January 28, 24 degrees
Saturday, Jan. 28, 2017 - 20:43

Uhh, I was going to write a little snarky thing about how I'm more American than other people because I've got two ancestral lines here going back to 1620 and the Mayflower and our glorious new leader is the son of an immigrant as are most of his children and I was going to call them filthy mudbloods and say they should go back to where they came from and it was going to be silly and ironical but -

I'm watching the live feed of the protests going on at JFK airport and it's 1. rad and 2. shocking. What the fuck is going on? Seriously? Fuck Donald Trump. Stories have come out about some of the people detained and it's a fucking travesty, and one of them is someone I know (barely - haven't seen him in probably seven or eight years - I should say I know people who know him) who has WORKED FOR THE U.S. GOVERNMENT AS A TRANSLATOR.

No, let me go back to what I was going to write about, except angrier and snarkier. So some adult baby, whose father was a self-made millionaire, who rode on the coattails of that, who had every possible luxury for himself his entire life, somehow blusters and bullies his way onto televisions and into the White House, and he decides that MY COUNTRY doesn't want immigrants? Fuck you, dude. MY COUNTRY is COMPOSED ALMOST ENTIRELY OF IMMIGRANTS AND DESCENDANTS OF IMMIGRANTS. You are an insecure gnat and I'm more American than you are.

And this right after issuing a monstrous fuck you to the tribes by reinstating the pipeline.

All of this is sadly and infuriatingly ironic.

I have a bachelor's degree in German and had to read and watch quite a few things about the Nazis and the fucking Holocaust and how that shit happened. How did that happen? What were the German people thinking and did they know and did they go along with it or try to resist, etc. So Donald Trump will hire 5,000-6,000 dudes to be "border security guards" and maybe they will just be happy to have a job, maybe these are guys who have been unemployed for a while, so they're grateful to our glorious leader for the jobs, and they'll get guns and some training on how to use those guns, and then he'll send them to Chicago to stop the "carnage" there, and maybe he'll send them into the airports where people are protesting right now, and maybe we'll decide that maybe it's better to not go out and protest because it's not safe and it's not worth it, we have lives and families and we don't want anything to happen, and there are other ways of resisting such as writing letters or postcards or talking with each other quietly in corners, and at least he can't get into our minds, he can't make us believe these awful things he's saying, and they'll bring "civics" back to the schools and we'll be kind of okay with some of that because it's bringing back obedience and discipline and work ethic and things like that, and that's okay, isn't it? And we don't want our kids to get targeted so we tell them to fall in line, and they do, and they learn what they learn, and there won't be an election in four years because we won't have had time by then to figure out how to stop these millions of illegal votes, and without the millions of illegal votes Donald Trump would have won again anyway so he'll just stay in the position a little longer until we figure this out, and anyway there will be the wars with Mexico and China and Chicago and Portland and all the brown countries to deal with and we don't want to change horses midstream, right? And he's not doing so well, he's old and fat and unhealthy but his sons and daughter and son-in-law are just doing what he's asking them to do, they're enacting his orders and he's our elected leader so that's fine, and then a while after that etc.

What I meant to say was that I watched the movie Julia last night because it was Holocaust Remembrance Day and I'm not here to say whether it was a good or bad movie or anything like that but if you watch it there's that scene in Vienna where the mob starts beating people up and throwing them over balconies. It's horrifying.

That was a movie. This is a picture from real life:

Chased by youth armed with clubs, woman fleeing from a "death dealer" whose left leg can be seen at the left-hand edge of the photograph.

That woman got up one day in June or July of 1941 and she got dressed - like we all do, every day - and at some point during that June or July day in 1941 ended up out in the street surrounded by people who hated the idea of her - including the boys behind her - who beat her and made her bleed, who pulled off her clothes, who chased her, and who, after this photo was taken, murdered her. That woman, that person, is dead. The young boys behind her either lived to regret their participation in events like this or they didn't. And those boys were just boys, and there they were holding sticks and running after some woman who's being beaten and murdered. What did those kids do that night? Did they go home and eat dinner with their families? How does this happen? I don't know, but it does happen.

In the reddit discussion about this picture someone says the worst thing is knowing that if they'd been there when it happened they wouldn't have intervened. Now I'd like to think that I'd do something, run up to that woman and put my arms around her and take some of the blows that will come her way and die with her there on the street with my clothes ripped off and my face all bloody - but I probably wouldn't. I'd probably run and hide.

And I know again this is a hysterical entry with a lot of conjecture and I thought about not posting it but I'm posting it. No, bad things like this might not happen, but it's only been a week and so far there are people from other countries who have been working for our government for the last 10 years who have been handcuffed and interrogated in airports by PEOPLE DOING THEIR JOBS at the behest of our glorious new leader. And that's all it takes.