History tells us that monsters and monstrous regimes are not sustainable.

The treasonous traitor in chief willfully would NOT call in the national guard to DC on Jan. 6, 2021, when it was desperately needed and being desperately called for by elected officials to quell the violent insurrection he incited, thereby also becoming an active participant in it, as its treason played out.  Yet now, in 2025, he is calling in the national guard to DC, for no reason other than to continue and solidify his fascist takeover. 😠

I have one thing to say to the monster and all those mini-monsters who follow and treasonously, complicitly enable him:  FASCIST REGIMES ARE NOT SUSTAINABLE FOREVER.  You're having your cruel, xenophobic, lawless, oligarchic, treasonous, violent moment but, if history is any guide, pretty soon you'll be flying your Qatari jet to take asylum in Russia.  If you're lucky.  And all those who enable you now will say later that they were "just following orders".  And the people who most vociferously supported you will pretend they never did.  And you will permanently reside in the reviled trash heap of history.

😠

The Coup has Couped

Putin's asset in the White House continues his relentless dismantling of the United States government.

I never thought I'd outlive my beloved country, but I have.  The name is the same but we've been taken over.  And the only "invasion" has not been from all those that 47 has relentlessly engaged in "othering", in dehumanizing, to his base for the last decade.  No, the invasion, as the cliche about horror movies goes, is "coming from inside the house!".  That is why so many Americans do not realize at all that we have undergone a fascist coup.  Congress, on the other hand, must realize it and just consistently turns a complicit and therefore treasonous blind eye, which is how we have gotten to this point.

This point of scooping people up of the street and disappearing them to concentration camps, vaporizing the already obscenely tiny social safety net in this country, all to cement the oligarchy, putting our constitution and rule of law in the shredder, and dismantling the federal government.

Everything may, for now, feel the same to you on a daily basis here in "America", but make no mistake:  you are now in a fascist country.  The coup has couped.  No one has stopped 47 at all the many points he could have been stopped at along this ten-year ride to get here.  And now here we are.  In MAGAmerica.

"State Department is firing more than 1,300 staff on Friday, internal memo says"

I've come up with a name for the new country we are now in, the xenophobia and othering capital of the world: MAGAmerica

MAGA people are sick.  The MAGAt in Chief is selling Alligator Alcatraz "merch".  How sick does one have to be to want to sport a beer koozie or tee shirt that says Alligator Alcatraz?  You are literally sporting your support for a concentration camp, for dehumanization and cruelty.  It is like the sick, antisemitic tee shirts that some of the Jan. 6th seditious insurrectionists sported, saying things regarding the Holocaust that I won't even repeat/give oxygen to on my page.  Sick, dehumanizing, othering.  That's MAGA and MAGAmerica, the name that came to me this weekend for this new, heartless, cruel, terrifying country we find ourselves citizens of.  MAGAmerica killed--murdered--my country, America.

There is nothing to be proud of about Alligator Alcatraz.  NOTHING.  It's a crime against humanity, and totally against American laws aplenty.  Have we learned nothing from slavery, Japanese American internment camps, McCarthyism, and the treatment of Native Americans?  That is all part of our own history here in this country.  Have we learned nothing from the Holocaust?  About othering?  About xenophobia and scapegoating?  About the banality of evil?  EVIDENTLY NOT, if we are kidnapping people, including 4-year-old American citizens with cancer, not affording people any due process, shipping hundreds to a concentration camp in El Salvador, and also creating our own concentration camp meets reality TV show, Alligator Alcatraz, in which to put kidnapped humans and intentionally torture them by surrounding them with the intense heat, fatal-disease-carrying mosquitoes, pythons, alligators and hurricanes of the Everglades, with nothing but a tent between all of the above and the people?

Oh, look honey, we are entering MAGAmerica, see the welcome sign?  Look, there it is:

"Welcome (only no one is, other than white, Evangelical Christians) to MAGAmerica!  We are the xenophobia and othering capital of the world!  Where your tee shirt can say "Alligator Alcatraz", to show your pride in one of our most sensational concentration camps!  Where you can carry a machine gun and not pay taxes, because society is for suckers!  It's every man, woman and child for themselves here, wu hu HUUUUUUUUUUUUU, the south is going to rise again!  47 was sent by God to make everything perfect for "us" by getting rid of any and all "thems", eliminating taxes, and allowing guns galore!  And if this welcome sign is too wordy for you, don't worry, you don't have to learn to read, that's for the "elites", and we have abolished the Department of Education, 'cause who needs it?  Alligator Alcatraz, wu hu HUUUUUUUU!"

Like I said, MAGAts are sick, sick, cruel people.  And they've remade this country in their terrible image.

Velshi piece on MSNBC: "American dystopia: The cruel spectacle of Trump’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’"

No Kings in America

Let's roll.  Creative non-violent resistance has been proven historically to be a profoundly powerful, effective instrument of social change.  Here are my signs for today's No Kings Protest:

#NoKings

As Bernie Sanders often says: It is better to show up, than to give up.

You're going to throw a Senator to the ground in MY country for trying to ask a question to a sociopathic puppy killer up on stage talking about "liberating LA" "from the socialists" "and the "bad leaders"? You're going to unleash a sociopathic, ketamine-fueled oligarch with a chainsaw to parade around on stage while his team of data-breaching little traitors downloads and uploads all our personal data to RUSSIA, and while they simultaneously dismantle our federal government? You are going to tear up the streets of my hometown with tanks today, so the "dear leader" can have an obscene military "parade"? You are unleashing marines to the streets of LA and having them arrest civilians? Yeah, I'll be at the protest, no matter WHAT. 😠

#DammitJim 
#NoKings 
#CreativeNonViolentResistance

Memorial Day

With my eyes closed, I travel back to my Ocean, back through time, I'm a small child.  Yet I'm not, I'm aware that it is now, and I've had all the experiences, all the losses, all the wisdom gained, all the heartbreaks, all the disillusionment, all the clarity, that I have now.  I travel back, with an ache in my heart, and I run down 21st Street to the Boardwalk.  It's amazing to be able to run again, in this dream, down 21st Street, and then feeling and hearing the sandy wooden boards of the boardwalk beneath my bare feet.  And then through the sand on the beach to my Ocean.  I used to call out to the Ocean, once I reached its edge, but this time I don't, my grief is too heavy.  I just stand there.  But the ocean calls to me, as it always did.

