Earlier this week I thought it was done. Our troubles were over because the Rapture was coming! The end of free speech as we know it was no longer an issue. Neither was the fact that the country I love is ruled by a petty, infantile tyrant with no guardrails and a failing brain who will stop at nothing to get his way, including threatening Freedom of Speech.
Like many, I have turned to friends to address my issues with this presidency. I found one who agreed with me, but he pointed out that he predicted all this, well, long ago. It was all written down in his unreleased Prophecies. He gave me permission to share these with you. Provided I also include his self portrait. I hope you find his words as enlightening as I did once I got around the irritating “I told you so” aspect of them.
The Nosedradadamous Prophecies
One national order will arise held up by hands so small— the great land teeters, no more a prize… The world watches the long fall.
The files of justice were flushed— we take the word of ones who lie. The great mouse has hushed, but the loud one doesn’t comply!
A man of law is now the hunted; political rival trumps up charges. The sword of justice is blunted in courtrooms flooded by largesse.
Across the ocean, they are not shy, shaking heads at what they’ve seen, while in the divided land we cry: “Release the files of Epstein!”
My friend says he may release more of his prophecies later on, but he put them through a rigorous editing process, which often makes them come out after the event they prophesy…but he refuses to release unedited work! (I have to kind of respect that.)
I try not to get too political…anymore. And yet, it has not escaped my attention that November 5 is much more frightening to many of us than October 31. In that spirit, I would like to wish you all a Happy Halloween and ask that you please vote this year. Our democracy may or may not be at stake, but just in case, wouldn’t it be nice to say its success or failure was decided by a fair vote?
In case you’d like to watch a mini movie in which I read the poem:
“We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.” —Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, June 2020
I actually don’t think that’s all we’re witnessing. I think our problems run much deeper. Four hundred years deep, dating back to the day the first slave stepped off the ship onto the soil that would one day be the soil of the United States.
Oh where were our visionaries then?
I suppose we could look to our founding fathers. Well, not all of them. But Benjamin Franklin allowed himself to be educated on the slave situation, though he remained pessimistic about integrating Black people into society. However, a thoughtful, intelligent man could not help but be troubled by what he himself saw as “an atrocious debasement of human nature”.
Yet he owned two slaves himself. And Benjamin Franklin was the best white man we had to offer at the time.
Jump ahead a few centuries. On June 16, 2015, Donald J. Trump announced he was running for president. Less than a year later, it was obvious he had the support to win. To the befuddlement and consternation of thoughtful, intelligent people everywhere, Donald J. Trump went on to become president of what was once the greatest nation in the world.
Life went on, but from that moment, the rights of the marginalized were under attack and in danger. As Mattis says, we haven’t had mature leadership. We have had evil leadership. Ignorant leadership. Leadership with the rights and privileges of the rich and powerful and white (and mainly male) prioritized. And our institutions have suffered because so much of them is controlled by that very demographic. It’s hard to stand up for what’s right when your stock portfolio is soaring. It’s hard to be concerned about “the others” when your race/religion/party is on top.
“The founding fathers, in their genius, created a system of three co-equal branches of government and a built-in system of checks and balances. I feel as though that is under assault and is eroding.” —Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, May 2017
Turns out Clapper was right. Our institutions have crumbled. Our checks and balances are nearly gone. And now we have a choice to make. The economy is on the verge of recovering after the blow it was dealt by Trump’s mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis. We haven’t seen the last of COVID-19, but people are learning how to live with the danger. That’s not even the wrong thing to do. We had to adapt. We are strong that way. Where we are weak is remembering the bad times.
Black Lives Matter has a chance for the first time in our history to make a difference. As a Southern White Woman—which I put in capitals because I worry constantly that it defines me to others, but, worse, to myself—I know this is important. It is important to every marginalized human being in our country including women, but it is most important to the Black community, which may finally throw off four hundred years of oppression.
