What He Said...

 

Keep the Home Fires Burning

Paul Krugman illuminates several points I have been mulling in my mind. In particular, his closing thoughts on keeping the outrage fresh in your mind. We musn't let ourselves come to accept the Drumpf era as acceptable or normal or moral. We must keep a "fire in the belly", a hot core of certainty that what has happened is wrong and deserves ongoing resistance. 

It can't be continual rage, fire that is out-of-control; that is what the Right-wing hate machine feeds on, consuming and ultimately destroying all who play with it. Rather what we need is more akin to a well-banked wood stove or a campfire, keeping you warm through the long winter night.

From Prof. Krugman's column today...

"So this was a tainted election. It was not, as far as we can tell, stolen in the sense that votes were counted wrong, and the result won’t be overturned. But the result was nonetheless illegitimate in important ways; the victor was rejected by the public, and won the Electoral College only thanks to foreign intervention and grotesquely inappropriate, partisan behavior on the part of domestic law enforcement.

The question now is what to do with that horrifying knowledge in the months and years ahead.

One could, I suppose, appeal to the president-elect to act as a healer, to conduct himself in a way that respects the majority of Americans who voted against him and the fragility of his Electoral College victory. Yeah, right....

Now, outrage over the tainted election past can’t be the whole of opposition politics. It will also be crucial to maintain the heat over actual policies. Everything we’ve seen so far says that Mr. Trump is going to utterly betray the interests of the white working-class voters who were his most enthusiastic supporters, stripping them of health care and retirement security, and this betrayal should be highlighted.

But we ought to be able to look both forward and back, to criticize both the way Mr. Trump gained power and the way he uses it. Personally, I’m still figuring out how to keep my anger simmering — letting it boil over won’t do any good, but it shouldn’t be allowed to cool. This election was an outrage, and we should never forget it."