Platypus Thoughts

How embarrassing. We will shortly be Zooming with good friends from Toronto with whom we have much history around serving others on humanitarian missions at home and abroad. We know each other’s children and families and have hosted each other in our homes many times over the years.

We watched Bishop Marianne Edgar Budde’s plea to our president to have mercy on immigrants as well as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s response to our president’s imposition of tariffs on Canadian goods. We follow the shocking news of all of the cruel and self-defeating executive orders that have been signed in our president’s first week in office. None of which serve our country, or our neighbors, or the world.

We shake our heads in bewilderment at the folly of those who elected this president, convinced that he would never do the things he said he would do during his campaign or convinced that his promises would actually make their lives better. What on earth were they thinking? Oh, wait. They were not thinking! They chose to close their minds and ears to anything and anyone who even whispered that maybe – just maybe – his ideas had other intentions than bringing down the price of eggs, just maybe they were being played for fools.

But here we are. With a president who is controlled by the strings of a phalanx of puppeteers who have dreamt up, mixed up and drunk their own Kool-Aid. Our president, like the bobble heads riding on our dashboards years ago, just bounces along thinking he is so smart, so full of common sense, and so in control of those around him. He has no idea that he is wearing no clothes. That those billionaire puppet masters who have bought him with their false fawning and flashing of money know exactly how easy it is to manipulate this egotistical fool into effecting their goals.

None of which is news, just me venting my spleen to join the lava flow of others. The important thing now is, What are we going to do about it?

Rioting in the streets will be deemed as insurrection and put down by force. Speaking out against this administration runs the same risk. We like to think our votes are still sacred and that we can elect leaders who are willing to fight for our democracy. But remember, this president promised that if he was elected, we would never have to vote again. Did that not register with his supporters that he was anointing himself king? That his goal is to eliminate everything our country has fought to become from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War to the fights for equal rights?

Is it true that democracy cannot sustain itself? Certainly if we don’t study and own our true history as well as world history, we will lose sight of what democracy means. Certainly if we don’t learn about all religions, we will never realize that we are more alike than different in our belief systems. Certainly if we don’t stand up for our own people as we are and not allow a minority of people to tell us how and who we should be, we will never live up to the potential of what our democracy can be.