Shiny objects

     As I'm sure he knew it would, tRump's suggestion we should postpone the coming election caused many liberal pundits' hair to spontaneously combust, thereby preventing them from writing about the continued depredations of the coronavirus and the imploding national economy.   Cooler heads pointed out the elections cannot be delayed by the president*, although there are loopholes that could be used by states controlled by republicans to screw up the elections.
     Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell adjourned the Senate until next week as many unemployed workers fall off an economic cliff when their $600/week supplemental unemployment benefits expire today.  Evictions, foreclosures and homelessness will be the fate of millions in the coming months if legislation restoring those benefits does not pass soon. 
     While many of my facebook friends are outraged by the actions of tRump and his GOP henchmen, I know many others who find these policies congenial.   A 10 hour day of Faux News, Breitbart and Rushbo have twisted their worldview into a zero sum, us or them scenario in which "those people" are coming to take their benefits.  It is a naked appeal to the racism which sleeps fitfully in the heart of America.
     In less than a hundred days, we will find out which faction has divined the soul of our country.  I hope it is not the haters, but I will sleep better, or not, after Nov. 3.

The days of decision

     As July winds down and the days start to shorten, parents around the country along with school administrators and teachers have decisions to make.   School or no school.  If school, how to manage it safely?  What are the knock on effects of losing a year of school?   Who will pay to ensure a safe experience.  I could go on, but you get the idea.  It is not a binary choice.
     Our local district is a case in point.  While they wait for state approval of their plan, the administration has released a plan calling for all children (except immuno compromised) in grades K-5 to attend school 5 days/week.  Grades 6-12 will be split into two cohorts which will attend on either Monday and Tuesday or Thursday and Friday.  Wednesday will be a sanitization day.  When not physically present, students will be "distance learning". 
     I'm not sure of the details of the plan.  For instance, will the younger children be kept 6 feet apart in class?   Will they eat together in a cafeteria?  As always, the devil is in the details.  Meanwhile, what about the risk of transmission to caregivers after school?  The Divine Mrs. M and I function as after school baby sitters and occasional full day caregivers for grandchildren.  What is our risk? 
      A recent outbreak of Covid 29 in our county was traced back to a gathering of 150-200 teens and young 20 somethings at a secluded property.   So far, at least 5 cases of coronavirus were transmitted at the party.   We know this is something young adults do.  Now imagine nearly 1000 kids limited to the tight quarters of school during a North Country winter.  The possible consequences boggle the mind.  Multiply that by the over 12,000 school districts around the country and you can imagine the angst of parents, teachers and students.  What is to be done?

Cue the moral outrage

     I'm pretty sure Americans who pay attention to politics saw two very different versions of the very same interview yesterday.
      Attorney General William Barr finally appeared before the House Judiciary Committee and was alternately grilled and massaged by democrats and republicans.   Having watched the MSNBC version of the hatefest, I came away with the image of Pramila Jayapal asking Barr why the DOJ was not on high alert when armed militia invaded the Michigan state house and advocated the hanging of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, but mobilized hundreds of federal police in camo gear because of graffiti artists and protestors besieged the federal courthouse in Portland.
     I don't know what the Faux News version of Barr's confrontation with reality contained, but I'm sure his bluster and stonewalling of democrat's questions was held up as a macho defense of the party and its president*, and incidentally, how dare the committee actually demand answers from Barr.
     In a nutshell, that is politics in our country today.  While I want to believe my side is fighting for "truth, justice and the American way", I also realize a Bizarro world version of the battle is being served up every night on right wing media and up to 30 % of my fellow citizens are not only being served this obnoxious stew of half truths and outright falsehoods, but they actually  believe it.  When a sizable fraction of the citizenry cannot agree on objective reality it is hard to believe we are not witnessing the death knell of democracy in the USA.



















