I was feeling bereft about the election results and the direction the country and the world are going in. I was in anguish about the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the war in Ukraine. I couldn’t understand why people and families and towns and counties and states and nations weren’t doing all they could to slow and reverse global warming. I was so dismayed I barely slept for three days. Then yesterday I was drowsing in the living room and I heard a voice.
“You may not remember steeping in timeless cosmic ferment prior to entering quantum transmogrifier beaming you into just-fertilized egg in mother’s womb. Few do remember. Nevertheless, it happened and I have come to remind you: regardless of the outer machinations of the human species, you are here to carry out the mission you and your co-creators devised for you. Carry on.”
I don’t usually write abut politics, but today I will in response to many of my friends wondering how anyone, let alone a majority of Americans, could vote for such a deplorable person. My answer is to take a little trip down memory lane.
I was thirty-one when my hero Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, another deplorable person. Jimmy, in his one term as President, launched the solar power revolution and might very well have ushered in the age of high-speed rail and other environmental-helping policies had he been re-elected. Jimmy was the only President we’ve ever had who really cared about the environment and made our government care about it, too. He spoke the truth about the need to live within our environmental means and was ousted by the corporate oligarchs who made sure we’d never see the likes of Jimmy as President again.
One of the ways the corporate oligarchs (the so-called 1%) have maintained control of our government since the ouster of Jimmy is to elect Democrats who are Republicans in every way save by party affiliation. The prime example of this in my lifetime is Bill Clinton.
Bill shoved NAFTA through Congress after his Republican predecessor and good friend George Bush Sr. failed repeatedly to do so. NAFTA, the North American Free Trade agreement, virtually overnight wiped out the American automobile industry and hundreds of other manufacturing mainstays of the economy, and this wipe-out finished off the American steel industry. These collapses directly created the Rust Belt (can you say Swing States?) where tens of millions of manufacturing jobs were lost because of NAFTA.
But Clinton was just getting his Republican agenda underway with NAFTA. He then abruptly and cruelly ended Welfare, throwing millions of people into even deeper poverty and fueling the homeless crisis while doing nothing to mitigate the suffering.
As for the environment, when Clinton came into office, the American fleet (all our cars) had a collective MPG (miles per gallon) well over 20 mpg. Clinton then gave massive tax breaks to people buying SUVs, and when he and Al Gore, the famous self-proclaimed environmentalist, left office eight years later the nation’s mpg was less than ten. That’s right. Less than ten miles per gallon. (Can you say huge profits for fossil fuel producers and a vast acceleration in global warming?)
Then for his most egregious act, Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act restricting affiliations between commercial and investment banks, which launched the era of Ponzi Scheme Economics run by the big banks and Goldman Sachs to create the stock market and real estate bubbles that enriched the 1% further. And less than a decade later America and the world suffered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Crash of 2008 that caused over TEN MILLION American families to lose their homes.
And did the great Republican, I mean Democrat, Barack Obama help those ten million American families, roughly 40 million Americans who lost their homes? No. He bailed out the corrupt banks and Goldman Sachs and left those tens of millions in deep trouble. If you think I’m wrongly castigating Obama, remember he KEPT Bush’s Treasury Secretary Timmy Geithner as his Treasury Secretary to oversee the bailing out of the crooks and the abandonment of the American people.
So if you’re still wondering why so many people voted for Trump, please remember it was the Democrats who pushed through NAFTA, ended Welfare, replaced it with nothing, and launched Ponzi Scheme economics, all of which resulted in destroying huge sectors of our economy along with the lives of tens of millions of Americans, many of whom had been union members and loyal Democrats.
I certainly didn’t want Trump to win. If his election wakes people up to what’s really going on in our country that will be great. However, I don’t think it will wake many up because the truth is we the people elected these deplorable people instead of electing Bernie Sanders who would have trounced Trump in 2016, given us Single Payer Healthcare, and birthed a national renaissance as did FDR before him. Instead we ran Clinton 2.0 and roused the ire of all those who Clinton and Obama and the Democrats so terribly wronged and abandoned. And Trump tapped the anger of those who suffered under Clinton and Obama, and tapped their children’s inherited anger, too.
And that, I think, is a big part of why so many people could have voted for such a deplorable person.
We recently changed the name of our two-acre place from Skunk Hollow to Hummingbird Hollow. Why the name change? First an anniversary update.
As reported on October 17, I turned 75 on October 17. No, that’s not a typo. Then on October 26, I celebrated what would have been my mother’s 102nd birthday. On October 31 I celebrated the 19th anniversary of my moving to Mendocino. I’ve now lived here longer than anywhere in my life. Then came the national election that made me glad I live in California. And on November 10, Marcia and I will celebrate our 17th wedding anniversary.
Fun fact: Marcia and I have forgotten our anniversary twice now in those seventeen years. We’re just so busy.
Now back to the name change. What didn’t we like about Skunk Hollow?
Well… when we first moved here to these two acres a mile inland from the coast (making it impossible to grow tomatoes, eggplant, or corn) we were delighted to find a family of foxes sharing the land with us. There was a mama fox, a papa fox, and every year they had kits, sometimes two, sometimes three. So cute!
Thus when we made our first batch of blackberry jam and I made the labels for the jars, we decided to call our little dip in the terrain Fox Hollow. And for some years that was what we called our place.
