Fear

I thought I would wake up today and all of the upheaval of retiring centrist Justice Anthony Kennedy would be just a nightmare. If Justice Kennedy gave new hope to women's rights, to gays, to many others and as an institutional check in favor of human rights then why in God's name would he decide to retire in July? Could he not have waited just four more months for an election of renewal? Democrats, perhaps, would have retaken the Senate and even the House thereby negating Trump's ability to nominate a right wing extremist justice to the highest court in the land. Now there will be nowhere to take our legal cases of human rights hope if tweet-storm-trooper-in-chief a/k/a draft evading General Bone Spurs gets his way.

I feel like part of me has died. All that work for all those years even before me for women's rights, for blacks and for all those who are oppressed both here and around the world seems for naught. I feel like Kennedy's retirement is a death sentence. The hundreds of protests attended by hundreds of thousands of people and all the legal maneuvering was for what -- to get an authoritarian misfit mentally ill excuse for a human in the oval office to capture the most powerful position on the planet changing life as we know it and not for the better.  Many will die because Trump has given license to the ever so violent right wing extremist hate embedded in some sinews of this nation to hurt, maim and kill those on the humanitarian left they oppose. Health Insurance companies will revisit the preexisting condition as a reason to deny one medical coverage, asylum here for those in violent lands will be no more and it will be deemed okay to rip children from mother's arms.

Trump has also influenced dramatically international politics.  Right wing extremist fascist and fascist light groups in western Europe gain in numbers.  Germany, Italy, France, Britain and even some Scandinavian nations, bulwarks of democracy, now have fascist powers who want to upend those democracies some created after the death orgy of WWII where a total of 80 million human beings lost their lives.  What does the number 80 million look like?  It is inconceivable to imagine 80 million deaths when one thinks of a ball park as holding merely 50,000 people.  Is this what we want to repeat yet again -- the fear of those years?  Our nation, saved by geography then, can no longer feel secure that it will protect us now.  It is a globalist world where nations that wish us harm possess nuclear weaponry that can destroy us.  Donald Trump is no joke.  He has won the presidency for his own personal enrichment courtesy of the American taxpayer and flouting of the Constitutional Emoluments Clause with conflicts of interest galore but those who support him do not see it.  The appeal of autocracy means that decisions are easily made by one man no matter how horrifically inhumane to vulnerable groups those decisions are.  Trump means to take human rights back, in reactionary form, to a Neanderthal era in this nation where separate but unequal ruled for persons of color, where there was nowhere to go for those whose sexual orientation was different from the norm; suicide seemed the only option and where those who sought abortion did so in filthy back rooms performed for the money by quacks where infection was not unusal and women died of blood poisoning in large numbers.

I have never felt so sad, so down, so hopeless in my life. I am telling myself I will regain the fight I once had. The stories in the press are depressing. The Daily News edition sported a big headline entitled [profanity not printed -- use your imagination.]  I quickly clicked off of it because it is the way I feel and I do not need reinforcement of that.  Trump's Muslim ban I fear will create more hatred and give extremist Muslims like ISIS just what they wanted, an excuse to attack the west and the moderate Muslims, the ones we need, will be silenced.  This is what Trump's ideological instructor, Steve Bannon has wanted -- a war between Islam (with nearly 2 billion Muslims) and the west but now nuclear weaponry is in the mix. I keep hearing FDR's words "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" but I am, despite those beautiful words, in fear now!