5

The masks are off

     Of course in the cases of many on the tRump side of the political spectrum, the masks were never on in the first place.   As Paul Krugman points out, the political right has drunk the Kool Aid of the "greed is good" gospel and caring for other people's health and well being is not something they are prepared to do.
     Many of us have mocked those who buckle up, wear shirts and shoes and obey the hundreds of other rules and commonsense precautions which keep us and them safe every day.   Then why the jihad against wearing masks.   Krugman maintains it is the basic selfishness which characterizes the political right in general and the GOP in particular.   Having made the wearing of masks a mark of solidarity  with the president*, his adherents have gone all in, despite the abundant evidence mask wearing is effective in slowing the spread of the coronavirus.
     Like the bans on phosphate in detergents or efficiency standards for light bulbs, the right is outraged at any regulation which inhibits their ability to maximize profit and minimize regards for the common good.   This sounds like a caricature on the order of Mr. Potter in "It's a Wonderful Life", but the outrage of many when tRump suggested mask wearing might even be patriotic virtually proves the comparison.
     The same thing goes for anti vaxxers who send their unprotected children to mingle with others and compromise herd immunity by their selfishness.   Many other societies are coping well with Covid 19.  Why can't we do the same?   It  would seem a sizable fraction of our polity is hell bent on letting the body count increase in pursuit of an ideology of personal maximization at the expense of social welfare. 

Same old, same old

    The racism, misogyny and pure assholishness of the modern republican party and some of the mainstream media were on full display this past weekend.
     Erstwhile Senator Tom Cotton, who some mention as a possible presidential candidate in 2024, claimed in an interview the "Founding Fathers" considered slavery a necessary evil upon which America was built.  The context of the interview was his threat to withhold funds from any school district which used the NYT 1619 Project as part of their curriculum in future years. 
    A new study now finds that during the 2016  elections, despite numerous fact checks to the contrary, a large percentage of the American public believed, contrary evidence non withstanding, Hillary Clinton was a bigger liar than Donald Trump.   That such BS is still current in the country was manifest in the NYT coverage of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' speech taking down Ted Yoho for referring to her as a "fucking bitch".   The Times did not use the epithet when attributing it to Yoho, but printed it in full and referring to it as a branding exercise when describing AOC's historic anti-misogyny speech.
     Finally, despite the fact it has had several months to come up with additional Covid 19 relief legislation, the republican controlled Senate has waited until the unemployment relief which has blunted the pain caused by the pandemic expired and now is trying to play chicken with Nancy Pelosi's House majority to continue to support unemployed Americans.   Assholes.   To my republican friends I can only say this is your party.  Cherish it.

Guilty pleasures

     After an inch and a quarter of rain yesterday the garden looked significantly better in the late afternoon.   Of course that amount of rainfall did not break the drought and many crops are maturing in a moisture deficit, so I will temper my enthusiasm.   2020 will go down as the worst gardening year in my 40 plus year career.   Hopefully, the back end will be worth the work I am putting into the later maturing crops like broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and greens.
    On a more hopeful note, the major league baseball season has finally started and my Yankees led off the celebration by beating the Nationals in a rain shortened affair in DC.   Despite the absence of fans at the stadium and the canned crowd noise, it was a joy to be able to enjoy a quintessential summer pastime.   As the commentators were quick to note, this is a 60 game sprint instead of a 162 game marathon, so those of us with a rooting interest will have to pay closer attention to the action as we approach the dog days of summer.
     Finally, it was a day to celebrate poll porn!   After a poll the other day showing Biden leading tRump by a point in Texas, yesterday's Quinnapiac poll pointed to a 13 point lead in Florida for the presumptive democratic nominee.   That, combined with the Senate republican majority's feckless approach to coronavirus relief, has made the GOP the laughingstock around the country. 

We have met the enemy

     When I put down the title for this post, I imagined my own idea of the type of voter who put tRump over the top in the last election.  The stereotypical tRump voter is supposedly a white man or woman with a high school degree or less, toiling away at a dead end job which barely pays the bills.  He or she also realizes they will never have the life their parents told them was their right and they are blaming it on "demonrats" and shadowy conspiracies which exist to hold them down.   Also, did I mention the casual racism the republican campaign passively encouraged by not condemning its racist candidate.
     The trouble with this neat package is the evidence is against it.  The median tRump voter is far wealthier than the median Hillary voter.  Clinton won big among those making less than 50,000 per year.   Of course the republican median voter is based on votes from those making order of magnitude more than $50 grand.  But there is a huge cohort of baby boomers who voted for republican candidates.   So much for peace, love and understanding.   Many of my contemporaries want what Cheetolini supposedly promised;  a return to the 1950s when women and people of color knew their place and the white man ruled his family and country.
     Now we are in the era of George Floyd, Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin.  Most of us see and understand the suffering endured on a daily basis by minorities in this country.  Even the elderly, one of the most reliable republican voting blocs are becoming increasingly uneasy with tRump's callous disregard for their vulnerability to Covid 19. 
    Yes, their will be reactionary voters this fall who would prefer to see the country burn rather than accommodate minorities and immigrants and they look like us.  We need to match their intensity and vote for the America most of us still believe in, a land where all are free, equal and enabled to pursue happiness.