Then… no more foxes. We still used Fox Hollow on our labels for a couple more years, but we began to feel disingenuous referencing an animal that didn’t live here anymore. This feeling coincided with a plethora of skunks traversing our deck every day at dusk, these handsome beings stopping to drink from the water bowl in front of our statue of Ganesh.
And since we didn’t want to call our place Raven Hollow or Deer Hollow, though we have lots of both, we chose Skunk Hollow for our new name despite the stereotypical and only sometimes correct belief that skunks stink.
And then the foxes returned! For a year. So we switched back to Fox Hollow. And then the foxes vanished and so did the skunks.
Which brings us to the story of our lemon trees, two of which grow magnificently in two big tubs outside my office windows. These two lemon trees were some of the first trees I planted when we moved here twelve years ago. And because I planted those lemon trees (and two others) in the ground rife with redwood roots as all our ground is, they did not thrive. In fact, two of the lemon trees simply died and the other two grew into wimpy little bushes that never made fruit, though I lavished them with food and water and sweet words.
Finally after seven years I heeded the advice of local gardeners who had warned me I could never grow lemon trees in the ground here. I dug up the little survivors and transferred them into hundred-gallon tubs filled with beautiful soil and they grew into big robust specimens, set hundreds of blossoms, and made lots of glorious delicious lemons and became the favorite haunt of local honeybees.
And then the honeybees disappeared. Pollinators became scarce, lemons few. But we still got some lemons every year because one breed of pollinator did not disappear: hummingbirds.
Every day, several times a day, hummingbirds visit the lemon trees to sip from the few or many blossoms, depending on the time of year and the exigencies of fate. And this year, for the first time in five years, honeybees have been visiting the blossoms and there are dozens of juicy lemons to be had.
Not long ago, I took a break from writing and went out to the orchard to see how the apples were faring, and a great cloud of ravens rose from the trees, the ravens having pillaged those trees and carried away hundreds of the delectable orbs.
We saved enough apples to make two big batches of Apple Yum (delicious apple sauce), and the labels this time, for the first time in our tenure here, read Hummingbird Hollow Apple Yum.
The 2024 election is over. Donald Trump won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College totals and will be the next President of the United States. And what first came to mind when I woke into this new reality was that when I was eighteen and nineteen and twenty I was deeply involved in the anti-war movement (The Vietnam War), and had I been a college student in 2024 I would surely have been among those protesting the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. And though I’m Jewish, I would never have voted for anyone supporting Israel’s crime against humanity.
I doubt Trump won because of Kamala Harris’s solidarity with Biden in supporting the Israeli slaughter of tens of thousands of defenseless people, but I do feel there is a karmic connection to that ongoing genocide and Harris’s loss.
In my musings this morning about the election, I was reminded of something I wrote and posted five years ago when I was supporting Bernie Sanders for President. I thought I’d include that post herein, recalling that it was the strategy of the Democratic Party to make sure Bernie did not win the nomination for President.
May 2, 2020
Bernie and Precious Dream
I’m voting for Bernie Sanders and contributing to his campaign because he is the second person in my lifetime (Jimmy Carter the first) who wants what I want for our society and the world and has a chance, however slim, of becoming President of the United States. I hope you vote for him, too.
Twenty years ago, I wrote a song called ‘Precious Dream’. Marcia and I recorded the song on our CD So Not Jazz ten years ago. When the CD came out, we gave some concerts and ended each of our shows with a performance of ‘Precious Dream’.
Many people said the song would make a good campaign song for a dream candidate yet to materialize. And now Bernie Sanders has materialized and here’s hoping our precious dream can at least start to come true.
Yesterday was Halloween. In a few days there will be an election I believe will either mark the beginning of a major disaster for America and the world, or will give us one more chance to make some substantive changes to help the country and the world move back from the brink of war and unimaginably terrible climate disasters.
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I’ve been giving a little money to candidates I admire who are involved in very close elections for House seats and Senate seats around the country. When you give candidates money online with a credit card, you hear from those candidates again and again asking for more money. And because I feel this election is so crucial, I gave a little more money to those candidates, hoping to make a difference in the outcomes of their races. I’ve now given way more than I intended to, but then I’ve always been a soft touch when it comes to trying to help save the world.
In their follow-up pleas for more money, much is revealed about these candidates and the states where they live. It seems all the people I’ve given to are decent, hardworking, patient, open, idealistic, intelligent, and dedicated to helping everyone, not just wealthy people. None of the candidates I support are racist misogynists, and all of them are running against racist misogynists being funded by… you guessed it… racist misogynist billionaires.
The choice has never been clearer, yet apparently lots of people want to be represented by racist misogynists who say climate change is a hoax and all our problems are caused by women, people of color, gay people, poor people, and environmentalists.
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My mother was a devout member of The League of Women Voters and was the first person to point out to me that polls do not measure voter turnout, which is the main determinant of who wins or loses elections. When turnout is big, the kinds of candidates I’ve given money to tend to win. When fewer people vote, racist misogynists funded by billionaires tend to win.
This is all to say I hope you’ll vote and encourage your friends (especially those in swing states) to vote for decent, hardworking, patient, open, idealistic, intelligent people dedicated to helping everyone, and not to vote for horrid self-serving schmucks funded by… you guessed it… horrid self-serving schmucks.
