Love at a Reasonable Price

Editor’s Note: This poem we were finishing when we looked at each other and said, “This isn’t going to work. This will not help the nation to see and feel and react to things as they really are. And time is running out!” So we just stopped writing the poem right then and there in that spot. It’s not that we don’t think the poem’s any good. We’re not sure. We haven’t read it. It just seems like we need to try a different tack. The winds here: What are they are? What is the most helpful way to maneuver within the strange swirls?

Let us US play now the higher game
Let Love to hearts to minds speak clear and true
Let’s dance upon that holy honest plain
Both real and Real we share — Yes: me and you
When Vance excuses lies as painting true moods
And Trump proves lies with lies, let’s not be wooed
But seek instead eternal Love and simple facts:
Old fashioned, careful facts that seek not victory but wise gentle acts

Let us US choose now the higher calling
Do Haitians live off cute little housey cats?
Do immigrants poison our blood with all theirs?
Are newsmen who call out Trump’s lies dirty rats?
How many clues do you need, USA?
George Washington had the support to stay
He left to clearly say that that’s the only way
A government of the people can survive
The Donald that US tradition tried
Republicans in office then with him
Resisted and protected Biden’s win
The GOP now silences such voices
I fear a top-down crime from such choices
If rewarded with power. They seem dark forces.
How many clues until we remember
That governments are weapons too — can fortunes melt and flesh tremble — ?

But Kamala I don’t know what she stands for
But Kamala I don’t know what she’s good for
But Kamala what’s she ever done for me?

I think Kamala would be what we make of her
I think Kamala would be what we help her be

I think Trump will be what his foolish pride his wild urges his contempt for constraints on his power his disregard for the norms, standards, and laws of democracy his lie-based communication style his us-versus-them hellhole reality
Combined with an administration purged of those who refuse to sacrifice our representative government for the sake of narrow political gain
Would be

The difference is a group of people who subscribe to the notion that this is a democratic republic and the leaders serve temporarily and at the will of the people and for the entire nation
Versus
A group of people who aren’t so sure that any of that matters so much, and who are led by and are now eager followers of a man who thinks that winning is the whole point of life, winning no matter what you break, no matter who you hurt, no matter

The difference is leaders working to maintain a system of government that answers to the citizens
Versus
Leaders who’ve decided to side with truth-as-whats-expedient and might-makes-right and the-ends-justify-the-means

The difference is towards less or more political evil

The difference is clear

Kamala Harris would need our help to be elected and to govern well
Donald Trump would shove us out of the way to litigate and confuse his way into office and to use any means available to maintain and wild power, which he likes because it makes him feel important and it gives him the ability to shove those who talk back into the dirt and to give little treats and special words to good little dogs who sit and roll over and lay down and beg as the master directs

No one knows for sure
What A or B entails
But if you keep giving a man who has tried to undermine the peaceful democratic transfer of power and who did when in office work against democratic norms and standards and who has managed to sideline those in his party who would stand up to him and elevate those who would do whatever he asks of them:
I think if you keep handing power over to that kind of a team, you will find that you have less and less say in what your government does in your name with your resources in your lives and in the world

What do you want America?
Do you want to pretend you’re king of the world?
Or do you want to admit that you’re lucky to be alive
And you’ve been so lucky to be allowed to not fear your government
And Trump oggles Putin and Putin is not content to just silence dissent in his own borders but is actively hunting down ex patriots who step out of line

How long can it last this world with nukes everywhere?
How many picnics in the park with the sun and family fun are left?
I don’t know
But
I vote for admitting that we already share the values needed to share this government
I vote for admitting that carefully vetted news sources exist and they should be preferred
I vote for admitting that we don’t know all the details of God and soul and sin and virtue;
but we all know that none of our worldviews make any sense to any of us except to the degree we are aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, loving-kind, and joyfully-sharing;
and we all know that none of our worldviews make any sense to any of us except to the degree they help us to translate spiritual Love into feeling thinking speaking acting living.
I vote for agreeing to work together to preserve an strengthen those norms, standards, rules, and laws that keep our government beholden to and serving the citizens of the nation, rather than beholden to and serving those who use the power of government to maintain power.

