#Kamala Harris is our best hope of ending this massacre

[reasonsforhope]

This is now a Kamala Harris for President blog btw

Obviously I'll keep posting good news as usual! And I'm going to pull up as much good news and reasons for hope about Kamala Harris's campaign as I can.

[kyndaris]

2024: Fear Leads to Anger, Anger Leads to Hate, Hates Leads to Suffering

Every time when it comes to the end of the year, I'm amazed at what was crammed into just 12 short months. Yet, with two major conflicts in the world, the rising cost of living, and people looking to settle old scores, the world feels like it sits once again at a precipice. Social media, especially, has seen a resurrection of the 'us' versus 'them' discourse with outrage being the sole currency being traded on. Grace and goodness have been tossed aside. Empathy, too, is just a tool to be levied.

But what I've seen most in the headlines and news articles I've perused is an undercurrent of exhaustion. Everybody is tired.

It's a struggle for so many to just survive.

So, to distract y'all from the dismal nature of our own persona lives, here's a recap of the biggest events of the year. First up to bat? Queen Margrethe II of Denmark abdicating the crown where she is to be succeeded by her son, Frederik. Then there was an earthquake in northwest Japan!

In the Nordic regions of Europe, extremely cold weather buffeted the countries that called it home whilst floods persisted in Germany, France and the Netherlands.

In the ongoing Israel and Hamas conflict in the middle east, a deputy Hamas leader was killed in Lebanon in an alleged drone strike (don't worry, we'll return here when Israel escalates and begins targeting Hezbollah later on in the year). At least the International Court of Justice ruled that genocide was probably being carried out in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Meanwhile, the military junta was forced to cede control of the capital of the Kokang region in northeast Myanmar as rebels continued to fight against their oppressors.

There was violence, too, in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, due to a glitch in payroll systems leading to about $100 being docked from the pay of public servants. And worse, Ecuador was plunged into chaos due to increased gang activity revolving around drugs.

Yemen's Houthi rebels also vowed retaliation against the US and the UK following strikes in the area to prevent them from attacking commercial ships trying to reach the Red Sea. And in Senegal, the government delayed their election, cut off the internet and tear-gassed protestors.

All of this was to distract from how Mother Nature, too, was rebelling against her human overlords with bird flu killing thousands of elephant seal pups in the Antarctic peninsula.

In happier news, Japan was the fifth country to land on the moon! Oh, and Greece was the first Orthodox Christian same-sex marriages!

But just to shake up the status quo, King Charles was diagnosed with cancer, there was a severe fire outbreak in the refugee camp in Cox's Bazaar, South Korean doctors resigned en masse due to being overworked and underpaid, and the Palestinian authority government resigned. Of course, a month or two after King Charles was diagnosed with cancer, Kate Middleton was also diagnosed with cancer.

And while I was hoping the Republicans would actually grow a spine, many of the other candidates pulled out of the election race leaving Trump as the sole contender. To fast forward what most people were betting on, he also soundly won the American election in November. Except, of course, Trump's opponent at the end was not incumbent Joe Biden but rather Vice President Kamala Harris (thus shattering any faith I had in humanity and relegating the US down to the bottom of countries I would like to visit in the next four years).

Putin, too, continued on as president of Russia although his hold on the country has been tenuous at best. More so when there was an attack on a Moscow concert hall courtesy of ISIS-K.

In quick succession: there was a massive bridge collapse in Baltimore when a container ship crashed into it, an earthquake in Taiwan and a massacre on Easter in Ecuador. Israel, still trying their best to tarnish whatever goodwill they still had on the world stage, killed seven aid workers trying to help those trapped on Gaza. They also exchanged missile attacks with Iran.

Closer to home for me, there was a mass stabbing at Bondi Junction Westfield shopping centre. Six people were killed, including the attacker. And just to show off how big corporations consistently make misstep after misstep, Qantas' latest travel app revealed the person information for almost all their clients, as well as their flight details!

Elsewhere in the world, as we headed towards June, the Slovakia prime minister was shot and there were mass riots in New Caledonia. The Iranian president was also killed in a helicopter crash. This was later followed up by the Malawi vice president killed in a plane crash.

Further indications of another pandemic brewing on the horizon saw the avian bird flu reaching Antarctica, with even a few cases detected in Australia (leading to brief egg shortages). Oh, and there was also a landslide in the Papua New Guinea, killing hundreds.

More chaos ensued when Trump was found guilty in a hush money trial. Unfortunately, sentencing was delayed due to the Supreme Court finding presidents can be above the law (honestly, why does anyone bother anymore?) Hunter Biden, too, was found guilty of gun charges. And before I forget, the International Court of Justice further ordered Israel to stop their assault on Rafah (which was summarily ignored).

As the world tilted on its axis following the economic struggles that came from a post-pandemic world, we also saw further unrest in Argentina following the passing of radical economic reforms. Tax changes in Kenya also sparked protests. And, to the surprise of many, the Tories were finally ousted as the ruling party of the United Kingdom. Enter Sir Keir Starmer as the new prime minister.

