes a thoughtful person to understand the various roles and capacities of our society. It takes a tolerant person to get past their own biases and listen to others with a whole heart and an open mind. No matter your age, you should be informed by your own physical and mental limitations; that’s part of your responsibility to being alive. Above all, you need to view people, places and things through the lens and filters of love, to temper your inherent negativity.
One man’s ignorance, intolerance, senile decline, negativity and hatred has fueled a dismantling of our nation.
It is a crisis.
It is an emotional bloodbath.
Sadly, there are people at this moment who are paying a real price for nothing more than having a dream, accepting menial labor, at minimum wage, doing shift work, dirty work, tasks that are better suited to young boys and girls, but are being done by adults seeking asylum, refuge and a place to rest their weary bodies after a day of toil. Many times, that toil is for the benefit of well-to-do people.
What I can say about my life is that I have survived seven decades, and I hope to complete one more circuit around Old Sol. I fear, as many do, that might not happen, because of this tyrant and his maniacal utterances and proclamations.
A part of me feels the white hot anger.
A bigger part wants to sit down and cry.
But in the space between those extremes, I hear the voices of people telling me about their survival stories.
Brenda Huss, a grade school teacher half a century ago, survived Nazi medical experiments, had the scars to prove it, and the number tattooed on her arm. She went on to educate young boys and girls about being decent to one another. She was one of my teachers.
Sol Green, and his cousin David emigrated from Poland after the Second World War, having survived the Holocaust. They built successful lives and families in their new homes. Sol worked for my father.
My parents survived the Great Depression, poverty, hunger and homelessness. They witnessed the Second World War, the Korean War and the Vietnam Conflict. They went on to be of service and support for those around them. To be fair, they accomplished that survival under the banner of our nation, during a time when we weren’t so many, nor were we as diverse as we are now. They spoke not through a simple concept of a “great!!” America winning a war, but through the pictures and stories of men and young adults, who, having gone off to fight a war, never came home.
My uncles had tales of surviving the time they spent in Europe fighting Nazis. They went on to create productive lives and healthy families. They never opened up freely about those times. Some stories are just too hard to relate to others, and too painful to reanimate.
My sister survived abuse by her late ex-husband, and I remember vividly those difficult times for our family, dealing with my two young nephews as they had to come back home. We made it through. It was not pretty, but there were good moments worth hanging on to.
I have so many, too many stories that live in my head, from people who have told me about hardship and recovery. Perhaps, you do, too. Perhaps, you understand that those stories are pushing and tugging at your insides right now, telling you that something needs to stop this onslaught of ‘terrible, horrible, awful.”
If you are at all like me, you need to acknowledge those stories, keep them in perspective, let them fuel your ability to reach to those in power, and convince them to cease and desist in deploying one angry man’s displeasure with all of life itself.
The survival story that I do not have, and the one that has not been part of our landscape for my entire lifetime, is that of being attacked by warfare on our own soil, seeing the neighborhood blown to bits, wondering where shelter, water, food, medicine and anyone giving a damn might be.
We have successfully kept war off our shores.
Until now.
Last week was an undeclared war by one man against an entire nation. Yes, even against his own supporters.
I know his ideas came from others, and I know that project 2025 provided the grist for his social attacks. It doesn’t make this any the less about one man’s vendetta against all of us.
But somehow, we’ve survived this week. That is all we can say. We survived. And without being overly preachy, but necessarily so, we need to locate the real survivor stories that help us keep pressing forward. We must do so. We must resist the urge to surrender.
It truly is horrible, terrible and awful. And because we’re dealing with a person who is addicted to his personal rage, and wants to enact a reign of terror upon all humanity, we’re all drawn in to his dysfunctional way of doing what he does. That is depleting, exhausting, unhealthy and is something we’ve not seen. Not for seventy years at least, by my reckoning.
How we survive this war on our soil depends on how well we are able to recover and re-learn those survival stories. It is not about whether we’ve trained ourselves to be warriors or “preppers.” Some of those people may become necessary. But what we need to accomplish is to create a survivalist inventory, a mental log of everything we’ll need when those apocalyptic scenes in this BS, made-for-TV weekly mini-series turn the set into a real drama, instead of our expectation of special effects and CGI green screen.
The California firestorm is both real and the story line for our national metaphor. It is but one example of a situation that got out-of-control quickly because of environment. What about our information environment? That’s chaotic and a constant, reactive tinder pile, waiting for an ignition source to burst into flame.
ICE raids are already making mistakes. People who are being deported are not just the handful of undesirables, but people who have built families, ties, held down jobs, made their proper immigration reports. It is a stoked fear that “too many people, millions and millions of ‘em” are “pouring in, bringing their worst”
Sorry, DonOld and the Heritage Foundation. You have brought the worst. You have turned us all into victims.
