What Is and What Should Never Have Been
Project: Pioneer #57, October 20, 2024 Sunday 9am
Giavana, Pia, and I are on another getaway, down south this time. There is some degree of guilt, being away this close to the election. Fear not, however. The work doesn’t stop. I’m down in the trenches more lately, online, fighting hard in the various social locations to help deprogram cult members. My goal is to at least help them see how wrong everything they’re being told is, to sow doubt in their chosen one, to show his rapid decline and lust to see them ruin their lives in his perceived glory. Maybe I’ll get some to reconsider, and at least stay home.
Project: Pioneer is the live weekly reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. Half of all subscription/donation money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses. You can listen to the audio podcast version of this journal at Substack, Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts and others.
Giavana has finished her angel work at this location. We’re enjoying the warmth and a chance to relax for a few extra days, over the weekend. We strolled the downtown main drag, lined with bar after bar blaring live music already at 10am, last night’s drunken puke still not dried on the sidewalks and the partiers already hard at it first thing in the morning. In another time, I’d have been right there with them. That past life pulls for a moment as we walk hand-in-hand. The live music was always my enabler.
Giavana knows, she lived it. She chides me, “We can go in and sit to listen to the band, and you can have a drink.” She used to do things like that early in our life together, and I quickly learned (the hard way) it wasn’t a gesture of kindness—it was a test. I failed the first few before catching on.
Back in the day, we’d wake up after a night of drunken debauchery and compare notes. Often, someone would say, “We did a lot of damage last night.” It was meant rhetorically, but was often true. The damage was always to budgets, relationships, health, reputation. When I’m in an party-to-excess environment like this, it’s not a temptation. It’s a sickening reminder of what I was, what that life was like, and a comfort that it is no more.
I’m still living the nightmare of my big mistake earlier this year. It burns at my core every time I’m forced to think about it. I’m still paying the price for that one mistake, that one-in-a-million chance coincidence that led to all this. I f’d around and found out. I left myself open, a rare thing, and I’m paying the price. I used to write about it here, keeping those post paywalled and semi-private, but couldn’t get past the idea I was pimping out my pain.
When I get hurt that bad, I’m done, whether it’s a relationship or friendship or anything. When I’m hurt like that, even when it’s somewhat my fault, I can’t ever go back. So, it’s easy to keep walking, not take the bait, mostly as well because life is good this way, this non-alcohol sober life is better. Instead of a long day of drinking, likely a bad end to an otherwise good day after passing though the euphoric stage, to waking up sick on an otherwise beautiful day, I feel good 24/7 now. I feel more Christlike, and that’s the goal at this (final) stage of the game.
We visited some historic sites yesterday. There were markers to commemorate the early women’s rights/suffrage movement, well over a hundred years ago. As well, the civil rights movement and all those who fought and died for it. And finally, those countless Americans and others around the world who died fighting fascism and authoritarianism, fighting for basic human freedoms. And yet, here we are, again, all those basic principals threatened by one wannabe dictator.
A third to a half of the country is buying it, too. That’s still very hard to wrap your head around, after all we’ve been through in this world. We never seem to learn, or some seem so ignorant they’re just incapable of learning, of remembering. They fall for the con every time, you can tell by the outlandish spending on merch they don’t seem to be able to afford, otherwise. On a positive note, here we are in hard-core Trumpland, a few weeks before the election, and I don’t believe we’ve seen one Trump hat or shirt or anything. Maybe they’re finally sick of the whining, sick of the drama, sick of the non-stop hate, fear-mongering, and vitriol.
President Kennedy was moving to end the Cold War with the USSR and the Vietnam war when he was assassinated in 1963. That may well have had something to do with it. The military-industrial complex doesn’t play well with enemies of war. As a Democrat, he was a friend of the civil rights movement. Had he lived, he likely would have been reelected, and much of the anti-war and race-related turmoil that comprised the 1960s may not have happened. We would have been on the path to a more peaceful country and world. The focus would have been on space and science, rather than hatred and killing one another for profit.
Hubert Humphrey came close to beating Nixon in 1968. He made mistakes, like not going to Michigan, which cost him the election. He had vowed to end the Vietnam war. Instead, Nixon won, the war raged on for another seven years, and another 22,000 brave American troops died for nothing. As well, we received the typical generous helpings of Republican corruption, scandal, and ruinous economies. That included his thoroughly corrupt vice-president Spiro Agnew, who resigned in disgrace.
In 2000, Al Gore did beat George W Bush, however the by-then corrupt Supreme Court had other ideas, stopping the recount and turning the win over to Bush. If Gore had won, 9/11 may not have happened, saving over 3,000 innocent lives on our own soil. The outgoing Clinton administration warned GW about Al Qaeda, which he promptly ignored. GW dismantled the CIA unit focused on Al Qaeda. Since Saddam Hussein hadn’t threatened Gore’s father, and the evil Cheney-Rumsfeld tandem wouldn’t be in positions of power, we’d not have gone to war in Iraq, saving over 5,000 US service members and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians (not to mention billions of taxpayer dollars).
Gore would have been less likely to believe the false Israeli intelligence fed to us about yellowcake and WMD, as he was by far a more intelligent man than the dim bulb GW was. We probably wouldn’t be enduring the countless deaths and billions spent on climate disasters, as Gore championed and knew full well what the effects of ignoring the damage we were doing to our climate would have. We would not have an even more corrupt Supreme Court—no justices Alito and Roberts.
If Hillary Clinton had listened to
and gone to Michigan, she likely would have beat Trump. Our world-wide pandemic response team would have been in place to detect the threat of COVID-19 earlier and mitigate it. Hundreds of thousands of lives on our soil saved, trillions of tax dollars would have been saved. There would be no Trump $7 trillion debt, including $4 trillion for the tax breaks for his rich friends. The Supreme Court is saved by the appointment of 3-4 non-corrupt justices. No ripping children away from their parents, imprisoning them in horrific conditions, and inspiring a new generation for terrorists lusting to make us, you and me and our loved ones, pay for that.On a happier note, it’s hard to imagine the hellscape we’d be in if Biden hadn’t won in 2020. Thank you, Joe! But we can, and it’s looming in front of us with all the dystopian promises we’re hearing from a sweaty, exhausted, cornered, and desperate Trump.
Of course, that’s all high-level revisionist history. A lot would depend on control of Congress and other factors.
We return to our White House RV pioneer home today, with a very busy schedule. We’re going to check out another remote cabin, and then have to pack up and depart for our winter home. We have to work on this election.
In the meantime, please help fight this any way you can at moveon.org, swingleft.org, or indivisible.org. Let’s not be having to answer to our kids and grandkids when they ask how much of the horror of their lives could have been avoided if we’d done more to elect Kamala Harris in this very moment. Like, today.
“The key to understanding why many Germans supported him lies in the Nazis’ rejection of a rational, factual world.”―Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic
“The real question is: who has the responsibility to uphold human rights? The answer to that is: everyone.”―Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning
“We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”— Justice Louis D. Brandeis
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished—unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”—Voltaire
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”—Benito Mussolini
“We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone, and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.”—Charlie Chaplin
This pioneer journey continues…
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