Author: Bartleby Willard
Editor: Amble Whistletown
Copyright: AM Watson

Stop Trump
Heal democracy
Save the country
A plan a system a spirit
How?

How evil is Donald Trump?
How evil is it to support him?
No, not like that: Donald’s trajectory is towards political evil, so he should not be given power
That is all

Helping Donald Trump get power here and now is what type and degree of evil?
I don’t know
I am so confused
Why would anyone do anything but take this giant weapon away from this reckless selfish fool?

Wake up and smell the coffee
Smells like somebody burnt the coffee
And then put the grounds in a blender
with some shit and some vomit and some piss
And used the “pulse” button
to get all creamy homogenous
And then poured it on everybody’s breakfast cereal

But the kicker is the logic:
“We ran out of milk.
I didn’t have time to go to the store.
I blame you, since it’s just us here, and I’m not perfect but I get up every day and do my level best.”

Wake up and smell the coffee
Smells like somebody forgot to add the water
And so the pot burned
Smells like an explosion of glass
tearing apart the family
leaving blood and guts all over the linoleum floor
And then forgetting about it for a few days
as the bodies decompose in the mild fall weather
and the flies can’t contain their jumping joy
and the cats overcome their five minutes of squeamishness
And everyone digs in for days on end
And the cats are now eating rotten flesh
And their little pukes add a note of acridity to the general putridness

But the kicker is the logic:
“We ran out of milk.
So I didn’t want to use any liquids.
I blame you, since it’s just us here, and I’m not perfect, but I get up every day and I do my level best.”

Pacing cobbles ‘fore a wooden gate
Facing left then right; pacing late
’til he spies a churning cloud of noisy dust
Filling road and meadow like a swarm of crazed locusts

A moonlit night, his lantern bright: An easy catch!
A danger espied in time’s no threat, he must merely fetch
his fellows, rouse the town to lower their defenses
and
hole up a careful minute ’til this violent madness passes

He runs he shouts he points he says look how ominous
Shutters clatter open. “Oh, yeah! Wow! That is obvious!
If we let that in, we may never again choose who comes and goes
Certainty’s a thing for memoirs, but we’ve got enough to know
what must be worked and won
before the rise of the sun.”

And so they spilled out onto the street but someone said
Now, wait, that watchman’s from the other side. Let’s go back to bed!
The throng jostled forward and back until the people got sleepy
and some made learned speeches about how the watchman’s real creepy
They set the meeting time for sun-up and promised an honest debate
Morning came and the orators were ready guide the many, to shift their weight
“I tell you what! They say that a cloud of crime is coming near.
But we all know that that’s not something that can happen here.
I mean, the colors of that beautiful swirling orb are ours —
of course that watchman’s faction would invent this spurious charge!”

They debated as the cloud grew darker larger louder more lethal
But soon Faction A declared Faction B to be the only real evil
And those with no time for politics shrugged their shoulders and said
“Well, he said, she said, in the end, everyone puts truth on its head.
So who can say? Anyway, they’re right about one thing: this doesn’t happen here.”
Faction B trembled. They panicked. They grew desperate to share the fear
that they were certain was sensible to feel.
But there weren’t enough of them to turn the wheels
that release the latch to drop the gate
before the storm enters and it’s anyway too late.

Whose fault?
The ones who lied?
The ones who preferred elaborate lies to the plain truth?
The ones who panicked and couldn’t make their case clear enough?
The ones who “knew” that everyone was lying anyway?
I don’t know.
Maybe they’ll get lucky.
Maybe the storm will die down.
Maybe it’s a mirage.
Maybe it can’t do too much damage anyway.
Maybe.
But
The citizens had one duty
To pay a little attention
To be a little honest with themselves and others
To close the gate when an obvious danger threatened all of them
But I think Faction A is trying to close the gate mostly
on the days when people from Faction B might want to come home
And otherwise, any talk of shutting the gate is clearly just
people from Faction B trying to cheat

Author: BW/AW
Editor: AW/BW
Copyright: AMW

No great country
God chooses no people no nation no country
God chooses every person always every time
The rest is a lie, is boring propaganda, is cruel

Interesting
Now some have sworn under oath before this court that
God has chosen them
God has favored them
They have a special relationship with God
Are you calling their testimony false?
Are you calling these people liars?