Thank God you are still here, I think silently, but it can hear me, I know.  Everything is gone now, on this Memorial Day.  But you are still here, Ocean.  And with my eyes closed I can travel to you, here in Ocean City.  And you are the same, thank God.  But behind me, everything is gone.  Phillip's Crab House is gone, which I can't bear, and which makes me glad that I'm not really, physically, there, because it would be impossible to bear not having their distinct crab spice mixing with and infusing your salt air.  The Surfrider Motel is gone.  My parents are gone.  And, Ocean, now my country is gone, too.

And the Ocean softly replies with breaking waves, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay.  And, as has always struck me and strikes me again:  the Ocean doesn't care.  It's okay, it's okay, it's okay.  Come in, come in, come in.  Or not, or not, or not. It's always struck me that the Ocean doesn't care, really.  Yet we have this very close relationship, and always have, and it does care, in its non-caring way.  The Ocean is the only thing on this earth that is comforting by not caring.  Because it says, it's okay, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here.  It's okay.  I was here before the Surfider was.  I was here before Phillip's was.  I was here before your parents were born.  I was here before you were born.  I was here long before your country was called your country.  I was here before, before, before.  I'm here now, I'll be here for a long, long, long time.  So, do you see, my child, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay?  It's okay, it's okay, it's okay.    

But, Ocean, how can you say that?  Everything is gone.  Everyone is gone.  And nothing is the same but you. And I start to cry then, as I say that to my Ocean.  I weep, as I continue listening to the Ocean's non-caring yet caring comforting communication, which is the same as it ever was.  Come in, come, come, come in.  Come in, my child.  I walk in until it carries me, and my salty tears mix with the salty sea foam.  The Ocean washes my tears away from my face and accepts them as part of itself.  I'm part of my Ocean, right in this particular, wonderful, awesome spot, where I have become one with it since I was a small child.

Please, let me stay here, Ocean, I can't go back.  I can't go back with no parents, no Phillip's, no Surfrider, and no country.  Let me swim out farther, carry me out.  But my Ocean sends me back, go back, go back.  I am still here and I will be here for you, my grief-stricken, grown-up little one, so come back, come back, come back, whenever you need me.  Leave me your tears and I'll hold them, this Memorial Day and always.

Never Again is Now

At sunset today, 4/23/2025, Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel) begins. The best way I know to honor the 6 million Jewish people (and approximately 11 million human beings in total) murdered in the Holocaust is to live the lessons and warnings that the survivors told us, and those still with us continue to tell us: Never again.

Right now, there are still 59 hostages held in dark tunnels by a genocidal terrorist group that has a written creed of wiping out Jews. Said group invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, massacred over 1,200 human beings--men, women, children, and babies in their cribs and parents' arms. They raped people. They massacred multiple generations of entire families, and decimated entire kibbutzim communities. They shot pets dead as a punctuation mark to show that they could. They massacred young people at a peace-centered music festival. The took 251 innocent people hostage, including men, women, children, Holocaust survivors, and BABIES. And all this they justified in their minds and hearts by "othering" Jewish people, just as the Nazis did.

Never again is a warning that means: never think it can't happen again. Never think it can't happen here. Never LET it happen again. Never LET it happen here. Human beings are capable of great acts of selfless love and altruism, of heroism and moving mountains for each other. But human beings are also capable of staggering cruelty and barbarism, and all it takes is othering. Dehumanizing the "other". This is how our own current POTUS rose to power the first time, talking of bans and walls. And the second time, talking about invasions and about immigrants "eating the dogs", which was a lie, but it is what he does: he others, he capitalizes on fear and hate as fuel. Hate is his fuel.

So the only way I can honor the 6 million of my own people and the 11 million human beings in total who were systematically exterminated by the Nazis while most people in Germany looked the other way since those "others" were dehumanized in their minds and hearts is to SPEAK UP when I see it in my own time.

There are 59 of my people right now who are still being tortured and held captive in dark tunnels by a barbaric, ruthless terrorist organization that has othered and kidnapped them. They've now been there for 564 days, since that terrible, tragic day I described above, October 7, 2023. LET MY PEOPLE GO! And in my own country, the POTUS has kidnapped and disappeared hundreds of people to a concentration camp in a foreign country, and is refusing to follow Supreme Court orders, first to turn planes around in the sky, and now to bring at least one specific person back. The hundreds of people he has kidnapped to date have had NO DUE PROCESS, so anything the POTUS and his followers say to try to justify why he did this is completely irrelevant--none of his "othering" is relevant: those kidnapped and sent to a concentration camp in a foreign country have not had due process! BRING THEM BACK!

The best way to honor the victims and survivors of the Holocaust is to learn the lessons of it, to learn what othering and dehumanizing leads to, and to listen to, and heed, the warnings--the tireless, consistent warnings of the survivors: don't think it can't happen again. Don't think it can't happen here. Silence helps the oppressor, never the oppressed. Silence is complicit. Speak up.

#NeverAgainIsNow

#BringThemHomeNow

#LetMyPeopleGo