All thru this terrible year I’ve felt a sense of community here — as if we're holding each others’ hands, being encouraging voices in the darkness that Trump created.

Praying for the sick and terrified, grieving with the bereaved, upholding the weary and fearful. Rejoicing at each step forward — each recovery, each vaccination. Being a community.

All of a sudden in the last few days, our “family” is turning on itself. In multiple posts and OPs we who have managed to work our way thru the distribution labyrinth are being accused of “gloating,” being “disrespectful,” being uncaring of others, hogging medication that should go to others, and of being unconscious of our “white privilege.”

How dare we have even a glimmer of hope and a sliver of relief?

No. Just no. This only serves Trump, who malignantly and maliciously killed at least half a million of our friends and loved ones. He and his family and cronies did this to us, and they did it on purpose.

Turn your wrath toward he who deserves it, turn your energies toward working somehow to make the system work better, and recognize that each person who is protected brings you and others closer to protection as well.

Please.

At the time I joined DU in 2002 I’d recently finished a graduate program in mythological studies.

Before I started that program I’d spent years dealing with an unruly adolescent daughter, which got me to thinking about Demeter and Persephone. Looked at from one point of view — in my case, askance — the daughter had dragged her mother through Hell. I wrote poetry about us.

When I started writing papers it seemed natural to delve deeper into the mythology of Demeter and Persephone, and a very rich mythology it is.

But as with so many goddesses, they are part of a triad, and Hekate is the third one. I asked myself if I wanted to continue with researching the mother-daughter myth and decided to take a different path. Hekate is not a mother, and one of her names is Eldest, because she’s from the Titan brood that predated the Olympians.

So when I came here I took Hekate’s name.

But in deciding to become very politically involved, I also took another road, away from writing about mythology. And that was also Hekatean, for she stands at the road where three ways meet, and as Frost noticed (in talking about only two roads) when you choose a path, you can’t really return from whence you started.

...when 10 just men could not be found.

I have issues with the Old Testament God, but stories like this come to mind today, given all the alleged “believers” there are in US politics. “Believers” who swore an oath on their holy book before their god to uphold the US Constitution.

You may not be a big fan of men having access to prostate exams, but it is part of men’s medical care. You may not be a big fan of prostatectomies, but on occasion, they are necessary. You may not be a big fan of vasectomies, but some men find them necessary.

Don’t judge human beings’ private medical decisions, especially about their reproductive parts.

I spent too much of my life parsing the abortion issue, trying to allow for the “sincerity” of abortion foes. Several years ago I finally, finally realized it was a hopeless endeavor. The RW in particular cares nothing about my level of sincerity, nor do they care about my or any woman's life or health. If they did care they would not be trying to outlaw all forms of contraception. If they did care they would ensure that all children would be fed, housed, and schooled, instead of abandoning them to hunger, poverty, and ignorance.

I understand your inner struggle with the word and concept of abortion. But that uncertainty is the wedge the RW anti-choice fanatics uses against us. I am over 70 and I decided to not even allow that any more. To hell with the RW, and I mean that. To hell with them.

Instead, what I hold to is: I believe women should have full & affordable access to the full range of women’s necessary medical care. Full stop.

Dr Jill cares about others, has real accomplishments to her name, and works hard. Those traits, more than her new title and more than her husband’s title, make her beloved, & make her of public interest (oh, say, to your average magazine editor) now that she has the title.

FLOTUS Michelle Obama had all that and glamor, too. The camera just loved her.

Of course Melania Trump is bitter with envy. She thought adulation on a royal scale came with the title, and it doesn’t. She still doesn’t understand — she never will — she is incapable of it. She is pathetic.

Solzhenitsyn was very popular in the 1960s. I was assigned Lower Depths in college. And so on.

More recently I read a lengthy memoir of a very observant Englishwoman who lived in Russia for about a decade prior to the Crimean War.

There is a common thread among them all: melancholy, misery among the lower classes, gaiety of a sort among the upper classes, and ultimately an all-pervading fear of the government and its spies. The Englishwoman was sent home for her own protection, and her memoir was published anonymously for the protection of everyone she was friends with or had even met while living there.

It was not just about the Tsar. It was not just about Communism. It’s not just Putin. It’s Russia.

...in the law, from what I have heard. This needs to be rectified soon.

Anybody who supports Planned Parenthood and other women’s reproductive rights organizations has known for 40 years about one network of domestic terrorists that has moved way past clinic protests and supports arson, murder, maiming, stalking, and doxxing. Their heroes are sheltered, hidden, and supported when on the run. When in prison they are still treated as heroes and receive visits, gifts, and letters.

The USA PATRIOT ACT (1 & 2) was shocking. Many of us believe it was overreach, but I am not going to argue the case now.

In all sincerity, there were American elements that were simply left out: white Christian men with personal armories and a simmering grudge against society and the federal government. Now, right now, we all just witnessed a political insurrection in which our Capitol was overrun. By these men and their female cohorts. They are fully networked across social media — so much so that there’s even a Proud Boys chapter in Honolulu.

The Legislature needs to name them for what they are — domestic terrorists — and enact a coherent body of laws to deal with them.

...Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong a couple of years ago and has been on an upward trajectory ever since. He’s added tremendous diversity to the staff, is paying attention to news of importance to the many ethnic communities of Los Angeles, and covers the region well. In addition he has once again made it a major newspaper for national and international news.

If I sound like a fan, it’s because I’ve literally been reading the LA Times my whole life, since all I could read was the headlines and the comics section. When the Chandlers sold, it was a blow to watch the quality decline — the new owners decided all they really needed to cover was the city itself and that the city’s major industry was in Hollywood, so they had a big section called The Biz. My gods.

I love what it has become since 2018. I’m not looking for a left-wing slant to my news, I am looking for objectivity, insofar as that is possible, and a humane point of view. I can take it from there.

Remembering the days when it was full of courtiers who paid top dollar just to have him crash their daughters’ weddings. Courtiers and hangers-on who applauded his entrance, who breathlessly awaited his next breach of national security at his dinner table, hoping they would be chosen to shine their cell phone flashlights on the proceedings. Bejewelled women who tolerated his groping with a smile...

Remembering the days when he could swagger forth in his little kingdom, the bright orange El Caudillo del Mar a Lago.

How long before we behold him on the browned golf course bellowing for his daughter, with only a jesting golf caddy for company?

*

Well, I can dream Shakespearian dreams, can’t I?

The guy up the hill from me is a Trumpista so sad he still has his US flag flying upside down — and he’s a medical doctor.

There were 3 people from Beverley Hills who went to the insurrection, and one was a doctor. People arrested and/or spotted in DC run the gamut from real estate agent to school teacher and on in that vein. One in 5 are veterans.

This really worries me. Between the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and 1933 Hitler co-opted enough of all classes of society and was invited right in.

Yeah, a lot of the January 6, 2021 insurrectionists look dumb as a sack of hammers — but a lot of them are not dumb at all. And some of them are in Congress.

ETA link to op-ed I originally read in the LA Times, but this will do
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2021/jan/22/insurrection-was-americas-beer-hall-putsch/