I am saying that it is not accurate to say that God chooses anyone or any group more than else
I am saying that there is no particular chosen anyone, that everyone is 100% chosen, and so there can be no extra chosen-ness

Okay, Okay, so that’s what you’re saying
But before this court and before this world please tell us
Who are you
that we should listen
to what you say?

I am you
I am everyone
I am telling you what you already KNOW

It is Saturday, October 5, 2024
We are having trouble with this one. It was begun September 22, 2024.
We’ll publish it now not because it is done or even because we’ve made much progress lately, but just to be able to read it on the website like a regular page on our phones. So we can mull on it from that angle.

Dear citizens of the United States of America,

I believe that whoever you are and whatever your values are, you’re best choice in 2024 is to vote Kamala Harris for President of the United States of America.

I take this position because I believe the following:

(1) Allowing Donald Trump with this GOP to win in 2024 would reward the type of anti-democratic behavior that it is our duty — as referees of our system of government — to discourage, and it would greatly increase the likelihood that Donald Trump’s corruption of his party could spread to a corruption of the whole nation.

And

(2) Liberal democratic republican governments are spiritual goods.

Explanation:

By protecting freedom of speech and an independent media, forbidding unjust imprisonment, setting limits and checks on individual powers and asking the citizens to serve as a final check on madness, corruption, and tyranny in government while together simultaneously growing both their shared conversation and their shared government; liberal democratic republican governments align the goals of their leadership with the goals of their citizens, which helps everyone to effectively share the universal values (aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, and joyfully-sharing), without which none of our worldviews mean anything to any of us.

By allowing us to effectively share the universal values, such governments allow us all to share both community and meaning — which allows us to more effectively share conversation, power, rights, and responsibilities.

Tyrannies are invariably incompetent — at least if you measure the competency of a government by the kind of environment it creates for its citizens. This because tyrannies are not trying to govern well, so much as they are trying to maintain power no matter the costs to their fellow citizens. Leaders in a tyranny are most fundamentally attempting to maintain power, security, wealth, and other “goods” for themselves, their cronies, and their loved ones: If your goal is not first and foremost representing your constituents and making decisions in the best interest of the citizens of the nation, of course you’re not going to manage either of these difficult tasks very well.

Conversely, in a representative form of government with freedom of speech and an independent media, politicians are incentivized to govern competently and in the best interest of everyone. Leaders are incentivized to govern competently and with good will, and to seek win-wins. Because pretty soon these leaders will have to make a case to their constituents while standing in an election that they will have to concede if the majority of the voters decide they did not do a good job in the previous term.

The beauty of a healthy liberal democratic republic is that the goals of the leadership align with the goals of the governed. In a tyranny, one cannot stand up to corruption, madness and evil in government without risking the standing, financial security, health, safety, and freedom of themselves and their loved ones. This creates a negative feedback loop where prestige and power are rewarded to those most willing to lie, cheat, and abuse power; and, by selecting for this behavior, tyrannies select for further and more egregious abuses of power, oppression, and crimes against their own citizens.

In a tyranny, the citizens have to choose between protecting themselves and their loved ones and standing up for what is right; whereas in a healthy liberal democratic republic, the good of the governed and the good of the government are in harmony, and so one is free to be both successful and publicly virtuous. Indeed, a healthy democratic republic creates a virtuous feedback loop where the government selects for honesty, accuracy, competency, good will, and good stewardship; and by rewarding this behavior, the government governs better and wiser and society is kinder, gentler, in more joyful.