The only thing we have to fear...

      Once upon a time, virtually all Americans could agree with the finish of the above quote from FDR.   Fear itself was what we needed to be afraid of.   Nowadays, in our polarized nation, what we fear depends on our political viewpoint.
      For those of us with a grip on reality and a respect for science, the Covid 19 pandemic is something to fear.  More than 140,000 of our fellow citizens have died from the disease in the past 5 months and nearly 1,000 of us increase the count every day.   The US government strategy is to let the virus rip through the population at least until a reliable vaccine becomes available and ignore the damage being done to citizens and the economy.   I fear both the coronavirus and the policies of this administration.
      Meanwhile, in the Faux News bubble inhabited by tRump supporters the fear is that mobs of "anarchists and looters" are taking over our cities and defacing and ruining our "beautiful monuments".  The administration's response is to dispatch a federal police force of camo outfitted goons who have violated the civil rights of protestors exercising their first amendment rights.   Personally, I fear the use of a police force with no loyalty but to the president*.   That way lies dictatorship.   But many, if not most tRump fans, the prospect of a few "dirty hippies" getting their heads bashed is something to be relished.
     The coming election presents a stark choice between fears.   Let' pray we make the right one.

Stopgap measures

    Like so many millennials, my nephew wants it all now, medicare for all, living wages, equality of the sexes and races and so much more.  He points to the Democratic party and sneers.  They don't understand and are just the flip side of Republicans he says.  You can't trust either party, so he pronounces a pox on both their houses and will vote for some true believing radical with zero chance to get his agenda put into legislation. 
     I get the anger and frustration.  The Obama years were frustrating for all of us who endorse liberal positions.  The first black president had to govern with republican majorities in the House after 2010 and the Senate in 2014.  He used most of his political capital on a Rube Goldberg healthcare program which included for profit insurance companies because the right wing of his own party threatened the entire program.   Any democratic president is constrained by the most conservative members of his party.  Joe Manchin will have more influence in a Biden administration than Elizabeth Warren precisely because his vote will have to be bought with changes to any liberal bill brought before the Senate.
     Joe Biden is not my choice for president, but in this moment in history, he may be the only thing separating America from a slide into authoritarianism.   I will hold my nose and vote for the man who will bring us back from the brink and in the process may well surprise many who feel he has no feeling for a majority of Americans.  FDR and LBJ were no liberal firebrands, but they ushered in two of the most progressive eras in our history.  Let's give him a chance Robbie.

Words are failing us

      Opening the NYT, the Washington Post or any other major newspaper is to be stunned by the reporting on the latest outrages being perpetrated by tRump's administration on a daily basis.  The continuing failure to deal with the coronavirus is of course the centerpiece of the media's reportage.  This extends to the pathetic response of republican governors to enact regulations regarding mask wearing in their states.   So afraid of crossing the dear leader, they are allowing Covid 19 to spiral out of control.
     Now, the president* is deploying a private army made up of members of ICE and Customs and Border protection to harass and intimidate protestors in Portland, Oregon.  The head of "Homeland Security" is promising more deployments of these unidentified troops to other areas of the country.  Under any previous administration republicans would be sounding a clarion call to disband these storm troops, but so far, all we hear is crickets..
    As Congress move forward with another round of coronavirus relief legislation, tRump wants to cut federal funds for testing!   I can barely type these words without rage building up inside. 
    The only relief in sight is the election and by the polling, most Americans are ready to deliver a resounding message on Nov. 3.

We are being led by idiots

     After seeing Mary Trump being interviewed by Rachel Maddow last night, the only conclusion I could reach is we are being led by a sociopathic idiot with a coterie of opportunists and enablers who have facilitated the decline in governance to the point of paralysis.
     If you strip the lurid personal details out of Ms. Trump's portrait of her uncle she reveals a person shaped by his father, an unrepentant racist and misogynist.  Fred Trump is the ultimate villain of the piece, but instead of resisting his father's indoctrination, Don lapped it up like mother's milk.  In return, Fred used his resources to prop up his failson through all the bankruptcies and business failures.   This has led to the unfathomable incompetence and mendacity of the current president* and his failure to deal with any crisis not of his own making.
      The failure of the media in the runup to the 2016 election to properly vet the republican candidate was driven by the profit motive and a "both siderism" mindset the elite press has always used in its political coverage.   tRump said outrageous things which proved irresistible click bait to his many fans who loved his "saying it like it is" style which allowed them to flaunt the racism and misogyny which lurks below the surface of American society.   The fact an elitist billionaire could convince so many he was acting in their best interest is the tipoff to the scam.
    Unfortunately for Donnie, Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton.   He has not been vilified by the media for 40 years and is just another old white dude who is significantly more empathic than his opponent.  Barring some unforeseen occurrence such as a turnaround by the economy or the pandemic, we will have new leadership in DC next January.  I pray they can repair the damage Mary Trump's uncle has done to our country.

