This Web Of Life (American Judgment Day, Six)

Look at the shoes you're filling
Look at the blood we're spilling
Look at the world we're killing
The way we've always done before
Look in the doubt we've wallowed
Look at the leaders we've followed
Look at the lies we've swallowed
And I don't want to hear no more

My hands are tied
For all I've seen has changed my mind
But still the wars go on as the years go by
With no love of God or human rights
'Cause all these dreams are swept aside
By bloody hands of the hypnotized
Who carry the cross of homicide
And history bears the scars of our civil wars.

~Guns N' Roses, Civil War, from the album Use Your Illusion II.

...

Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money. ~Alanis Obomsawin, Native American activist and filmmaker.

...

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

This was Alaska

He was a rescue ferret who I cared for in 2019 and 2020.

He had become disabled and his person was no longer willing or able to care for him. He had a soft-tissue injury and his hind legs didn't work very well, I first wrote about him in November of 2019.

I gave him the best life that I could, he got big and fat, because he ate a lot and literally couldn't burn it all off fast enough even when zipping around in his little ferret-cart. He made friends and was happy, but he never regained full mobility. He passed away from what turned out to be Cardiomyopathy in the late summer of 2020. 

Why do I bring this up? Because that's what the American ideal, the American experiment basically is right now...a rescue ferret.

As the mad whirl of media attention and spin of all things Trump begins...with the media positively gleeful about having all the chaos to cover...America isn't just in the wilderness. No, America is like an old gray rescue ferret huddled up in a cage at some old guy's ferret rescue  with a bunch of others like itself, sleeping in a pile in the corner, waiting for the food and water bowls to get filled and to be let out for playtime, hoping that somebody...anybody...other than the kind old man that comes and takes care of it might take the time to give a damn.

And worse, American Christianity, Democracy, and a whole bunch of the other ideals that we claim to hold so dear are right the fuck there with it, like so many old ferrets sleeping in the same pile...worried that they don't become the sole purview of the kind of people who collect things like old gray rescue ferrets and discarded ideals.

And there's precedent, I count an actual Communist among my ferret-connected friends, too. Not a bad guy, but I wouldn't let him run the economy either.

It's like as far as the goddamn Clicks-and-Likes-based media is concerned, there never was a Democratic Party or a Kamala Harris or even an American Experiment, in the eternal Now of this fucking endless political silly season we seem to be stuck in, this Groundhog Day of Idiocracy, there never even was a Jesus Christ. 

They say "God wills it" they mean Trump.

Yes, these people are that fucked in the head and addicted to blowing the damn narcissist.

It's all Trump, all the time, and I'm goddamned tired of it already. But you know what I'm even more tired of??

The usual head-ass Democratic takes. Like, motherfucker, 20 million of your own damn people didn't fucking show up. You wanna know why I'm comparing America and its ideals to a bunch of forgotten rescue ferrets?

That's fucking why, that right there. Like, do you fuckers believe anything at all?? Kamala Harris called Republicans weird and said "We're not going back" and these idiots stopped her?? It was a line of attack that worked, for fuck's sake!

The people, for the most part, with the most to lose here...couldn't be bothered to get off the couch.

You wanna know why American Christianity for the most part gets defined by a bunch of fucking Chuds who...when some person actually reads the Bible to them (cuz they don't read it on their own) call the Lord's Word, including the Sermon On The Mount, a bunch of "Woke" and "Liberal" propaganda??

Because far too many allegedly decent goddamn people didn't correct their behavior for too long.

So now they think God must be like the fucking Empire from Star Wars or some bullshit.

Now, I get it, some of these people are or at least appear to be dangerous or they're behaviorally and otherwise obnoxious and all a lot of people want to do is get away. Trust me, I've been there. I was married to that shit, yo.

You would think, then, that voting against this crap (Secret ballot and all!) would therefore be the path of least resistance to at least keep this shit away from yourself, your kids, your LGBT neighbors, POC, etc.

But too many of us couldn't be bothered, and now we're probably literally going to have to fight...to survive, let alone reestablish America in some recognizable form...and they won't give us a choice.

It's basically fight or they're just going to kill us anyway. You cannot appeal to the conscience of somebody who ain't got one. 

You'd be amazed (if you'd paid the least bit of attention) at just how much time these fucking people spend talking about all this stuff. These motherfuckers spend more time thinking about gay stuff than actual gay people do. It's creepy and it's sick and it's very, very goddamned weird.

Modern Evangelical "Christianity" doesn't give a shit about Jesus Christ.