The fundamental difference is that the leadership of a liberal democratic republic is incentivized to seek win-wins for the whole nation within an assumption of honesty, professionalism, fair play, good will, and service; while a tyrannical government is incentivized to divide, intimidate, mislead, and confuse their citizens so that they can continue to reward those who help them abuse power and silence, punish, and destroy those who would make it more difficult for them to abuse power.

Stop for a moment to consider how beautiful it is when people do not have to choose between (A) telling the truth and fighting against corruption and injustice and (B) keeping their families safe! Stop for a moment and consider how beautiful it is when the governed and the governing are alike incentivized and empowered to select for honesty, accuracy, competency, and good will!

And stop for a moment to consider how evil it is to pursue a system of government that rewards lying, cheating, stealing, maiming, imprisoning, and murdering in the name of the state; and that actively punishes telling the truth, fighting corruption, and doing your job competently and without bias. And watch yourself in the room where you have to choose between protecting your family and giving them a nice life and fighting for a democracy that is already gone: Watch yourself sin more and more as the “goods” your clamoring for become — through the very incompetence and corruption you are serving — scarcer and scarcer. A

Obviously, the health of any given democratic republic is a thing of degrees, and people find ways to be virtuous even in the most corrupt environments. The relationship between (a) being able to publicly and privately abide by the universal values (aware, honest, clear, accurate, competent, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing) and serve the public good and (b) being able to care for one’s loved ones is not absolute; but these two forms of government represent two distinct paths and the one is clearly preferable to the other. The more corrupt a government, the more people are rewarded for dishonesty and cruelty and incompetent stewardship of the public good. That is why tyrannies feel so upside down: Top-down corruption and crime force make honesty, goodness, and decency life-threatening habits. That is a terrible way to live! Better to be middle class in a healthy democratic republic than an oligarch in Putin’s Russia, beholden to state-sanctioned crime for your money, your safety, and your standing.

And

(3) The citizens of a liberal democratic republic are a critical part of their government. They are like a branch of government. But unlike the other branches, they are only tasked with selecting representatives to govern for them. As such, their most fundamental duty is not debating specific policies, but refereeing the process. They should educate themselves and together grow their shared conversation while they together nudge their government towards the better and away from the worse; but their most fundamental task is ensuring that politicians meet a minimum standard of honesty, accuracy, openness, good will, fair play, and competency; and most fundamentally to serve as a final check on madness, corruption, and evil in government. In this way they incentivize public virtue and actual-helpfulness, thereby creating a place where honesty, good-will, competency, and useful creation is rewarded — the kind of place people want to live in because they can share the universal values (aware, clear, honest, … joyfully-sharing) without which none of their worldviews mean anything to any of them while also doing neat things and providing for themselves and their loved ones. It is so nice to just able to live and speak and move and laugh in a free city in a free land!

Fun Fact: Did you know that Putin is hunting down not just outspoken dissidents, but regular, ordinary Russians who’ve fled his dystopia? [link]

And

(4) In all elections, but particularly in this one, we should not ask not what our politicians can do for us, but what politicians we can meaningfully and productively partner with to help our government protect our shared representative form of government and our shared inalienable human rights — rights which include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

And

(5) A vote for Kamala Harris in the 2024 is our best hope to stop the spread of corruption from Donald Trump to his GOP (which corruption has already largely been accomplished, but can perhaps be to some degree reversed if Donald and this version of the GOP are soundly defeated in November) to our government to us (for the truth is that once a government reaches a tipping point into crime and corruption, more and more people start reasoning that “well, this is just how it is here” and “everybody’s doing it” and “at the end of the day, I have to look out for my family” and so on and so forth as they help to make their world a little darker).