The political correctness police are coming for you too

     According to the local rag, the Peru High School athletic teams will no longer be referred to as the "Indians".  At Tuesday's school board meeting, the board voted to remove any mention of native Americans from any business having to do with the district.   Of course there was a predictable backlash against the decision by many alumni who argue the mascot is a sign of "respect".
     While I can see both sides of this issue, ultimately i have to agree with those who feel we need to remove racially insensitive nicknames involving native Americans and other minorities from sports teams at all levels, from professional teams to Pop Warner leagues involving 7 and 8 year old children.   Perhaps if we had treated natives with the respect they deserved when we first encountered them, we might have had a better claim to use their images and names for our sports teams.
      In the meantime, Peru will have to look for another nickname.   The school's colors are blue and white.  As a proud alumnus of Center Moriches High School, home of the Red Devils, I would suggest they borrow the moniker of Duke University and become the Blue Devils.   Feel free to offer more suggestions in the comments section.

Unhinged and losing it

     Our president* put on another in a series of unhinged rants in the White House rose garden yesterday.  One can only wonder how anyone could have viewed even a very few minutes of  his performance and come away with a positive review.
      Accusing Joe Biden of far left proclivities,  intimating democratic mayors are fine with terrorists blowing up their cities, praising his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and even blaming Biden for a plan to "abolish windows" in his infrastructure plan.
      I know people who question democratic priorities and feel tRump is a check on out of control liberalism.  Most of them are acting in good faith, not out of fealty to an obvious sociopath, but I must appeal to their powers of reason.   Ever since Hillary Clinton referred to a "basket of deplorables" who would support candidate tRump because of his racist and misogynistic views, some people who would otherwise have cast a vote for her became tRump partisans.  There is probably a hard 30% of American voters who would vote for the second coming of Adolf Hitler.   Another 10% of the electorate would vote for a Hitler Lite if the alternative was a woman president.  Democrats need to reach that 10% to start a landslide which sweeps tRump and as many republicans as possible out the door in November.
   

Education in a pandemic

     Well, the administration trotted out the nincompoop supposedly in charge of education to let us know how schools will reopen this fall.   The results were more or less cringeworthy depending on your position on the ideological spectrum.
      Cruella DeVos basically told us the Secretary of Education still has no plans or guidance for school districts struggling with the decision to reopen with in person instruction this fall.  The Covid 19 pandemic has been with us since March and the all she could say was  there are examples and information "out there" which school officials could tailor to their situations.  I believe there are more than 12,000 school districts in the US.    De Vos wants 12,000 experiments this fall with in person learning with a pandemic raging through over 30 states. 
      Aside from the absolute stupidity this position exemplifies, the Secretary then implied the federal government will withhold funds from districts who refuse to turn their campuses into petri dishes.  She threatened to send the money to districts or private schools who will sponsor in person schooling.   We are being led by deeply stupid people.

All it takes

      We  received nearly an inch of rainfall between Friday night and Sunday morning.  It was not enough to break the drought, but was certainly a welcome relief from the unrelenting heat.   More rain is promised today.
       I was able to transplant fall brassicas and some lettuce yesterday and seeded the late summer squash and cucumber crops.   Weeding continued, as i was able to salvage a bed of carrots facing imminent  destruction from weed pressure.   There was a noticeable spring in my step as I tended to the crush of midsummer gardening pressures.   It makes a difference when you feel your efforts are not being wasted in the face of super dry conditions.  I will even welcome the inevitable invasion of crab grass in my now dormant lawn!

