“I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” To General John Kelly at his son’s Arlington graveside.

I just had to say it. That is all.

*I don’t get it. What was in it for them?*

That is what is meant by “transactional.” The Dotard understands nothing at all outside himself, and nothing outside of buying and selling.

Not honor, or duty, or sacrifice for others. Nothing. He is the Abyss walking on two legs. He is a sucking wound.

If I take a letter to Fed Ex and say I want it delivered from my little town in So Cal to my sister’s little town in NY, do you think they’ll do it for 42 cents?

If my friend wants to order mealy worms or lady bugs for her organic garden, how much will UPS charge for that?

For over 100 years the USPS has delivered live chicks to 4H kids, backyard farmers, and commercial growers — Promptly, alive and cheeping. Our big postal facility in Santa Clarita currently “looks like Armageddon,” according to the people who work there. They came in and not only were boxes and letters jumbled high, but fruit flies and rodents had moved in to dispose of boxes of dead chicks and rotted food parcels. Do you think De Joy gives a rat’s patoot?

Like so many of Trump’s appointments, this guy was brought in to wreck a well-functioning federal department and replace it with a malfunctioning for-profit mega-corporation. De Joy is doing exactly what he was hired to do.

Obama was better prepared, I think. But the forces aligned against Hillary were international in scope.

Whoever wants the American Experiment finished and the glassware in the lab smashed has been at this a long time.

...should solve our problem with our POTUS by removing him from the White House. Invariably, there are a number of other posters who agree. This has happened before, specifically during the Bush/Cheney administration. The difference with this poster is their desire to use the Dept of Homeland Security for this purpose — and DHS was tasked overall with battling the Moms of Portland and other peaceful protestors!

Periodically, there are other OPs by other DUers conveying what they think is the brilliant notion of finishing the work of the Civil War by dividing the states into two or more countries. Or dividing California into 3 states in a mistaken belief that we would then have 6 assured Democratic Senators in the US Senate. That, btw, is a fantasy — the California interior tends to be quite conservative, but are outnumbered and hence outvoted by the people on the coast.

I used to give long involved treatises on why this was all a very bad idea. However, the energy that used to propel me in 2002 has been stomped into utter exhaustion by Donald Trump. Therefore I boil it down as I just did: if we experience a military coup, our republic will be at an end. In this, I will not change my mind.

The person I was responding to has carried this thought from one thread to another. I am not, repeat not following them around. However, I will not let this nonsense go unchallenged if I encounter it.

...still-existing democratic republic, with a Constitution revered the world over. That “200-year old piece of paper” you scorn as toothless has been and remains the template for every other aspiring democracy since our nation was founded.

We are struggling now, and struggling hard. But expecting the DHS to step in, when we can see their fascist methods on display every godsdamned day and night, would put the final nail in the coffin. Who do you think is shooting rubber bullets and throwing tear gas canisters at peaceful protestors? Usually DU posters of your inclination make a plea for a military coup, which would likewise put the final nail in the coffin of our democratic republic.

I always wonder why, in a community that prides itself on an understanding of the US Constitution and civics, there are always a few people who believe the current situation calls for the final dismantling of that Constitution.

You are very eager to throw out the Constitution. As is Trump, may I point out. Why?

...every adult, every Hawai’ian knew of the work of Fr Damien De Veuster.

Leprosy was a devastating, contagious, disfiguring, and fatal disease. It still is, if untreated. There was no treatment whatsoever for leprosy, and as it was highly contagious, especially among native Hawai’ians, the afflicted were simply taken to the remotest part of a remote island and let go into the surf. The remainder of their days was Hell on Earth, as their bodies decayed to the bone, fingers and feet fell off, noses collapsed inward, and maggots took residence.

Father Damien went to them, lived with them, gave them hope, helped build a place to live in with some measure of dignity before death. And he himself contracted this terrible disease and died of it.

AOC speaks from a place of profound ignorance if she thinks he was a “white colonist,” and nothing else. In Hawai’i there were and are many religions. No one else came. Only Damien.

Perhaps as a person born and raised in NYC, perhaps she confused Fr Damien with Fr Junipero Serra of California? Serra has been in the news lately, after all.

Both my states are very far away from her center of the universe, and both these men were priests of the Roman Catholic Church. They were born centuries apart and operated in different parts of the globe, but no matter.

Junipero Serra could rightly be called an agent of European colonialism: in his zeal to convert, he broke apart and virtually enslaved indigenous tribes with the assistance of the Spanish Conquistadores.

Father Damien, on the other hand, went to a leper colony in a kingdom where the native culture was already devastated, but no matter I guess, if you are simply trying to make an important point about race and gender.

After statehood, the sculptress Marisol Escobar was commissioned to create the statue that now resides in Statuary Hall. She chose to work from photos taken in 1889, the final year of his life, and it is no exaggeration to say the result shocked the hell out of people in both Honolulu and Washington DC. Here is no plaster saint. Here is no faux-Roman marble bust in a toga. Here is no conquering hero with a chestful of medals. Here is a man, dying for those he served.

AOC is a rising star in the Democratic Party, and I watch her career with interest. But she is capable of error. I think she tried to take back the implications of what she said, but the fury with which her defenders are attacking even the most on-point corrections is not helping her or anyone else.

For anyone who is interested in the life of this man and his place in the history of Hawai’i, I suggest “Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai” by Gavan Daws, University of Hawaii Press, 1973. It is an entirely secular work of scholarship, for those to whom it matters.


PS for Anamnua: I am not writing as a Catholic, though my grandparents were of that faith. I write as one who cares about my home state, its history, and the truth, as best I can. Peace. See you around.
~~Hekate

...so that we could sleep at night. Linking health care access to specific jobs, and making it a for-profit enterprise, is now nakedly the scam it has always been. Naked and ugly beyond words. 20,000,000 people laid off, furloughed, fired all at once — and however many family members they had dependent on their jobs for medical care would make it what? 80,000,000?

In all the heroism of doctors and nurses in hospitals trying to save lives, there was just one story I saw and one comment made that put the lie to overarching story of our country: (1) medical personnel being laid off by the agencies they work for, and (2) someone who lived who was presented with a bill over a million dollars. Didn’t see these two items? I almost missed them when I blinked.

I think there are going to be any number of hospitals that go bankrupt and close their doors before this is over. But Blue Cross and the rest won’t be hurt.

So, the “medical plan” that Trump and McConnell promised? The current situation may be it.

A friend found him today on his couch at home, and our younger brother called me.

Think a good thought for him, my friends. He was 71 and it was COPD and emphysema that got him in the end. We remaining siblings are grieving from SoCal to New York state and up to Oregon, where he had lived for over 50 years. We don’t know when we will be able to be together again, but I told our younger brother that from the first time I heard Liam Clancy sing The Parting Glass, I knew that song would be Joe’s elegy. So he pulled it up on You Tube and we cried together.