Donald Trump’s lies are pervasive, and often anti-democratic and/or outright hateful. There is ample evidence of anti-democratic and corrupt actions taken by Trump while in office [link]. And we hear every day as Donald Trump promises to abuse the power of the presidency to undermine democracy and the rule of law. And we watch in real time as his mind seems to slip further and further from the kind of mental and emotional coherency that one should require from a world leader. We have hours and hours of testimony from Republican officials from his own administration outlining the steps they took to prevent him from forcing a constitutional crisis while attempting to overturn an election that he had no legitimate reason to question. Today’s GOP has sidelined Republicans who refuse to either cover for or just straight-up echo Donald Trump’s lies, invectives, and not-so-subtle hints about the dark post-democracy future he envisions for us. How easy it was for them to forget their high principles and to slobber all over the ring of the man who would be king!

The GOP’s intra-party discussion ended with a decision to back the man who openly and brazenly tried to steal the 2020 election and who continues to lie about that and everything else while also spreading hateful xenophobic lies. They have chosen the direction of increasing political evil. It is the right and duty of the voters to recognize this crime against our shared government and send them a decisive defeat.

note that machivellian internal politics are corrosive to this form of government, as is the idea that leaders are only supposed to do the will of those who voted for them — fundamental to the success of this form of government is the idea that we are all in this together and we are lucky to have one another and to share this form of government

a politics of gratitude and responsibility

A symphony
that would help
that would help us all to together see things as they really are
both in the deep heart
and here in the scudding surface where we
touch one another
and the deep heart

How God?
How humanity?
How to forward in this moment?
When the world feels foolish, reckless, angry, desperate, flailing
How to write the songs that help here and now?

How to the tell the truth in a way that segues well with the Truth and with how we here and now all together think and feel?

A symphony for the people
A symphony for the stars in the heavens
A symphony for the God in and through it all
A symphony for the people who shine like stars
each a sun lit by the God that lights all with eternal Love

How?
in time?
For time races fore
while we slip our bones and cut down into our own flesh
while we skip our tracks and crash forward into and break with terrible shrieking metal our own selves
How?
How do we together compose
the symphony that weaves us together into the wiser way?

I sing a song of joy
for all the people in the world
I find a song to share
for every boy and every girl

We are our songs of joy
like sunshine warms the yard
We are the joy we share
In a play where everyone’s the star

Let’s sing a song of joy
while the sun is up and we are too
Let’s dance a dance of fun
We’re free ’cause Love is Real is True

And everything will flow along
We never see who wrote the song
that fills our hearts and minds
but we know Its Love by keeping time
with the song of joy
that we sing for every girl and boy

and the grown-ups too.

I sing a song of joy
for all the people in the world
I find a song to share
for every boy and every girl

We sing these songs of joy
in our homes schools stores churches parks
The best treat and funnest toy
As we sing with squirrels, birdies, fishes, even sharks

Let’s sing a song of joy
while the sun is up and we are too
Let’s dance a dance of fun
We’re free ’cause Love is Real is True

And everything will flow along
We’ll never see who wrote the song
that fills our hearts and minds
but we know Its Love by keeping time
with the song of joy
that we sing for every girl and boy

and the grown-ups too.

How can we
What does it take?
How much evidence?

It’s not a matter of wagering, well, he he will or he won’t really go through with it

A free people in a free land automatically fire politicians who
try to steal elections
lie about having elections stolen from them
lie about everything over and over again
threaten to use the Department of Justice to go after political foes
try to use federal funds to bribe another nation’s leaders to dig up dirt on political rivals
rage on about immigrants
repeat mean-spirited and disproven lies about immigrants
A free people in a free land must pay a modicum of attention and choose the adequately-plausible over the fantastical
Otherwise they will find themselves
Stuck in the cruel mud
of leaders who are no longer incentivized to govern well for the whole nation because soon they will have make their case to the people and accept the people’s decision about renewing their contract or not;
but instead,
a leadership that is mostly in the business of oppressing, manipulating, deceiving, and — when push comes to shove — destroying the finances and/or reputations, jailing, and/or outright terminating those organizations and citizens who don’t take the hint that this now a land where you get ahead by serving and submitting to the criminals who maintain and abuse power by routinely committing crimes against their own citizens.