Can we as a nation find the strength to resist a government which would oppress all of us—all but the powerful, white, and rich? Can the powerful, white, and rich find it in themselves to resist the call of more power and more money? Some have. James Mattis was one of them. There have been others.
“We have a moral obligation to continue in our just cause, and we would bring more than shame on ourselves if we don’t. We will not thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals are absent.” —Senator John McCain, October 2017
“Without fear of the consequences and without consideration of the rules of what is politically safe or palatable, we must stop pretending that the degradation of our politics and the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal. They are not normal. Reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior has become excused and countenanced as telling it like it is when it is actually just reckless, outrageous and undignified.” Senator Jeff Flake, October 2017
Can others follow? Can we all come to realize what is wrong is wrong even when it is not in our own interests? I don’t know. In November 2020 I hope I will find out. I pray what has been normalized—whether that has happened over four years or four centuries—will be rejected. Only then will the symbols of freedom we treasure mean anything at all.
Yeah, I said it. Before you go making fun of Generation X’s “High Hopes” dance, take a few notes from your elders. (And maybe read the lyrics of that song, too. It is the Generation X anthem.)
I have not yet decided which Democrat I will vote for in the primary election. I like different aspects of several of them. I wish I could combine all these different aspects into one Super Candidate. Lacking that, I wish that all of the other candidates would get behind one candidate in a kind of Super Coalition and promise to help that person defeat the Great Evil, Donald Trump.
I have High Hopes.
You gotta have High Hopes.
Truth is, I started out my adult life with High Hopes. My generation, who hadn’t yet been disregarded as Generation X—not Boomers or Millenials or even The Silent Generation, but evidently not even worthy of a name—at any rate, my generation was the first to realize we needed to recycle. I remember how proud I was to cart my little blue bin from the apartment I shared with my husband while he was in medical school to the larger blue bins labeled by colors of glass, newspaper or aluminum cans. I was making a difference.
I had High Hopes.
Not many dimes, though. I worked for a tiny newspaper an hour away, covering local news in a town I didn’t live in but grew to care about. I covered politics, police reports, wrote features about interesting folks, even tried my hand at writing about sports (baseball was my favorite, basketball a close second, football killed me).
I was going to make it big at the little newspaper and catch the eye of the bigger ones. I pictured myself eventually writing something that caught the attention of Rolling Stone. It could happen. After a couple of years of it not happening (and late nights at the paper keeping me from my new husband), however, I was tired of commuting. Burning your biography and rewriting your history isn’t all that easy after all. A job at the library of the medical school attracted me, just as jobs at libraries always had. I went back to my roots.
But I still had High Hopes.
Twenty-some years later, I still have high hopes. I still write, and it’s not all romance or kid stuff. I write about my politics and my beliefs and just my thoughts, not because I hope Rolling Stone will take note, but because I know words have a way of getting out there. Sometimes in an article like this one.
Maybe my generation hasn’t changed things. Maybe we aren’t the ones who will save the world. But we have the influence and the power to effect change when we find the one (or ones) who will. We’ve got one more run in us, and it’s going to be a sight to see.
We want everything.
The sun has not yet set on Generation X. We still want it all.
I’ve been struggling with my feelings about the impeachment of Donald Trump. Last night, watching the votes rack up and the opposing sides face off, I felt as if I were torn in half. I never wanted this. But since the day I realized Donald Trump would be our president, I knew it was coming. It was a matter of when. With each of his horrific policies and statements, I wished it would come already. When immigrant children were separated from their families at the border to be placed in group “homes” and “facilities” without protection from God only knows what (death and abuse), I prayed for Donald Trump to be impeached. When he pulled our military out and left our Kurdish allies to bleed and die, I prayed for Donald Trump to be impeached. When Donald Trump overturned the military courts and allowed war crimes to go unpunished, I cursed God for not listening.
And now I am confronted by the reality. Donald Trump is impeached. And every Republican stood behind him, defending the indefensible, turning the truth to fit their own version of reality, spitting in the face of what is right. And I know that when he is acquitted in the Senate by his majority, something precious will die. And all I feel is sad.
