Eternal Vigilance Is the Price We Pay
Jan. 25th, 2025 08:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraThe political news is so awful this morning, I honestly feel shaky.
Trump is suspending all foreign aid except to Israel.
The new Secretary of Defense is straight out of Dr. Strangelove. Any minute now, he will begin ranting about his precious bodily fluids.
Trump is making threatening phone calls to the Danish prime minister. He’s serious about Greenland.
I want to ignore this shit, but I feel like if I do, the universe is gonna begin to tilt and shake like a roller coaster car careening off the tracks.
How do I become an active member of the underground resistance when that resistance, by necessity, has to organize secretly?
###
The foreign aid freeze saves American taxpayers $70 billion a year, which will hardly put a dent in the $1.83 trillion U.S. deficit.
At what point does Trump start beating the drum for a deficit default?
As a private businessman, after all, declaring bankruptcy was his very favorite strategy.
###
Spent a good chunk of yesterday hanging out with Belinda and her six rescue dogs, which was sweet but, at the same time, made me restless.
Came home & fell into the bleakest mood imaginable. Like somebody had turned off the dopamine & serotonin waterlines to my brain.
What is the point of any of this?
How come I have to go on being alive?
Because you have to, sez the not-quite-voice in my brain. Because you were sitting in that bar in Bardo looking at the cosmodemonic equivalent of travel brochures, and this was the destiny you chose.
Distraction is the only way out of such moods.
But I feel as though if I distract myself, if I don’t watch closely, the whole thing is gonna explode.
The Eternal Vigilance of the Child With a Borderline Mother!
###
Meanwhile, I am thinking that after I work out today, I should stop by half dozen drugstores and buy out their stock of morning after pills.
No, morning after pills are not the same thing as mifepristone & misoprostol. But they're over the counter, and I have a feeling when the Big Push comes to drive American fertility levels back up to 1950s standards—it will coalesce around a drive for a federal abortion ban—morning after pills will be in short supply throughout the American South. And women will need them.
Trump is suspending all foreign aid except to Israel.
The new Secretary of Defense is straight out of Dr. Strangelove. Any minute now, he will begin ranting about his precious bodily fluids.
Trump is making threatening phone calls to the Danish prime minister. He’s serious about Greenland.
I want to ignore this shit, but I feel like if I do, the universe is gonna begin to tilt and shake like a roller coaster car careening off the tracks.
How do I become an active member of the underground resistance when that resistance, by necessity, has to organize secretly?
###
The foreign aid freeze saves American taxpayers $70 billion a year, which will hardly put a dent in the $1.83 trillion U.S. deficit.
At what point does Trump start beating the drum for a deficit default?
As a private businessman, after all, declaring bankruptcy was his very favorite strategy.
###
Spent a good chunk of yesterday hanging out with Belinda and her six rescue dogs, which was sweet but, at the same time, made me restless.
Came home & fell into the bleakest mood imaginable. Like somebody had turned off the dopamine & serotonin waterlines to my brain.
What is the point of any of this?
How come I have to go on being alive?
Because you have to, sez the not-quite-voice in my brain. Because you were sitting in that bar in Bardo looking at the cosmodemonic equivalent of travel brochures, and this was the destiny you chose.
Distraction is the only way out of such moods.
But I feel as though if I distract myself, if I don’t watch closely, the whole thing is gonna explode.
The Eternal Vigilance of the Child With a Borderline Mother!
###
Meanwhile, I am thinking that after I work out today, I should stop by half dozen drugstores and buy out their stock of morning after pills.
No, morning after pills are not the same thing as mifepristone & misoprostol. But they're over the counter, and I have a feeling when the Big Push comes to drive American fertility levels back up to 1950s standards—it will coalesce around a drive for a federal abortion ban—morning after pills will be in short supply throughout the American South. And women will need them.
Today in schadenfreude
Date: 2025-01-25 03:34 pm (UTC)The Incumbent has suspended ALL foreign aid (Leave aside that much of that is spent in the US, where the weapons and farm surplus come from) with one BIG exception: Israel. Fuck you Hamas-lovers.
Re: Today in schadenfreude
Date: 2025-01-25 06:03 pm (UTC)weapons and farm surplus
Good point. And, of course, very little of the monetary subsidiaries actually make it to people in need; most of it goes to despots' interior decor and automobile collections.
I should be more worried that the CDC, the NIH, the Food & Drug Administration, the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, et al have been muffled while we're on the brink of an avian flu epidemic that shows promise of jumping to humans.
But somehow the foreign aid suspension is what sticks in my craw.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-26 12:29 am (UTC)I think if you just keep being you, the resistance will find you.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-26 01:24 pm (UTC)If yr activist-y group is up for having long distance members, let me know.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-26 02:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-26 12:52 am (UTC)That's all I got, but I'm keeping on.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-26 01:25 pm (UTC)Sigh...
no subject
Date: 2025-01-26 11:19 am (UTC)We may be Cassandra's children but we're not Cassandra. Our portents will not devour us. Today we live.
Also those doggies look very sweet :-)
Love to you always X
no subject
Date: 2025-01-26 01:26 pm (UTC)Excellent point. 😀
Love to you & R always as well.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-28 01:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-28 02:57 pm (UTC)