We, the Unchosen
We did not grow up to be the President. We did not become pro sports legends, movie stars or astronauts. We have not won Nobel Prizes. Those dreams of greatness faded with adulthood and responsibilities. We chose families and the work-a-day life. We are the Unchosen. We are America.
My father belonged to the Greatest Generation, the one that saved the world from totalitarian rule by defeating Hitler and the Nazis. World War II claimed the lives of 419,000 Americans (60 million worldwide). All but a sliver of those were also Unchosen.
The perilous threats we face today overshadow those of my father’s generation. The global cost of worsening Climate Change, in lives and property, continues to mount. American oligarchs like Charles Koch are lining the pockets of Trump Republicans to make certain their income streams are uninterrupted by mitigation measures. Other oligarchs, likewise, make similar investments to avoid being taxed, thereby, assuring government coffers are too empty to take effective action on this extinction level event that is climate change.
The conservative U.S. Supreme Court, having diminished women’s control over their own bodies, blunted government efforts to allay our climate crisis, reduced efforts to control deadly weapons, and opened a breach in the wall between church and state, are prepared to vacate rights to contraception and same sex marriage, while allowing wholesale discrimination against certain minorities.
A re-elected Trump would hold Putin and Xi in such high esteem that, one could easily imagine him ceding Ukraine to the Russians and gifting Taiwan to China in exchange for one-third of the world pie, the triumvirate of nuclear nations, crushing democracies and ousting tinhorn dictators around the world along the way.
In November of 2020, we, the Unchosen, manned the polling ramparts and turned out in record numbers to fight for our seat at the table. We carried the day and took our seat.
Again, the forces of darkness are amassing for the next battle, armed with legalities and loopholes meant to strike down as many of our voting numbers as possible, while scaring up more opposing voters with inflation, immigration, and socialism.
Whenever Trump endorsed candidates declare that the 2020 election was stolen, they are not promoting the Big Lie. They are sounding a dog whistle to publicly acknowledge their ongoing seditious conspiracy and commit to installing Trump or a protégé as President following election 2024, by whatever means necessary. If his candidates are elected this November, they will be poised to install their candidate regardless of the outcome at the polls. If they succeed, 2024 will be the last free election in America.
We must defeat them all, even if it means escalating the civil war that may have already begun.
If we are victorious in this November’s election, we will further advance the transformation that will save us all. If we persist, triumph after triumph in election after election, through the darkness in the decades to come, we will reach the dawn of that better day, a democratic America, having averted the climate catastrophe. We, the Unchosen, will be hailed as the Greatest Generations to have ever lived.
If we fail, there will be no one left alive to notice.
We, the Unchosen, are the only heroes we have. We the are the heroes we need! You may not be a Democrat. You may not like what the Democrats stand for, but this November, they, alone, stand between us and the abyss. Choose wisely.
Vote!
The Chicken or the Egg- The impact of Roe V Wade and other recent Supreme Court decisions
When you look at the picture above, what do you see? The abortion abolitionists believe that a separate human being is created as soon as a human ovum is fertilized by human sperm. They see a chicken. The rest of us see an egg. What is this viewpoint based on?
The Catholic Church has always been opposed abortion. But, in 1869, in response to it being made legal in a few states, Pope Pius IX erased from Catholic doctrine the point at which a fetus was thought to become viable, thereby, declaring a separate human life sacred from the moment of conception, thus making church punishment for abortion uniform from conception to birth. The Evangelical Christian Right has taken up this same cause stemming from the first Vatican Council.
While researching this, I found and read several websites that use the Bible to justify their dogma. “Bible Verses About Abortion,” like related sites, takes quotations from the Old Testament. The passages selected as proof of their concept apply only if you already believe this to be true. Otherwise, the list of anti-abortion quotations contains a few that say a ‘woman is cursed if she is not a virgin until marriage’ or is ‘unfaithful after marriage.’ Some declare God’s authority over man. Many remaining arguments make a case for specific lives having existed before birth, before pregnancy, therefore, somewhere other than in the womb. Opposing this viewpoint “What Does the Bible Really Say About Abortion?” is one of many sites with multiple Biblical samplings of God having utter disregard for what is in the womb.
Nothing in my past as a Methodist minister and evangelist or more objective readings of the Bible since leaving, supports the idea that a person separate from the mother comes into existence at conception. The findings are similar if one reads the holy books of other major world religions: Judaism, Islam, Hindu, and Buddhism. To the religion, including Christianity, new life begins with the first breath.
The belief that a separate life begins at conception is fundamentally a Christian religious belief. It is supported only by rulings from the first Vatican Council by Pius IX, declared infallible at this meeting, and by cherry picking and interpreting the Bible to justify what is already a part of their belief system.
Another stance taken by the evangelical wing of the Pro-Life caucus is that we are living in the End Times when God, in the form of Jesus Christ, will return from the sky and take them away from the global problems they helped create to a place where everything is perfect. They call this the Rapture. Many adherents are actively trying to precipitate that.
This Pro-Life bloc is homogeneously integrated with the Pro-Gun camp that believes that every living child, at as early an age as possible, be allowed to have guns because it is one’s Constitutional right. These two factions intersect deeply with a third coterie of staunch believers; the Climate Change Hoax group.
All three were the subjects of recent Supreme Court decisions.
The relationship between these three sects looks a bit like overlapping circles:
The red circle represents Pro-Life advocates. The blue circle represents Pro-Gun adherents. The green circle represents Climate Change Hoax devotees. The yellow, purple, and turquois areas represent members sharing convictions with two adjacent doctrines. The large black area in the middle is where the three circles converge. It is comprised of disciples of all three perspectives.
There are no serious problems confronting humanity that do not have their roots in over population. The first contingent is promoting more population in the name of a God who is expected to rescue them from its effects.
Meanwhile, gun violence and dealing with the aftermath have become a daily ordeal in America. This second concurrent division will not be happy until we are all armed to the teeth because, of course, the answer is more guns.
Our ongoing, pervasive Climate Crisis, an offspring of over population, threatens to destroy civilization and, perhaps, drive us to extinction. This third synonymous faction adamantly refuses to address this because… What problem?
Collectively they are creating a hurricane of violence, death, and destruction across America. Referring to this cabal as Pro-Life is a contradiction in terms.
The six Justices of the Supreme Court who handed down these decisions, like Pro-Life’s use of the Bible, selectively chose text in the Constitution to support what they already believed. By their recent actions, all are residents of that black hole.
Unless we, as a nation, can overcome this cabal and move toward real solutions to the global climate catastrophe, we stand little chance of surviving because we will be huddled in our basements in our red robes and white bonnets cuddled together amid of a dozen or so children we can no longer feed to avoid being shot.