Doug's Darkworld

OK, cooler heads seem to have prevailed in the USA, no catastrophic new developments over the past few days. Large scale demonstrations against white supremacy and police brutality have continued, largely peacefully. Trump has tweeted up a storm and built a wall around the White House. So he got his wall, just not quite what he expected or promised. These are still very uncertain times. A few thoughts about various developments.

Someone pointed out that when Trump was waving a bible around for his photo op, he was holding it upside down and backwards. And they observed that if Obama had held a Bible in such a fashion, Fox News and crowd would have been screaming it was proof that Obama was the anti-christ. Yes far future readers, we really have reached that level of transcendent absurdity. The GOP and Fox News spent all of Obama’s two terms generating outrage about Obama over things that were trivial to non-existent. And of course never really criticizing him for his real failings: his service to the banking industry, normalization of endless war, etc. Political discourse has been farcical in the USA for decades, it’s just gotten more pronounced under Trump.

There has at least been some response to all these demonstrations. The cops who killed George Floyd have been arrested and charged. The Democrats have announced a police reform bill. France is banning chokeholds. I dunno though, serious change in how we police America has been overdue for decades. Our rate of police shootings is horrifying. And it’s not like we don’t know what to do, there are excellent and proven ways to reduce violence by police. That we haven’t done this shows the problem is political, despite what anyone says. And by political I mean that special interests wedded to ideology are preventing progress. Maybe we are at a watershed and true police reform will happen, I’m not holding my breath.

And no, Minneapolis disbanding their police department doesn’t mean the burbs will hire private security while the Crips and the Bloods fight it out for control of urban areas. I literally heard that from a person on the right. I could write a book about the bad logic and factual errors such thinking encompasses. Like I said, we’ll see what transpires. Disbanding police departments means turning over all the instances where cops were expected to be “social workers with guns” to other more appropriate agencies. Go with what works, imagine that?

So yes, all sorts of mass demonstrations against police violence. Wildly outnumbering the handful of people taking to the streets demanding an end to the Covid-19 social distancing a month or so back. Many of these people are not wearing masks or practicing social distancing. Add that to police using banned chemical weapons, which helps spread Covid-19, and we could see a huge spike in Covid-19 in a few weeks. Thrillsville. I don’t think saving the rich was worth killing grandma, but ending police brutality is? I have yet to resolve this issue.

So came across this quote:

“It has exposed how much of Western society … is permeated with influential people who have deluded themselves into thinking that their ability to manipulate words, images and sounds gives them the ability to control reality itself.”

It was from this article, Why the Coronavirus is Winning. IDK, it addresses my previous conundrum, how does one justify mass protests during a pandemic? Read it and weep I guess. And I stand by the quote above, it exposes the west’s fatal flaw. Reality bats last.

For my part I’ve concentrated on getting my garden ready as I wait for more shoes to drop. (Image above.)  It was very satisfying, my first serious vegetable garden in nearly 30 years. Boy, life just whizzes on by, mostly boring, sometimes too stressful for words. One adapts to the later I suppose. That’s my plan, seeing as my plan to die young and be a horrible warning has gone tragically awry. Have a safe and sane week everyone. Shares, comments welcome.

Copyright © 2020 Doug Stych. All rights reserved.

(Image: My garden, Copyright © 2020 Doug Stych. All rights reserved.)