Shame and Shaming, Get Your Foot Off My Neck

Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions, Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen.                                                Mort Sahl 

Many years ago criminal acts were punished by people being put into the Pillory to be publicly humiliated on the public square. It was a wooden device, the head and arms trapped the criminal like a oxen yoke that they couldn't escape. Sounds reprehensible, inhumane doesn't it? However there are reprehensible, egregious acts committed each day from the highest office in this country by the current GOP administration. The list is a long one: depriving people of their health care and insurance; allowing old people to starve; putting children, separated from their parents in cages; invading the privacy of women's medical treatment; fouling our clean air and water; denying that there is a climate crisis--- all this is no big deal to the Republican administration. Despite the verbiage of caring for this country and the people therein, our #45 currently spending many millions on golfing and self aggrandizement.  The travesty of the President against the wishes of the Pentagon putting on a parade for himself is a huge waste of money to say nothing of an embarrassment for any thinking person in this country. Then the kicker: we're paying for it in more ways than one. Has the Republican administration bothered to add up what the President has spent superfluously on himself? The Pillory I say!

I regard it as a crime to knowingly depriving hungry children when we are one of the richest countries in the world. Then the for profits that are being given  and starving people of food when there is a surplus of food in this country. It has been seriously recommended that the Meals on Wheels program be cut. It has been recommended that our contribution to foreign aid be drastically cut. This announcement came when many countries in Africa are on the verge of famine. What seems even more disgusting is our 45th golfs each weekend at Mar-a-Lago and his wife remains in NYC all at tremendous expense to us and then, with the stroke of a pen, he takes away money that could be used to feed people. Someone make sense of this for me.

One of the important issues currently addressed in schools across the country is combating bullying. Yet one of the biggest bullies in the country just got elected president. He is notorious for his lack of empathy and disdain for those of us he says are "bleeding hearts". That he would choose an entirely ill suited and ignorant woman, Betsy De Vos, to be in charge of the schools is an enormous insult. She has a prejudice against the public schools and does not understand some of the basic rights of handicapped children. 

Many of 45th's fans are good, loving, and supposedly religious, and yet they make no connection to what the 45th is doing to the country. They can't seem to believe that they elected a greedy, insufferable person who is trying to cut social programs, many which directly benefit them and meanwhile will give extensive tax cuts to the wealthy.  How is this "loving one another" or even caring for their fellow humans? I fail to understand. Is their love so narrow that they feel love should be limited? If so why? Love is vast and as Walt Whitman stated "contains multitudes." 

• All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy.
  • Sarah Grimke July 17, 1837

I read the above quote in the county building in New Orleans in an exhibit of women's rights. There is a book based on the life of Sarah Grimke and her sister, The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd. The Grimkés, the author learned, were abolitionists and "among the earliest major American feminist thinkers." In the late 1830s they were also, she writes, "arguably the most famous ... women in America."

Although this was written 180 years ago by a suffragist and abolitionists the quote still remains sadly right on. All I ask of our oppressors today is they take their officious foot off, not only my neck, but the country's neck as well. Allow, once again people the right to vote, stop the gerrymandering and the photo ID crap. Stop invading the rights of women, specifically using laws to control her body and her privacy. What is between a woman and her doctor is none of your business. If you think it is I have an interest in their Viagra prescriptions and I want to see a full report on their sperm count. 

Supposedly the 45th is a champion of jobs yet with the gutting of the EPA, defunding schools, penalizing states for not going along with his climate change denial, is taking thousands of jobs from the American public. Interestingly these are in areas that are critical to all of our health and well being. Want clean air and water? Take the foot off our necks. Perhaps that is why the Pillory came into my consciousness. Put the yoke around the people who are behaving in an appalling manner and attempting to steal from us our basic rights. Shameful behavior must have consequences.

Americans have always prided ourselves as being heroes, as being there for the downtrodden and welcoming with open arms the ones who are suffering in other parts of the world. Knowing that our vetting practice is more than 2 years long for refuges to become available for citizenship, why suddenly are so many afraid of refuges. It is the young white men who have 74% of the time committed the terrorist acts. Should we by their logic start screening all right wing young white males between the ages of 17 and 50? 

What has happened to our generosity, our American spirit, our kindness? Nastiness has creeped in with the creeps. Speaking of creeps, most of us would never let our girl children around someone who is as disrespectful as 45th or Bill O'Reilly. 

I have been asking the same question, respectfully, of everyone that I know who voted for the 45th: "please tell me, and make it based on truth, what is admirable about our 45th and why should I respect him." I have not gotten an answer yet to that question. Oh, yes they say he's a good businessman. Really? He has six bankruptcies that can be documented and numerous lawsuits. That doesn't seem to be good business to me. Why should I respect a man who would deride a handicapped journalist and lies constantly? If you have some insight, please help me out here. 

I would like to put him and a few of the more reprehensible men in public office in the Pillory. Why you ask? This is possibly the only way they might feel the full import of their lack of empathy for our country and the average citizen. Their acts are shameful and yet they feel no shame. 

Mom never needed Meals on Wheels, just think of the many who do

susansmagicfeather 2017 copyright Susan R. Grout all rights reserved