NEWFANE — Nancy Braus's voice is always a welcome call to clarity, a call to the best of what “human” can mean.
The anguish, the questioning, the pain and outrage were what made this piece strong; there was an open-endedness in it, which was good: it was a raging, a questioning, not a prescription for what to do.
She posed the big question: How do we live in a country where 40 percent not only do not apologize for the genocide on which this settler-colonial state is founded, but are ready to do it again in a heartbeat?
How, indeed?
Trump does not scare me; he is just another damaged child, a buffoon, another jerk. What scares me is those 40 percent who support him.
The president's policies are deliberately cruel, mean, and outrageous precisely because cruelty is what appeals to his base, as ends in themselves. The cruelty and outrage are the point. Yet most commentators still try to analyze them as political policies, which diverts us from the truth.
For whatever her flaws, Democratic candidate Marianne Williamson nailed it in the second debate, when she said Trump appeals to the deep, dark psyche of this country, and if the Democrats respond only in a political context, they will be shocked.
This country needs to come face to face with the genocides on which it is built: the murders of the Indigenous and the enslavement of Africans. And, as Williamson said, we need to make real reparations. Until then, this ugly, racist, genocidal foundation will fester and poison, and it will lead to the abyss.
This is why I almost welcome climate disaster, if that will help us crash this ugly, hateful civilization. I want it to end, by whatever means.
Will climate disaster be the way it all comes to an end?
No one knows. But that is why I have a hard time getting enthusiastic about begging the rulers for crumbs, such as more solar, electric cars, etc., which I fear will just be ways to save capitalism, not the Earth, or ways to prolong the agony.