In the Court of the Mad King

       Even as the Roberts Supreme Court's latest ruling ensured the public will not see Cheetolini's tax returns until after the election, the aforementioned president* went on a twitter rampage criticizing the court's reasoning.  After all, tRump was looking for a ruling validating his vision of an imperial presidency of maximum power and minimal accountability.
      As Paul Krugman points out in today's NYT, this latest outrage is of a piece with tRump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic.   Based on the experience of the social democracies in Europe who had time to get ready to deal with the pandemic, the US could conceivably limited casualties to the same per capita rate as Germany and Denmark.  That means 20,000 or fewer deaths.  Instead, we have over 130,000 and could top 200.000 dead by Election Day in November.
     It didn't have to be that way.   We could have had a robust federal response, led by the CDC and Congress and guided by the president.   Instead, the chief executive buried his head in the sand for weeks, denying the problem and then actively hindering palliative measures such as social distancing and mask wearing.   Now he is actually bragging he saved "millions" of lives with his know nothing and do nothing stance.
     We are truly in the hands of a mad king, as surely as the British were during the Revolutionary War.  Fortunately, despite the damage we are suffering as a nation, we can change course in a few months.  Hopefully we will still recognize our America when the nightmare of the last four years is over.

School Daze

        On the same day the country set a new record for coronavirus cases, our Dear Leader has demanded schools, especially K-12 classes reopen with in person instruction 5 days per week.  This after calling CDC guidelines for safe reopening "too tough".   Obviously tRump is operating in some parallel universe where we have crushed the pandemic and it is manifestly safe for millions of unmasked and unvaccinated children to interact with teachers and staff and then return home.  It sounds like an experiment conducted on a massive scale with few or no controls.
       Blaming democrats for questioning his wisdom, tRump is also threatening to withhold federal funds from any state/district which fails to reopen on his terms.  Both democratic and republican parents desperately want schools to once again bring some structure to their children's lives this fall.  But not at the expense of having to deal with viral infections.   It seems most children are not at significant risk from the virus.  Not so the teachers, staff and parents.   Grandparents and the informal childcare arrangements for before and after school are also in the firing line.
    If we had a competent administration which treated the pandemic with the seriousness all other industrialized nations have, we would not have 59,000 new cases and rising each day.  Cheetolini has already surrendered to the pandemic and it looks like it will be burning through the nation for the rest of the year.  November 3 cannot come soon enough.
     

Cancelling whose culture

      As an aging baby boomer, I have a lot of cultural baggage to unpack when I read about people pulling down statues in all manner of settings.   While I certainly sympathize with anyone toppling monuments dedicated to those who committed treason in defense of slavery, the idea of questioning the legacy of our country's founders is a much harder lift.   Unfortunately for many of us, once you start down that road, it is hard to backtrack.
      Yes, Jefferson and Washington were slaveholders who benefitted from the unpaid labor of black men and women.  In Jefferson's case, we can probably add rape to the list of crimes he never was charged with.   John Adams was a more nuanced case, but he certainly never advocated for political rights for anyone other than white men with property. 
       Tucker Carlson inveighs against Tammy Duckworth for daring to validate criticism of Washington for his slaveholding.   For Carlson and older Faux News viewers, support for traditional views of US history is rapidly becoming a litmus test of politicians' worth.  Meanwhile, Cheetolini has gone all out on defending heroes of the confederacy and the flag that stands for the most hateful era of our collective history.
      As I said, I have no trouble with those who would dance on the graves of Robert E. Lee and his fellow traitors.  I also have no use for racists like Andrew Jackson whose "trail of tears" resulted in the deaths of thousands of native Americans.   A clear eyed view of our history is necessary, including revising our understanding of the founders.   However, it is one thing to revise history.  It is quite another to deny it.

losing the war

      At the heart of America's losing war with Covid 19 are the actions of our president*.   For some reason, Cheetolini, who had virtually nothing to do with the economy he inherited from Obama except to avoid killing it, has decided this is the hill his candidacy will die on.
     Jamal Bouie in today's NYT points out many of our fellow countrymen took a chance on tRump because the economy was in good enough shape they could indulge in the barely concealed racial grievance at the heart of his campaign.  So what if he was a failure at everything he ever did except his scripted reality show, The Apprentice, the thinking goes.   He promised to protect Social Security and Medicare and confirm conservative judges.   That was enough to get him over the line in the electoral college.
      Now, in the final year of his presidency, an actual crisis has occurred which requires good governance and we have found to our dismay the emperor has no clothes, or in Texas parlance, tRump is all hat and no cattle.
      We are losing the war with the coronavirus because of the federal government's bungling of the response.   Instead of the central government leading, tRump encouraged 50 different responses by the states and then cheerleaded the ones he favored.   This is no way to run a company, let alone a country of 330 million people.   Despite recent gains in employment, many jobs lost in the initial confrontation with Covid 19 are never coming back and the economy is still likely to be a shambles in November. 
      The same people who felt they could take a chance on a tyro in 2016 so they wouldn't have to deal with a female president, are going to have a choice between two old white men.   The racial division and misogyny which worked in 2016 is liable to backfire this time around.  Doubling down on that strategy is a recipe for democratic control of the executive and legislative branches in 2021.