When Justice Falls
By Michelle Garren Flye
You’d think I’d be happier, right?
Justice is blind, but Truth lies at her feet.
How can she not see what lies before her?
Come, Justice, set us free from tyranny!
But she can’t hear me above the multitude of lies.
Blind and deafened, she doesn’t see Truth…and stumbles.
You’d think I’d be happy, dancing…
But instead I just want to cry blood and rain.
I want to scream, wake up, stop this!
Please, please…open your eyes.
It’s not a dream, not an illusion—it’s real.
What you grind under your feet doesn’t grow back.
You’d think I’d be happy to tell you I told you so.
I’m not—in truth I never wanted to be right.
I just knew, inescapably and undeniably, that I was.
Now I sit, bowed and broken and old and tired,
At the graveside of ideals with Truth for company.
We wait together—eventually, Justice will fall beside us.
Picture it. Really put yourself there. Stand there on that high school campus in the misty cool November morning. You’re a kid. You didn’t want to go to school but you dragged yourself out of bed. Maybe you had to get there early to take a test you missed last week or to work on plans for the next school dance or maybe you had a club meeting.
Whatever. You’re there. You’re standing on the quad at your high school, maybe talking to a friend. What are you going to do this weekend? Gotta work. But maybe catch a movie after? You’re sixteen and you have your license now. The whole world has opened up to you.
You hear a pop and in the cool fall morning under the open sky, it doesn’t feel important at first. And then you see the small red dot between your friend’s eyes and you feel the warm spray of her blood and nothing is really real except the next pop seconds later and the sting in your shoulder as you spin and fall on the prickly grass.
From there, you try to decide. Lie still, play dead or get up and run while you still can. Another pop and then two more. That’s five. If the movies are right, you get six. But the last one seems to take a while longer. You roll over and look. He’s standing less than twenty feet from you, but the gun is pointed at his own head, not you. You wonder if it’ll work. You’ve heard it’s hard to actually kill yourself that way. You’ve heard of people doing it, losing part of their brain, living the life of a vegetable, or, possibly worse, being horribly deformed for the rest of their lives.
You see his eyes, the hollow, hopeless look there, and you desperately hope that this time it will work.
And the last pop comes and he falls and it’s over. You lay back and tears seep from your eyes as you remember the red dot between your friend’s eyes. It bothers you that you don’t remember her falling, just standing there. Like she’s still standing there above you and not lying on the ground next to you with the back of her head blown out. Who else was shot? They aren’t all dead because you can hear them crying, too. You hear someone retching, coughing. Blood and vomit and tears soak the grass.
And so it happens again. Two lives lost, four more wounded in the time it takes to walk across a room. All because someone had a gun who shouldn’t have had a gun.
Raise your hand if you’ve been in an active shooting situation.
Raise your hand if you know someone who has been in an active shooting situation.
Raise your hand if you’re pretty certain you will soon.
A few days ago, I visited the Grand Canyon. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go, even if it was on my bucket list. The Grand Canyon is a bit of a challenge for someone with even a mild fear of heights, and I definitely have at least that. But I found once I got there that the paths were wide and I could walk on the side away from the canyon and enjoy the view.
My kids were another story entirely. It seemed they were intent on walking as close to the edge as I would allow. I was constantly calling or motioning them back from what seemed like a precipitous edge down which they were sure to fall. My oldest finally looked at me with exasperation and said, “You bring me to a big hole in the ground and tell me to stay away from the big hole in the ground!”
I laughed, but it’s true. I told him to stay away from the hole in the ground because I want to protect him. I don’t want him to fall.
Of course, while we were looking at the big hole in the ground, the United States teetered on the brink of far worse. We put our toes over the very edge of a very dark, deep hole waiting to drown us in war (and don’t fool yourself that it won’t be nuclear). We’re still balancing on the edge of that black pit, but it’s full of our sins just waiting to pull us in. Sins like helpless children held prisoner without decent beds or meals. Environmental regulations rolled back every day in favor of money. A clueless leader who has lost the respect of every nation on earth except those hoping to profit from his ignorance. And our blind eyes turned to all of it.
