Why “Decapitation” as a title?  See end.  A dew days ago I responded to someone else’s post as follows: “Outstanding. Now if we all can really believe that we are the ones who will make the difference, one person, one action at a time“.  Barbara K, responded to my response: “Richard, I have posted this Marge Piercy poem here a couple of times, but seems fitting to do so again…thinking of “one person, one action at a time”: The Low Road“. It’s worth your time…

Other recent and related posts: 3/6 Aftermath; 3/7 Garrison Keillor; 3/11 Dept of Education; 3/13 Social Security; 3/15 Acquiesce

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Today is St, Patrick’s Day.  Five years ago today, a friend and I were going to meet for breakfast, but the restaurant was unexpectedly closed.  I wrote a bit about it a few days ago in an update to the March 6 post, “Aftermath”.  Here’s what I said:

UPDATE March 9, 2025:  Five years ago, mid-March, 2020, my ‘world’ changed: I think it was March 18, 2020, that public functions in Minnesota closed by state order.  (I had planned to meet a friend for breakfast on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, but the restaurant closed early, and unexpectedly, the previous day.)  As any of us around at that time in history know,  mid-February to mid-March, 2020, was the time of reckoning about Covid-19, for even the most skeptical.  Death was loose among us.  It wasn’t until more than a year later, about May, 2021,  that there was some confidence that we were past the worst of the pandemic and life slowly returned to normal.

[emphasis added] This morning, March 9, 2025, I feel the same as I felt in mid-February, 2020.  Something ominous seems to be on the horizon, and slowly but surely the warning signals are being sent.  Will we listen, is the question I have.  Are we facing a self-imposed political and financial pandemic which will claim lots of victims?  I don’t know, neither do you, but I’m certainly paying attention.

Below is an opportunity to consider what we’re facing at this moment in our history.

Yesterday, a good friend of long-standing, a retired Professor, forwarded a post that came her way from Facebook about what I would call the “Musk faction” presently dominating the American government conversation.

The ‘meat’ of the post, begins at the paragraph which begins “Finally…”.  I have made it more easily readable in pdf form: Follow the Money Feb 9 2025.  I urge you to read this.  Make up your own mind.  Of course, your comments public or private are welcome.

(If you have a Facebook account the entire post from Feb 9, 2025 – one month ago – is likely still accessible here.)

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Of course, all of our routines changed about March 17, 202o, and for a long period of time after.  Everyone has his or her own memories of the impacts of that awful time period which ultimately took over 1,000,000 lives and scarred us in assorted ways forever.

Today, March 17, 2025, I plan to have breakfast with the same friend at the same restaurant, five years later.  The hi-lited paragraph, above, will be on my mind as it has been for some time already, and will continue to be on my mind, by my count 56 days into “the first 100 days” of what is turning out to be the attempted reign of King Donald the First….

I headline this post Decapitation for a specific reason: The obvious intention, it seems to me, is for the Donald Cabal to behead the beast they fallaciously call “the Deep State”, which is everyone of us, and in so doing assume control of the enterprise (which will suddenly become a paradise built in their own image).

The best definition I’ve seen of what we are all facing today was shared with me by a former adversary, then colleague, in 1987.  It was a collection of tactics he had learned in a 1974 organizing workshop in Michigan.  Here it is, from his notes: “P.R. everything. – disrupt – confuse – challenge – display anger.”  There were more similar notes, in all on one side of a single sheet of paper,   The rest are here, if you wish: AFT Organizing Tactics001.  (Don’t get lost in the terminology.  This was about bargaining elections pitting one teachers union against another.  The two competing organizations merged in 1998 and are now known as Education Minnesota.)

I learned of these tactics 13 years after they were used against us.  Then, we saved our scalp by a “Hail Mary”.  We decided to go on the offense, rather than chase the bouncing ball of one charge after another.  In the end, we won a large election easily, but we were nervous till the votes were counted.

The solution today, it seems to me, is for us to exercise the immense power that we have – the 75 million of us who didn’t want the present alternative.  We are, after all, the body which the opposition is trying to kill.  We have a huge amount of unrealized potential, which only we, as individuals, can unleash, one action at a time.  The ball is in our court.  Period.

Have a good St. Patrick’s Day and go to work for a great future.