Blog 1842 – 10.09.2020

Pinocchio

https://drive.google.com/file/d/15TQspilzOlLpkHrXEHM19IlfRl3A5w7v/view?usp=drivesdk

Pinocchio

Today I share another Disney marketed tale, the first of six small books in a set. Much has been made of the wooden marionette sans strings whose wooden nose grew longer with each lie he told. Would that were the case with politicians and Presidents so everyone would immediately know they were being untruthful to us. Sadly as the old joke says it has become too easy to tell when they are lying i.e. their lips are moving.

But unlike Pinocchio they seem to have no Jiminy Cricket conscience to keep them straight and no blue angels other than the Navy jet fighter precision flying team and good as they are at public displays, turning bad puppets or puppet masters into good boys is not part of their repertoire.

For the time being, we like Pinocchio throughout most of the story are stuck with a less than the best lead player. Happily in less than a month we can do something to change that, we can vote the rascal and some of his co-conspirators out, hoping a new crew will do a better job of running this country. Often we forget that we with our vote still get to decide. I was encouraged to hear the other day that over four million people had already voted up from the about 75,000 who had voted at the same time before the 2016 Presidential election and that we are on target to have 65 percent of all registered voters to participate this time. That would be the best voter turnout out since 1928, the article said. High time, I say, that people realized the importance of exercising their franchise.

My dad though he, to my knowledge, never voted for a major Presidential candidate, always casting a protest vote against the two major parties, did vote in every Presidential election and all the others too. I first moved to Houston, Texas from Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1973 to attend college and the first first time that I voted here in 1974 and several times in the years that followed I noted that many Democrats ran unopposed on the ballot, their influence in Texas politics was once that strong. I voted mostly Republican at the time so this was disheartening to me then. In the nineteen eighties that trend reversed completely.

After leaving a fundamentalist religious cult in the late nineteen eighties that like a lot of fundamentalist and evangelical religious groups had been seduced by Republican promises to bring back the 1950’s mythical golden era of American dominance, preeminence, and “moral purity”, I began to lean in a more progressive than conservatives direction.

I have never had and still do not have any desire to go back to the nineteen fifties. Despite the Conservatives hype, it was one of the darker periods in American history with the National Guard having to be called out in Little Rock, Arkansas to desegregate public schools there. I like many steeped in southern myths and traditions was mostly unaware of the systemic and horrific racism that was all around me. Sadly it still exists to a larger degree than many white folks like to admit, while shamefacedly even claiming a reverse discrimination exists and not continued white privilege. To be poor, darker skinned, and female is sadly still to have three important strikes against you. And, Beloved, this ought not to be so, and never should have been. And these terrible ideas still persist because we have allowed and continue to allow puppets and puppet masters to control the reigns of power in this country and around the world.

Presidential candidates and others running against those in office like to ask the question, “is the city, county, country better off or worse since the current occupant took office?” That is really the one question that always needs an honest answer before we vote, and not all that big nosed Pinocchio spin.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

I cast my ballot by mail last week and was thrilled to see ten Democrat candidates for judge on my ballot running unopposed. For my money the Republican Party needs to just go away like the Whigs it replaced in Abraham Lincoln’s day. The party Trump has seduced has all but ruined our democracy. Shame on them and so many of us for letting that happen. It is time to correct that mistake.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11grZyzlXA2tsJhwmYaM1t50waYTXBti6/view?usp=drivesdk

Fool hearted Memory