22 January 2017

Okay, We're Awake Now — Let's Take This Back


I marched yesterday. Well, I strolled in the sunshine. But it was with a couple of dozen other people in my community, including some men, several young children and a few four-legged allies. Many of us wore pink (including my favourite little mammal, Lita); some of us understood the whole Pussy Rally thing and wore our pussy ears (can you see mine?), but it wasn't the focus and with the kids present, we didn't make a thing of it. 

We decided that as Canadians, we have to not only work for our own reforms here (better conditions for many First Nations communities, electoral reform so that we join other democracies who have chosen proportional representation, which is much more fair than our first-past-the-post system), but also be vigilant that President T****'s nastiness doesn't 
seep across the border. 

The people I was chatting with along our "route" (ahem, it's a very small community) concurred that the most sickening and despicable moment of that man's campaign was the day he mocked a reporter who has a physical handicap. My hubby figures it was an orchestrated move to test the waters ... to let voters know how brutish his presidency would be and to see whether he could get away with it. Well, he got away with it. Very sadly, Americans at that rally did not turn their backs to him. Now wouldn't that have sent him a message, eh?

Senator Bernie Sanders sent out a message of solidarity on Friday:
"Today is going to be a tough day for millions of Americans including myself. Our response has got to be not to throw up our hands in despair, not to give up, but in fact to fight back as effectively and as vigorously as we can. Our job is to keep our eyes on the prize, and the prize is that we will continue fighting for a government that represents all of us and not just the 1%. We're going to go forward in the fight for economic, social, environmental and racial justice. That's who we are. That's what we're going to do. We are not giving up."

I'll admit that at first, all I saw was "Our response has got to be not to throw up." Because that has been the response of many stomachs around the world these last two months, but especially on Friday. 

According to The New York Times and other outlets, one of the first things that President T**** did was purge the White House website of all mentions of climate change — except one: "Mr. Trump’s vow to eliminate the Obama administration’s climate change policies, which previously had a prominent and detailed web page on whitehouse.gov."

We are in the fight of our lives, as living beings and as a species among millions of others, and this man has decided that the only thing he, I mean, Americans care about is money. His particular form of mental illness won't allow him to change his mind (although for some reason, flip flops are allowed), so now that we're awake and we know this is a living nightmare, we have to take back the fight to safeguard the future, for all the children, of all species.

No comments:

Post a Comment

I would appreciate hearing your thoughts or questions on this post or anything else you've read here. What is your take on courage and compassion being an important part of the solution to the climate change emergency?