It’s not a matter of wagering, well he will or he won’t really go through with it

if you keep giving the keys of the kingdom to a man who continues to attack the legitimacy of our shared reality and the norms, laws, and standards of our shared democracy,

if you continue to give the keys of the kingdom to that man even after he has managed to silence those within his own party who would speak the truth about what he is doing, as he elevates those who find ways to sugarcoat or outright echo his lies

at some point

he, or someone who has floated into power on his coattails and with his ethos, will really go through with it

That’s why
a free people in a free nation
give an automatic
“Go home and don’t come back” card
to people
who behave
like
Donald Trump
has behaved
and
is behaving
even now

Please wake up, America.
I know it is hard.
I know you are sleepy and grumpy
And you don’t think the government is doing enough for you you you you always you

The truth is there are structural problems
Our representative democracy is not very responsive to the will of the people
It needs work
But fixing a representative democracy requires work, coordination, communication, honesty
A good first step could be together watching this man do and say the things he has said and done
and together
drawing the obvious conclusions:

Donald Trump should not be given more power,
and those who have found a way to make peace with and coddle and raise up him — complete with all he has brought us and continues to bring us: his anti-democratic and mean-spirited lies; his attacks on the peaceful, democratic transfer of power; his rule and dishonest rhetoric; his open abuser-makes-his-way-down-victims-shirt-in-front-of-everyone-to-test-how-far-he-can-go-today-and-get-everyone-ready-for-how-far-he-will-go-tomorrow hints about staying in power forever, fixing elections, and using the federal government to persecute political and media foes —
should be told

NO

THAT DOES NOT WORK HERE!

What works here are protecting those values without which none of our worldviews are meaningful to any of us:
Aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing

What works here is a government of good-will and integrity that governs for all the people, because in a representative government we all rise or fail together — we commit to working with each other and our leadership to find a way forward for everyone. This is not weakness or giving in to “bad people”. This is another fundamental spiritual insight: the Love without which nothing is Okay and with which everything is Okay: That spiritual Love chooses everyone.

We don’t have to agree with everybody on everything; it is enough to agree that our government should remain responsive to the will of the people so that we can together find win-wins: a way forward together.

I will not impose my hippie-dippie

“The Truth is prior to all human ideas and feelings; although some ideas and feelings do a better job of orientating humans within the Love that shines through everything; and because we humans have a tendency to confuse our ideas and feelings about the Truth for the Truth, we should err on the side of minimal dogmatism, and take Jesus at his word when said what the greatest commandment was: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” To my mind, that is a recipe for a mystical religion, based on the never-ending work of trying to stand up better and better within oneself; of trying over and over again to keep yourself centered not on your ideas and feelings — which of course of necessity must translate and therefore to some degree lie about the Love that chooses everyone –, but on that Love Itself; of working every moment to revise the poetry of living the Love that is prior to human feeling, thinking, and acting (that’s why living that Love has to be poetry and not an exact 1:1 science: We humans will not capture the Absolute with our finite tools of thinking, feeling, and acting; and pretending we can is the cause of no end of trouble, of cruelty, of hard hearts, of ready self-satisfied lies, of junk junk the same old boring junk).”

But please don’t impose your notions on me. They aren’t as true as you think they are. And even if they are, in practice they have to be interpreted by mere humans.

We share the universal values. We share the sense that we must think, feel, and act aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind and joyfully sharing. We share the knowledge that to the sense we fail to think/feel/act in this way, we will not make sense to ourselves and cannot travel with ourselves to our own thoughts and actions. And from this shared knowledge, we can all together see that forcing ideas onto feelings of certainty while purposely muddying our thought so as to not have to notice that we are not able to understand, believe in, or even care about these forced idea-feeling pairs that we desperately demand keep us forever safe and forever loved: Well, we can all see that that process amounts to clutching more and more tightly onto notions that mean less and less to us.

Anyway,

We share the universal values.

And we share the sense that a human life can only mean anything to any of us to the degree that that life is centered on and flows off of the spiritual Love that alone Knows what is really going on, what is really preferable, and how we can move with Reality towards the True Good.

