Gloom and doom

Feel free to skip this post. It’s probably the gloomiest I’ve ever written. Cling to love and beauty if you can. 

Tomorrow we may find out who won the US election (if there is not an endless and fraught appeal process or outright Civil War). It’s not a ball game, but if it were, the blue team would stand for Genocide + Billionaires and the red for Genocide + Billionaires + Fascism. I won’t be celebrating either way. Here is an except from a poem sent to me today:

…empires
are always rising and falling, and whole civilizations
die, they do, they get wiped out, this happens
all the time, it’s just a shock when it happens to your civilization….

An essay by a Buddhist teacher I know and respect expresses how I feel about Harris: “I would have dearly liked to feel more elation voting for our first female BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, or Person of Color] presidential candidate and perhaps President. But her disregard for the enormity of Palestinian suffering is heavy in my heart.”

Mine too. 

Also heavy in my heart is disregard for climate change, wealth-hoarding, and exploitation of poor people by both parties. Corporations cause climate change, which results in immigration, and politicians close the border to immigrants. Corporations grow rich from war, and politicians shut out those disabled by war, along with asylum seekers and refugees. Corporations buy up apartment buildings and set rents so high that people have nowhere to live, while billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Taylor Swift have fleets of carbon-guzzling private jets. Don’t even ask what Musk and Bezos have.

If Republicans win, everything I have worked for all my life, everyone I love and everything I hope for, including freedom for Palestine, will be MORE threatened than if Democrats win. But if Democrats win, corporations and billionaires will still be in charge.