And these fucking people think Trump is going to give them everything that they want.

Trump has basically become these fucking people's God. Hell, they've fucking said so.

Yes, I'm a former Christian and No, I'll never understand it. Why a bunch of fucking Baptists and Pentecostals think that a debased old racist former Democrat atheist who only glommed onto the idea of "God" when he thought it might be him will somehow make America more conservative or more "Christian" I'll never know.

I can't fit my head far enough up my own ass to see that point of view.

And when they don't get it, when Trump simply cannot be their imagined Right-wing Santa Claus, giving them treats and the rest of us nothing but shit, when the rest of the world refuses to put up with Trump and the Republican Party's collective bullshit and these fucking assholes get nothing but higher prices and the scorn of the rest of America and the whole damned world for their trouble, the religious nuts (who spent the most time sucking off the damned narcissist in the first place) aren't going to blame him...they're going to blame their fellow Americans.

And if we haven't all started shooting at each other by then, well, guess what? 

If you want to live you're going to have to shoot back when they start shooting at you.

Lest you forget "Deus Vult" (God Wills It, in Latin) was the Crusaders slogan and excuse for mass murder. Don't think people like Pete Hegseth wouldn't act like that again, if they thought they could get away with it. Among other things, motherfucker's cheated on all of his wives and got a fellow Fox News employee pregnant...all while basically having "Jesus Loves Me" tattooed on his junk. Do you think that fool has any scruples whatever??

This crap is getting old, here and around the world.

The rest of the world doesn't have to put up with our shit, my dudes, just like I don't have to put up with yours.

We need to start telling these fucking people "No" America.

And we need to mean it.

You cannot reason with people who do not think you have the right to exist.

Instead of discarding our ideals or locking them in a cage when they're inconvenient or not "entertaining" anymore, we need to fight for those ideals.

Otherwise, why have them??

Look, even if these fucking people succeed in starting a war and breaking America and trashing the country and we go down like the Soviet Union did and start over with a bunch of smaller Republics...well, guess what? 

Somebody has got to be our Ukrainians. Sooner or later somebody has got to stand up.

It's a law of nature.

So get off your ass and get after it, It might as well be us, right?? 

Otherwise, what's even the goddamn point??

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

You either believe in the future, and the promises our country already made to us, or you don't.

771 days between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Fall of the Soviet Union. Our timeframe will be similar...if we let it.

But we can choose not to.

We can say "No."

We can fight.

We can give our founding ideals a proper place and care for them appropriately, and live by them, you can take that rescue ferret home and give it a good life.

We can stitch this web of life back together.

Yes We Can.

Слава Україна!

Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and the overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this ancient Holy Land, the House of Abraham, Muhammad, and all the other Prophets of the Holy Scriptures. For the past week, I have been utterly speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed all around me by people of all colors...

You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This was not too difficult for me. Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.

During the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept in the same bed (or on the same rug) -- while praying to the same God -- with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. And in the words and in the actions and in the deeds of the "white" Muslims, I felt the same sincerity that I felt among the black African Muslims of Nigeria, Sudan, and Ghana. We were truly all the same (brothers) -- because their belief in one God had removed the "white" from their minds, the 'white' from their behavior, and the 'white' from their attitude. I could see from this, that perhaps if white Americans could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man -- and cease to measure, and hinder, and harm others in terms of their "differences" in color.

With racism plaguing America like an incurable cancer, the so-called "Christian" white American heart should be more receptive to a proven solution to such a destructive problem. Perhaps it could be in time to save America from imminent disaster -- the same destruction brought upon Germany by racism that eventually destroyed the Germans themselves.

They asked me what about the Hajj had impressed me the most. . . . I said, "The brotherhood! The people of all races, color, from all over the world coming together as one! It has proved to me the power of the One God. . . . All ate as one, and slept as one. Everything about the pilgrimage atmosphere accented the Oneness of Man under One God. 

~Malcolm X, Letter following the Hajj.

Five

You were just babies then!" she said.
"What?" I said.
"You were just babies in the war— like the ones upstairs!"
I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.
"But you're not going to write it that way, are you." This wasn't a question. It was an accusation.
"I — I don't know," I said.
"Well I know," she said. "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be portrayed in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs." So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.
So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: "Mary," I said, "I don't think this book of mine is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.
"I tell you what," I said, "I'll call it The Children's Crusade." She was my friend after that.

~From the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut 

Original Post

This is Loki, my current rescue ferret. He deserves a better world to live in than this shit.

Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. ~Chief Seattle.