The Path Forward

Today is my youngest Childs 50th birthday.  Happy birthday, Heather!

Heads up: A week from today public television will begin a six part, 12 hour, Ken Burns series on the American Revolution.  Check with your local public broadcasting schedule.

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It was a good night for my (Democrat) side on November 4.  My initial thoughts including vote totals are here.

Having said that, the narrative the days following, from people who know the terrain of elections from long experience, has been uniform:  It is no time to rest on your laurels.  The next and even more important election is November 3, 2026.  The prudent person engages NOW, and stays engaged every day.

Engagement doesn’t have to be dramatic.  Endless organizing anthems I’ve heard over the years emphasize “the power of one” – you and me – individuals wherever we live; being part of our community.

Elon Musk and I are equals.  He may have a trillion dollar contract, and the megaphone of “X”, but he and I each have a single vote when the time comes to select our leaders.  His ultimate objective apparently is Mars, for some odd reason.  Have a good trip.  (Here’s a bit about the realities from NASA.)

Personally, I think the 7+ million involved in the “No Kings” demonstrations should be the big story going forward.  These were real people, everywhere, showing up to express concern.

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POSTNOTE: A note about realities.

The U.S. from our beginning has been a competitive sort of place.  In recent history competition seems to have gotten more ridiculous than ever.  We are in a continuous internal Civil War, as deadly as the historical one, 1861-65, except the weaponry is different – killing the opponent by disinformation.  Institutional character assassination, as it were.

Having a divided country might seem like fun to some.  It certainly doesn’t make us stronger, rather it weakens us.  The usual metaphor I use is a bird – which to fly has to have co-functioning and equal left and a right wings that must work seamlessly together for the bird to even fly. Coordination depends on a ‘head’, which for us are leaders at all levels of our society.  For good or ill, we choose the leaders.  We need each other together, sharing responsibility.  Period.  Absent that we become weaker.

Of course, there are endless “yah, buts”, but I think the analogy holds together pretty well.

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The game of winners and losers is not quite as simple as it might seem.

Yesterday for some reason I was thinking back to the “good old days” of WWII (I was only 5 when the war ended, so, no, I’m not an expert!).  First, World War II helped get the U.S. out of the Great Depression, as I suppose it helped Hitler get revenge and bring prosperity to Germany after World War I.  I suppose that is a “benefit” of War.  But war also had a huge cost beyond $$’s, and WWs I and II are huge examples of the failure of war as simple win/lose proposition.

I have an interest in history, and a thought that came to mind yesterday was “The Battle of the Bulge” which is pretty generally acknowledged to be one of the largest and bloodiest single battles fought by the U.S. in WWII.  It is memorable, certainly, but not quite as often remembered officially.

You can easily access the details of the Battle of the Bulge yourself.  The battle went from 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945.  The Germans threw everything at the Allies in a final, and failing, offensive. In the end, the Allies prevailed, albeit at great cost.

About three months later Hitler died in his bunker, at age 56.  Three weeks after that, Germany surrendered.  Victory had been sweet f0r awhile – by 1943 the tide turned.  The cost of war for the Germans was immense, and recovery slow.

My mother was 100% German ancestry.  Her German relations were farm people maybe three hours from “the Bulge”, and at least four men from the family were drafted into German service, and refused to talk about their experiences afterwards.

In 1954, an American relative visited kin in Germany, and below are two evocative photos from the time.

Below is same viewpoint different photo.

I was to this farm, in 1998, and I’m quite certain one of the girls is the relative I stayed with in the 1998 visit.  Today, the farm  is a prosperous place, a dairy operation, more or less a suburb of Essen in the Ruhr Valley, not far from the Rhine and close to the border with the Netherlands.

Memo to extremists: There’s a cautionary note from the post: winning and losing are uncomfortable and absolutely certain companions.  Winning is never permanent; losing seems always a companion – the next step.

It is by no means unusual for desperate reaction when confronted with an uncomfortable truth, as the Nazis were at the end of WWII.  They threw all they had at the enemy, which of course was not enough; the Germans, generally, paid an extremely heavy price over many years.  This same reaction is always a possibility in our present national situation.   The only difference will be the kind of weapons used….

Best we figure out how to live and work together for a better world.

The task is up to all of us.

COMMENTS:

from Norm:

1.  Donnée using food aka SNAP et al as a weapon in his war on democracy.
2. Air traffic slow downs caused in part by President Musk’s as in President Musk’s pre-shutdown slashing and burning of the FAA’s budget cutting down on the  number of air controllers.
3. The determination of Congress not to extended the funding support for Obama Care.
4. The rising costs of food and necessitates under donnée who claimed that he was going to bring down inflation as soon as he returned to office…and the dumb asses who actually believed that and voted for him. It is so darn good to see that they are paying the price for voting for donnée!  As you know, donnée recently claimed that food prices and inflation have gone down under his administration. There does seem to be a disconnect there with reality.
5. That fact that the war rages on in Ukraine in spite of donnée claiming that he would end that war on his first day in office aka “giving Putin whatever in the hell he wants!”
6. Might be good to mention the voters in the Mill City re-elected Frey as part of the effort to return sanity to its city hall and not put its reigns in the hands of the what a country folks.
7. Probably no need to mention that dumb ass childish Code of Conduct Pledge that too many DFL leaders and wanna be leaders have been asked to sign.  It seems like requiring folks to sign that silly COC pledge is just a matter of providing an opportunity for folks to avoid facing the reality of the damage that donnée continues to do to democracy.  And doing that damage, of course, with the full support of Congress and the SCOTUS unabated while exposing their now high in the air bottoms of those politically naive COC pledge signers to being kicked hard again and again.