This will offend some people, and for any offence I apologize.

[Martin Eden]

42. Alas, even here at DU the broad brush is used all too often

It's much easier to judge a wide swath of people than to articulate a more nuanced and specific behavior when describing those who threaten our rights and democracy. On one level all Trump voters are part of that threat, but they are not all the same.

Regarding how to practice moral behavior without religious influence, I think that is something all human beings struggle with at times. My parents and my mother's older sister who lived with us were not religious. They did not talk against religion, but they did instill in me and my sister a strong sense of right and wrong. Growing up, I observed kids in my neighborhood were more likely to be deterred from bad behavior by threat of punishment rather than inherent motivation to do good. Most of them went to church.

The adults in my home were all of the "greatest generation" and involved in the labor movement. Since my parents worked, I grew very close to my Aunt Kate. She was a wonderful story teller, often with a moral lesson. Born in 1907, she began working in Chicago factories at age 15. It didn't take long for her to become an activist, devoting her life to it. During the McCarthy era she spent 10 months in jail waiting for deportation to Croatia where she was born (my parents were born in the US) but there was no record of her birth in her small village, so the Tito regime refused and Kate was freed -- though never allowed to become a citizen of the America she loved.

Not long before she passed, Kate (Katherine Hyndman) was one of three elderly ladies interviewed in the Academy Award nominated 1976 documentary Union Maids -- which you can watch online, if interested.