This past week, healthcare communications, interdepartmental reporting, outbreak updates were shut down by a fiat that essentially muzzles the physician and all other healthcare providers. They cannot confirm data regarding disease spread. This, and other measures, were warned about in the publication of Project 2025. Everything he has done so far is defined in that one document. Sure, he said, “I don’t know about any Project 2025.” But what else would a profligate liar say? Of course, he would deny its existence and usefulness as a blueprint for this massacre of a regulated government that precluded unfettered abuse of ordinary people.
Brutal reality has come, and all this one man can do is play chief village idiot, putting on shows of “permission” and exacting fealty from folks through fear and intimidation. This, from a man who would not know a true survival story if it was standing right in front of him, poking him in the nose. He lives as if life has not touched him, changed him, added baggage and he ignores the cries of folks who are becoming victims to his careless, thoughtless approach. He minimizes the harm, the damage, the consequence, just like that “Strict Father” that James Dobson has described in his books on parenting, but without the understanding that kindness is the underpinning of the strongest man in the room. All of this, from a man who has never been without food, clothing, water, shelter, family, friends, resources and wherewithall.
I often look back on a lifetime of listening to the survival stories of people who have been trapped in the middle, targeted, wounded by life, crushed and somehow got back up again and again. I have my own stories that help describe my good fortune as a living thing. If you have watch the Late Show, you are aware of the “Steven Colbert Questionnairt” that asks “Five Words that Describe Your Life”. My answer is, “I’m the luckiest guy alive.” Anyone who has a life story and who is willing to tell it is worthy of being heard.
People in prisons often have stories, and our assumption is that their attribution isn’t valid, because they got there by committing a crime. We don’t want to listen or believe them. It is inconvenient. But even those stories tell us that we need to move patiently with administration of justice, and be certain that we get the who, what, when, where and how of each incarcerant right before deciding that they’re “just not worth our time.” Those stories are hard to listen to. But also, those persons struggle with telling us the facts of the case.
All these stories remind me of how I got here, what my responsibility is to my family, friends, fellow humans and myself. The stories are out there. You just have to find them and listen, with both ears, and an open heart. That’s not what we as a nation decided. We went short-sighted, let a computer program make a choice, created polarization and oversimplification, all because we didn’t have the time to make informed choices, and we wanted someone else to make the path forward for us.
Now we have someone who hasn’t the time or capacity for listening to stories in a job that demands being a good listener. All he can do is scribble his magic marker, do all things that so many offered, “He doesn’t really mean that, he won’t really do that...” Now we have not only a strict Dobson Father, but an unbelievably cruel and vicious, heartless one. Now we have a mean, impatient, savage old man, looking to even the personal score, do whatever heinous things he can, continue crossing the line with “official acts,” cause egregious harm to people who have not done anything wrong except be alive to tell their stories, stories he wants to silence because it interrupts his magical, imaginary story, one that has a tragic collection of lies and misdeeds.
My role at this juncture, perhaps also yours, is to be a listening post, a person who attends to those who need to tell a story of survival. Easy living will probably become less easy. Fortunes may collapse. “Forever” relationships may be torn apart, children may be lost in the shuffle of this destruction and madness we’re about to have rendered upon us. Obviously, “no mercy” is the battle cry of this idiot tyrant and he wants those around him who will simply do his bidding, no questions asked.
I’m suggesting that those of us who can, should be out there offering a listening ear, an open mind and a human heart. We’ll meet folks who are like ourselves, wounded and in need of support. We will also meet people who didn’t pay attention, treated this as “just another boring election” and ignored the warnings. We’ll meet the “doubling down” folks who offer totally illogical and incoherent nonsense about how this cruel dude is doing everything right. And then, we’ll meet the people who thought this gamble would pay off for them, leaned in to help get him back into office, and now, like a recovering gambler, are sitting outside, morally bankrupt,still not able to accept reality as they see that all the warnings were spot on.
People need mercy. They will need places to be safe, even if it is only for a little while.
Fred Rogers of MisteRogers Neighborhood fame, would often mention instruction his mother gave him, “Look for the helpers.” In any difficult or dire situation, look to see who is helping, who is stepping forward, who is resolving the crisis, who is acting compassionately. Is that you? are you doing your part to promote survival? Are you involved in rescue, even if you are just saving or rescuing yourself and your family? When the tools you relied on are stripped away, do you simply give up or do you get your brain in action and begin inventing new tools? Do you adapt to the crisis and become a helper? Do you join in a horde of dangerous people who add more terror, destruction, hatred and violence?
Are you one of the helpers? Are you a rescuer? What is holding you back? We need you right now
I wish I could offer assurances that I know how this ends. I do not. I only know that this insanity has begun in earnest, and that we don’t know what we don’t know; how long or how bad things will get? I think it will get pretty bad. But sharing survival stories, not for bragging rights, but for providing comfort and support, is how we will endure this cold and dark night for humanity. Helping one another, remembering we’re human, locating our inner strength, is how we can get through this nightmare that seems to go on without end.
It will be a tough road ahead, indeed.
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