In other parts of the world, there was a failed coup in Bolivia and Masoud Pezeshkian wins the Iran presidential election.

Closer to home, Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, faced court on a tiny island in the Pacific before returning to Australia. And for the first time in a long while, Russian spies were detected stealing defence secrets from our small island nation!

As the months headed towards the latter half of the year, Donald Trump survived not one, but two, assassination attempts. With his flagging numbers and poor showing at the first debate, Biden stepped down as the Democratic candidate and threw his support behind Kamala Harris. Unfortunately, it was not enough to heal a fractured United States of America that was too focused on the past to see the path forward to a better future.

And, to show just how fragile our world is without the conveniences of technology, the Cloudstrike outage had everything from airports to banks shutting down.

With the social contract fraying worldwide, we saw riots in Bangladesh, Venezuela and the United Kingdom (although these were all for different reasons). Heck, there were even protests in Israel as the people wanted their loved ones back instead of the endless back and forth between Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas. But as the conflict in the Middle-East deteriorated further, Lebanon, too, was drawn into it. Several people and thousands injured in pager and radio explosions. Not content to simply send a message, the Israeli Defence Force also launched a strike on Beirut.

Mother Nature, however, was not content to simply have humans duke it out with each other. Severe flooding in Japan saw thousands evacuated. In Spain, too, homes were lost. Heck, there were also two damaging hurricanes in the United States of America as well!

But it was not all doom and gloom! For, in Thailand, the government also saw fit to legalise same-sex marriage! Oh, and King Charles and Queen Camilla came to pay a visit to Australia!

To round out the year, and to show how fractious the world had become, we saw anti-government demonstrators in Pakistan, a no-confidence motion for the French Prime Minister (with Francois Bayrou being appointed after it), antagonisms between the Vice President and President of the Philippines, martial law being declared in South Korea and Syrian rebels toppling the Bashar al-Assad government. In Canada, too, there are rumblings to oust Prime Minister Justin Trudeau!

Of course, nothing else truly mattered to the people except the shooting of the United Healthcare CEO in New York outside his hotel. In a rare alliance between the left and the right (at least in America), people cheered at the prospect of finally taking the fight to the ones who have truly been keeping people down despite record-breaking profits all round.

And so closed 2024.

On a personal level, 2024 hasn't seen much change from the previous years. I've continued to enjoy my video games, read my books, share my musings on the internet and try my hand at posting the stories in my head online. The one thing that was a bit of a drastic change was nuking my personal Discord server (one I shared with my friends and was created during the pandemic) because I couldn't stomach the bad faith arguments employed by people I thought were friends. Especially when they aped comments from the anti-woke crowd for games that weren't even out yet.

While 2025 doesn't look particularly rosy, I'm hopeful people can come together. The cycles of hatred we perpetuate do nothing to improve the current state of things. And if we were to ever stop and think, would anyone who had died want a legacy built on the blood and bones of children and innocents?

That is not to say we must forget the past.

But we must also ask ourselves, what good does it do to carry around a heavy ball of iron of hate for everyone that has wronged you.

Nobody is perfect. A bad day can lead to hurtful comments that last a week, a year or a lifetime for the person you said them to even if you forget it the very next second.

Yet to tiptoe around people, fearing offence is not the solution either.

Of course, it's important to realise the consequences of one's own actions. Nobody intends to do wrong by another (usually). And yet, it happens. Why?

It should come as no surprise that what inspires us to be better people can also drag us down into the depths of depravity. To quote one of my favourite shows in 2024, "Why does anyone commit acts other deem unspeakable? For love."

So, what can we do?

For me, I believe that's slowing down our decision-making and listening. In the end, there is barely any difference between my beliefs and those of the person next to me. It is simply how we internalise the information presented to us that differs.

We, as humans, need to learn patience, resilience and tolerance.

Change takes times. Language evolves.

More importantly: "Sometimes taking a leap forward means leaving a few things behind."

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 19, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters,” wrote Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci. Trump and the Republicans are fighting tooth and nail to retain their hold on power, while President-Elect Joe Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris are quietly trying to move forward.

There are monsters, indeed. Today, New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Zolan Kanno-Youngs reported that Trump held a long meeting at the White House yesterday with his lawyer Rudy Giuliani; disgraced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, whom Trump recently pardoned for lying to the FBI; and Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell. These four are the heart of those insisting—without evidence—that Trump won the 2020 election. They have talked of Trump declaring martial law and holding new elections. In the meeting, Trump apparently asked about appointing Powell as special counsel to investigate voter fraud in the 2020 election.

White House advisers in the room, including White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, pushed back strongly, noting that Powell has yet to prove any of her accusations. Axios journalist Jonathan Swan reported that senior Trump officials think Trump is spending too much time with crackpots who are egging him on to seize power. One told Swan: when Trump is "retweeting threats of putting politicians in jail, and spends his time talking to conspiracy nuts who openly say declaring martial law is no big deal, it’s impossible not to start getting anxious about how this ends."