And we share the sense that such a Love — well, sometimes we think we find it within and shining through all things, and sometimes we aren’t so sure we find anything but rags of desperate hopes and fears; but always we know that except to the degree we connect our feeling/thinking/acting with such a Love, they are foreign, boring, meaningless, and dead to us; always we know that we can only live in our own lives to the degree we are centered on the Love that choose everyone —

Anyway, what I was saying was that we all share the sense that we need a spiritual Love, but also that we are not a spiritual Love; we are people: we can we hope and work to realize span the spiritual and the mundane; but our ideas and feelings are not Absolute, and making Gods out of our own ideas and feelings is a spiritual, emotional, mental, and practical mistake.

We share the universal values. We share the fundamental sense of a need for a Love that choose everyone and has a place for everyone and helps everyone and does not ever ever tell anyone they aren’t good enough they can get lost they can go to hell. And we share the fundamental humility of knowing that we are not going to be perfect vessels for that Love, even as we know we must work every moment to become better vessels of that Love: we know that that work is the direction of more internal coherency, more internal meaning, more of a starting place from which we can meaningfully steer and travel with our own feeling, thinking and acting.

We share enough common ground to share a government of by and for the people.

But this government needs the people to anchor it in the rules, norms, laws, practices, and standards that make representative government possible: Limits on individual powers, honesty and clarity in debate, openness in government, procedures to deter and limit corruption, regular fair and universally acknowledged elections, freedom of speech and freedom from persecution from the government (I’m talking about real persecution here, not somebody said something that hurt somebody’s feelings or made things kind of awkward; I’m talking about somebody used their power to destroy the fortunes, safety, and peace of those who criticized them).

A liberal democratic republican government is a spiritual good because its public virtues align well with the private virtues we humans need to be meaningful to ourselves. This form of government protects and rewards aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing thinking, feeling, and acting. It supports governing well for all. It supports seeking win-wins. The opposite of a liberal democratic republican government is a tyranny. In a tyranny the government is committed to crime and so to succeed in public life, one must participate in or at least be complicit in the big lie that the fearless leader(s) can do no wrong, as well as the many related lies and crimes that keep the great master(s) in charge of the government they mismanage (because they aren’t even trying to govern well in the sense of finding what’s best for the governed and creating a country where people can thrive) and the government resources they abuse (funneling them, as they must to maintain forever-power, to themselves and their cronies).

There’s no perfection. No government is perfect. But we’re lucky to still have enough power over our government to have a say in what happens here and now. I say let’s use it: Say No, to Donald Trump and those who would put him and his criminal intent in charge of our shared government; and work together to educate ourselves about how we can best organize ourselves and our government better — not make it perfect, but make it more responsive to the will of the people while also making us all better stewards of our government through learning, thinking, sharing, working together.

It is not too late.

It would be good to seize this moment.

Signed,

The same old flunkies
Yeah they never got it right
Yeah they fall apart all over the place
But still
they are humans
creatures of the Light
even them
even these tired fools
who would sign this bold declaration
even they should be loved
and respected
and remembered
in prayers that twinkle like the stars over the water the shakes in the breeze

Editor: BW
Production: AW
Copyright: AMW

I was thinking of cutting to the chase
Something direct and clear, vulnerable but not sniveling
Maybe like
I am desperately lonely, please love me
I don’t know what to do with myself, especially my man-parts and my lonely scared little-boy belly that for some reason only fully opens when what would be a man would make a home
I am mess and would like to collapse upon your round firm breasts soft bending tummy and full fertile fulcrum
No, too needy, right?
So honest as to be dishonest, right?
There must be some subtler art that would allow a gentler start
to me
tunneling through you
into
children sitting at our feet
around the Christmas tree
eager for presents
in a safe and neato world
where we are
some kind of decent
plus
some kind of happy
in
some kind of together

look we could just like go out to dinner once and talk a little
it wouldn’t necessarily mean we have to get married and everything
although I would hope it would
I mean I hope you wouldn’t enter into this dinner lightly
just like a casual easy no pressure thing