Is this the new normal?

    I dragged hoses and watered tomato plants yesterday in  a seemingly futile attempt to get at least a few of the tasty fruit come August.  The ground on either side of the plastic mulched rows was dust except for the nice crop of weeds germinating in the heat.  I finally gave up as the water coming out of the hose was reduced to a trickle as the well emptied.   I will have to wait for the well to recharge overnight.
    I have been gardening for more than 40 years both on Long Island and in the Champlain Valley of New York and I have never seen it this dry.   If this is the new normal, I'm almost glad i won't be doing this much longer.   If I was to garden on this scale again, it would be with drip irrigation and water conservation measures.   Welcome to climate change world.

Wear the damn mask

      As even the governors of Texas and Arizona have shown, the wearing of masks is both important to control the coronavirus and a significant marker in the Culture wars.   Neither Abbot in Texas or Ducey in Arizona was on the mask bandwagon last week, but huge upticks in new covid 19 cases in both states has obviously convinced both men of the efficacy of compulsory mask wearing.
      We are now in uncharted territory with the pandemic.   With a daily count of new cases lurching above 50,000 per day, it seems the experts predictions of a resurgence of the virus if states emerged from lockdown without a strategy is being confirmed daily.   Nowhere in the country is there a robust contact tracing and isolation program.   Unfortunately, in some cases where contact tracing was tried, people who were know to be at large gatherings refused to admit they were and further refused to tell tracers who else they had interacted with.   Lacking this information effectively ended the program's usefulness.
      Thank to the president's* intransigence on the whole coronavirus issue, many of his supporters continue to treat the pandemic as a "hoax" at least until they or a loved one is hospitalized or dies from complications of the virus.   As long as tRump refrains from wearing a mask and continues to plan mass rallies of his faithful followers, there will be no consensus on how to fight the disease.   Meanwhile we are rapidly becoming an international pariah as our deaths from the virus spirals above 130,000.
     Wear the damn mask Mr. president* and either lead the fight or get out of the way and let a competent person do it.

tRump is toast

     This may be a little like whistling past the graveyard, but at this point in the election cycle, it looks like the president's* reelection prospects are pretty grim.  He just fell below 40% approval rating and that poll was taken before the news that the Russians were paying bounties for American scalps and Cheetolini did nothing about it.  To paraphrase Walter Cronkite, if tRump loses the military, he has lost America.
     Of course, many things may occur between now and November 3 to change the makeup of the election.  Joe Biden may start speaking in tongues, tRump may drop out of the race (only partially kidding), or something totally unexpected may happen.   But if the present trends continue, the GOP and its candidate may be in for an historic shellacking. 
     

Heads down, don't shoot

      Working and middle class white voters are being increasingly forced into larger and more liberal ideological stances than their immediate predecessors.   What do I mean?   It turns out the "greatest generation" and its offspring, the boomer generation mostly operated on the same set of principles as most Americans have since the founding of our country.   Namely, that white people are undeniably supreme and all immigrants and people of color are inferior and further, rich white people sit at the apex of power.   Of course, white immigrants can eventually be assimilated, as long as they show proper fealty to the reigning orthodoxies.
     Now, in the era of Black lives Matter and the increasing concentration of wealth by a few mega rich families, younger generations are starting to question the validity of the assumptions which undergird our society.   As Paul Krugman points out in today's NYT, we might not be an oligarchy yet, but the rich wield outsize power in our country.  His example of the dissonance between our beliefs and actual lived experience is the "grand bargain" Obama almost made with congressional republicans in 2011.
     Republicans were as usual when democrats hold the presidency, braying about the deficit exploding.  It is funny how this only happens when a dem is president, but I digress.   Obama offered cuts in Social Security and Medicare in return for modest tax increases on the wealthiest among us.  The deal foundered only because republicans rejected any increase in taxes.  Meanwhile, polls show overwhelming majorities support increases in social safety net programs and increased taxes on the rich.
     The gulf between the wealthy and the rest of us has not been this great in over 100 years.  Meanwhile, the pressure from POC for equal rights has never been greater.   It is time for working and middle class white Americans to say enough and support those who would bring social and economic justice to all in our country.