The country is increasingly ravaged by the pandemic. Friday saw more than 250,000 new infections in a single day. More than 315,000 have died, including 3,611 on Wednesday. More than 128,000 Americans have received the vaccine.

The economy is in recession, but yesterday, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) objected to one-time federal payments of $1200 because he says he’s worried about the deficit. Democrats noted that the Trump administration’s tax cuts for the wealthy and military spending added a projected $4 trillion to the deficit by 2026. Then, just as it seemed both sides had come to an agreement over a coronavirus relief bill, the Republicans scuttled it with a new demand that would rein in the ability of the Federal Reserve to combat the recession. This would take from Biden a key tool. The Republicans seem to be doing their best to undercut the Biden administration so they can regain power in 2022 and 2024.

(Just before midnight tonight, the Senate appears to have reached a compromise. Details are not yet available).

This week, the United States learned of a massive hack on our government and business sector. Intelligence agents as well as Trump's Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, say Russia is behind the attack. Once again, though, Trump refuses to criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin. He claimed that the attack wasn't as bad as the "Fake News Media" says it is, and he suggested the culprit could have been China, rather than Russia. Then, once again, he insisted he won the election.

And yet, if the Trump administration models an assault on our country by a group of oligarchs determined to seize power, the incoming Biden administration is signaling that it takes seriously our future as a true multicultural democracy.

Nothing signals that more than the nomination of Representative Deb Haaland (D-NM) as Secretary of the Interior Department. Haaland is a member of the Laguna Pueblo people who have lived in the land that is now New Mexico for 35 generations. She is the daughter of two military veterans. A single mother who earned a law degree with a young daughter in tow, she was a tribal leader focused on environmentally responsible economic development for the Lagunas before she became a Democratic leader.

Her nomination for Interior carries with it deep symbolism. If confirmed, Haaland will be the first Native American Cabinet secretary and will head the department that, in the nineteenth century, destroyed Indigenous peoples for political leverage.

The United States government initially put management of Indian affairs into the War Department but, in 1849, transferred the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the newly created Department of the Interior. Reformers hoped that putting Indian relations under the control of civilians, rather than military, would lead to fewer wars. But the move opened the way for indigenous people to be swept up in a political system over which they had no control.

In the nineteenth century, as settlers pushed into Indigenous territory, the government took control of that land through treaties that promised the tribes food, clothing, shelter, education, health care, and usually the tools and seeds to become farmers. As well, tribal members usually received a yearly payment of cash. These distributions of goods and money were not payment for the land. They were the terms of the deal. If tribes were to give up the lands on which they depended to survive, their people needed a replacement for their livelihoods.

But here’s where politics came in. Tribes moved onto the reservations, either willingly or by force. In the nineteenth century, those reservations were often large tracts of land. To pick up their food and so on, the Indigenous people would go once or twice a month to the agency, essentially a town on the reservation, usually with a school, a doctor, warehouses, and stores. The agency grew up around the man in charge of the agency: the agent.

With Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior, the agents were political appointees. The U.S. senators of the state in which the reservation was located made their choices and told the president, who then made the appointment. While some of the agents actually tried to do their job, most were put into office to advance the interests of the political party in power. So, they took the money Congress appropriated for the tribe they oversaw, then gave the contracts for the beef, flour, clothing, blankets, and so on, to cronies, who would fulfill the contracts with moldy food and rags, if they bothered to fulfill them at all. They would pocket the rest of the money, using it to help keep their political party in power and themselves in the position of agent.

When tribal leaders complained, lawmakers pointed out—usually quite correctly—that they had appropriated the money required under the treaties. But the system had essentially become a slush fund, and the tribes had no recourse against the corrupt agents except, when they were starving, to go to war. Then the agents called in the troops. Democrat Grover Cleveland tried to clean up the system (not least because it was feeding the Republicans so much money) in 1885-1889, but as soon as Republican Benjamin Harrison took the White House back, he jump-started the old system again.

The corruption was so bad by then that military leaders tried to take the management of Indian Affairs away from the politicians at the Interior Department, furious that politicians caused trouble with the tribes and then soldiers and unoffending Indians died. It looked briefly as if they might manage to do so until the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 ended any illusions that military management would be a better deal for Native Americans than political management.

The Interior Department today manages our natural resources as well as the government’s relationship with Indigenous tribes. Placing Haaland at the head of it is more than simply promoting diversity in government. It is a recognition of 170 years of American history and the perversion of our principles by men who lusted for power. It is a sign that we are finally trying to use the government for the good of everyone.

“A voice like mine has never been a Cabinet secretary or at the head of the Department of Interior,” Haaland tweeted after the announcement. “I’ll be fierce for all of us, our planet, and all of our protected land.”

A new world struggles to be born.

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[reading-writing-revolution]

I'm down...

This is now a Kamala Harris for President blog btw

Obviously I'll keep posting good news as usual! And I'm going to pull up as much good news and reasons for hope about Kamala Harris's campaign as I can.