It's On

"When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right."

-Victor Hugo

It's Tuesday. Is this the first week of the civil war?

The images from Los Angeles are stunning, as is the contrast between this administration's posture toward mostly peaceful protesters voicing opposition to armed goons trampling due process and the rule of law, and the armed mob that smashed into our Capitol on January 6th. This is a coup playing out before our very eyes.

And one doesn't need to be a nutty conspiracy theorist to see how the pieces fit together. Yesterday Stephen Miller posted, "Stand with ICE. Pass the B[ig] B[eautiful] B[ill]." What does massive wealth transfer have to do with signaling one's approval of martial law? Pretty much everything in the bill is wildly unpopular, and effectively screws over whole constituencies who put the Grifter In Chief back in the Oval Office. If there were a do-over of the 2024 election, knowing what we all know now, it's easy to imagine a complete rout of the Republicans.

But 2026 is right around the corner. Won't that be a reckoning? If the Ds regain control of Congress, isn't this whole cast in the executive branch standing in the crosshairs of impeachment?

Sounds like a compelling reason to make sure that election doesn't happen, or for the feds to seize control of the process in blue states under the pretext of an "insurrection" or some such.

Anyone paying attention had to figure 2024 would be our last election, and that the country could well splinter as that realization sinks in.

What to do? Sitting quiet isn't an option--that enables the coup plotters. So Peg and I will be out there on "No Kings" day this coming Saturday, protesting for all we're worth. That in turn will likely get us on a watch list in this surveillance state we're building, but we're old and white and probably the last ones they'll send to the gulag.

Turning to one's social circle, you can't have a friend who's MAGA, any more than you could socialize with a Nazi in Germany in 1938. No, really. Unfriend them, not just in social media but in your personal life. Shun traitors.

And maybe move. The news in the northeast is that the real estate market is exploding even as the rest of the country sinks into the doldrums. Smart people are loading their U-Hauls and heading northeast or west. People of color, people with trans kids, people who don't want to live in a theocracy or a place that still holds firing squads (I'm looking at you, South Carolina), people who can't marinate in the hate that fills the red state world. They're all coming to western New York, to Massachusetts, to the west coast. A good friend of mine rather publicly told off all of his Panama City friends for their complicity in this moment, and now as a lifelong Southerner he's shopping real estate in Washington state.

The "Big Sort", as it's been called, now seems to have entered overdrive.

P and I at a personal level are working as a couple through all of this, pondering how to cut ties and cultivate new ones, how to effectively start over in our 60s. We never saw this one coming, but perhaps we should have.

In the meantime, it's time to decide which side you're on. I mourn the moment, but have become pretty clear-eyed about where we find ourselves.