History EMPOWERS the powerless

 

The power of tyranny is overestimated (not in the short run, but in the long run)…and can be overcome by the unity, the determination, of apparently powerless people. Howard Zinn epigraph to The People's Historian by Dave Zirin

Their cruelties, in their minds, constitute a moral good. But that’s the macho posturing of

nerfy, weak men with uncallused hands and a great deal of unresolved anger. The truth is

that they were shaken to their bones by the 2020 protests and this is the brutish, reactionary

response. They lock away the works of Zinn not because they loathe the historian but

because they fear the history. The irony, however, does burn. What Trump and his cabinet

of reality-show contestants, pro-wrestling executives, and fascist-fanfic authors are

showing in practice is that they actually share a very fundamental belief with Howard

Zinn: that history from the point of view of social movements holds the potential to

empower the powerless. That’s why Zinn worked to popularize this kind of history and

that’s why they aim to erase it. They fear something Zinn wrote decades ago: “Our

country is full of heroic people who are not Presidents or military leaders or Wall

Street wizards, but who are doing something to keep alive the spirit of resistance to

injustice and war…. To ward off alienation and gloom, it is only necessary to

remember the unremembered heroes of the past, and to look around us for the

unnoticed heroes of the present.” They oppose this because their algorithms aimed at

fostering alienation and gloom are essential to making a populace feel defeated. ibid p10

 

A [person]’s spirit can be marked most clearly in its passage from the reform to the revolutionary impulse at the moment when [they] decide that their enemy will no longer write [their] history. Murray Kempton ibid epigraph

Rights and DUTIES (responsibilities) under the Declaration of Independence

Happy 250th!

Believe the victims; FACT IS Trump raped female children

By the way, if Congressional Republicans had adhered to their oaths of office with authenticity, neither cartoonists like Michael de Adder nor his cartoons would get attention with images like this. 

Former CNN journalist Jim Acosta interviews an Epstein survivor in the video below starting around the 22:52 mark. 

Consider this. If we lived in a small town in Russia (like an Oscar winning documentarian did), we could be in danger of Trump succeeding in getting court and FBI records changed. But Trump will never succeed in doing so. 

WE the PEOPLE can rely on that fact. Trump will bluster all the way to January 2027, but he will not win the midterm fight this year. Get ready for a bumpy ride, but know his days in office are numbered.

In the meantime, CALL your US Senators to assert your position that they do NOT pass the SAVE Act. And have great fun at your closest NO KINGS rally on March 28, 2026.

One of my latest reads

Yikes!

Last month, I started reading a book by a British psychiatrist, Dr. Gwen Adshead, "The Devil You Know: Encounters in Forensic Psychiatry. An alternative subtitle for this work is , Stories of Human Cruelty and Compassion. From the blurb on Goodreads.com:

In eleven vivid narratives based on decades of providing therapy to people in prisons and secure hospitals, an internationally renowned forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist demonstrates the remarkable human capacity for radical empathy, change, and redemption.

What drives someone to commit an act of terrible violence?... Through a collaboration with coauthor Eileen Horne, Dr. Adshead brings her extraordinary career to life in a series of unflinching portraits.

Alongside doctor and patient, we discover what human cruelty, ranging from serial homicide to stalking, arson or sexual offending, means to perpetrators, experiencing first-hand how minds can change when the people some might label as “evil” are able to take responsibility for their life stories and get to know their own minds.

With outcomes ranging from hope to despair, from denial to recovery, these men and women are revealed in all their complexity and shared humanity.

My intent was to understand (empathize) with the patients and with the doctor, enough to allow me to write characters in fictional stories I haven't yet written.

However, reading about Adshead's patient "Sam, (not his real name)" I was drawn into empathetic understanding of a remarkably earthshattering tragedy, as we've come to know Nick Reiner, who is in jail in California awaiting trial for allegedly (apparently) murdering both of his parents. Sam is the 10th of 11 case studies described in Adshead's book.

From NEWS coverage of a certain POTUS over the last decade, I (we) have become somewhat familiar with some of that fellow's personality flaws. Various mental health practitioners have tried to exercise their Duty to Warn, including in a documentary film, #UNFIT about Trump's first term. I'm confident Jeff Bezos will not get rich by you paying $.99 to watch the film on Amazon Prime if you should choose to do so.