Remember the feeling of standing on the edge of a pool waiting to plunge in but not quite ready for the cold water to envelop your steaming skin? Remember the feel of the rough concrete beneath your feet as you leaned forward just a little more, spreading your arms for balance so you didn’t fall too soon but you might fall any minute?
Remember the moment your toes finally lost their grip and you plunged in before you were ready and the hopelessness of knowing the icy water would shock your skin and pull you down?
We’re teetering on the edge of something far worse now.
Teetering
By Michelle Garren Flye
Toe slides…
Over the edge…
Arms spread…
Balanced,
But mindful.
Lean a little more—how far can we go?
How far before…
The balance
Slips?
And we
Fall?
Wobbling,
Swaying,
Sliding,
It may be
Fate,
But—
Who will see the plunge and watch us flatten the world?
Today I watched a historic speech given by a great man. Former Special Counsel on the Russia investigation Robert Mueller finally gave us his two cents worth in a speech. And he basically said what he had already written was worth much more.
He’s right. He said: “I’ll make a few remarks about the results of our work, but beyond these few remarks, it is important the office’s written work speak for itself.” In other words, I’m outlining a few points here, but this is basically a book report. Read the book if you want to know what happens.
Later on, he added: “We chose those words carefully and the work speaks for itself.”
Have you ever noticed that when you’re speaking, you might say anything, but when you write it down, you think about it? If you haven’t, you probably don’t write much. Maybe you’re one of those who can write themselves into a corner on a birthday card. But if you write reports of any sort, if you write news stories or blog posts or books, you think about the impact of each word on your reader. And you think about the impact you want to make on your reader.
The written word has a power that the spoken word does not, and it also has a permanence the spoken word usually lacks. I believe Robert Mueller’s words will live on, both in spoken and written form. I also believe it’s time to pay attention to what he has already told us. And have the courage to act accordingly.
I’m editing this to add one more thought. Mr. Mueller’s written words are there for history. If Congress does not act on these words, history will judge them accordingly.
Yesterday I got that text. The one parents all over the United States have been getting. It’s never expected or wanted. It’s not welcome at all. But as of now we’ve done absolutely nothing to stop it.
At 5:51 p.m. my son texted me, “Crap there’s a shooter on campus.”
For the next several hours we texted and called back and forth. I’m lucky. My son was safe in his dorm. His friends were scattered across campus, one in the library that was fired on, another in the student union. Others hunkered down in classrooms and halls. Slowly word got out that the shooter was caught. Buildings were cleared and students were allowed to leave.
At 11:28 p.m. I texted my son again to make sure all was well and he said it was. His roommates were back, having been released from where they’d sheltered. He was going to bed, hungry because the dining hall was closed and he had no food in his room. Hungry but alive and safe. I got to tell him I love him again.
That text is coming for every parent out there. Until our Congress implements sensible gun control measures, we are all in danger of getting it. Until the NRA’s power over us is cast off, every parent sends their kid off to school knowing that it might be their child sending them that text next.
The shooting at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte barely caused a blip on the radar of most politicians and news organizations. By the numbers, the shooting wasn’t that bad, right? Only two people died. Only four people were injured. Only two families had to be notified that their students wouldn’t come home. Only four had to wait in anguish for word that their loved ones were out of surgery.
Can we really judge it by the numbers, though? Because the only number that matters, really, is one. One more school shooting. One more time that lives were ended when common sense gun control could have stopped it. One more time kids texted their parents.
So, if you’re happy with waiting for that text from your kid, go ahead, sit back, relax. This was just one shooting. But it only took one shooting to end the lives of two college students yesterday.
You’ll get that text eventually unless we stop this now.
BREATHE: Michelle Garren-Flye 