“And we are going to kick them out of Congress and we are going to take back our country! ... take back the administration.” Such comments revved Port Townsend marchers to feel their power and chorus about Trumpian bedevilments.

Take it back to what? I paraphrase Paul Street at CounterPunch: bailing out the parasitic elites who crashed the global economy; commanding the U.S. drone campaign to planetary hyper-terrorism; health care reform favoring insurance and drug companies; inhibiting union formation; lecturing black people on their personal responsibility for their poverty; shielding the 0.1 percent class; facilitating corporatization of public schools; vicious prosecution of whistleblowers; pulverizing Libya and Middle East villages and cities; keeping the U.S. imperial machine set on spy, torture, imprison and kill.

Take it back! The red and blue bipolar structure manifests oligarchic agendas: racism, sexism, threat of nuclear holocaust, inequality, extinction, climate shift – all perpetuated by the U.S. deep state government. The Pentagon’s global military adventures are on a rampage, usurping and polluting land and commerce; command systems that effectively coordinate militaries and security apparatuses of most other nations. We live in a new Gilded Age of taking; an era of shocking economic disparity and bankruptcy.

“Take it back” heralds the next two-year, billion-dollar election spectacle between reds and blues infused with PAC money.

You vote, and the electoral college, superdelegates and gerrymandering will decide – a poor substitute for democracy. Direct action means voting with feet on the ground; opting out of the culture of consuming and the coliseum distractions.

We live in a time of precarity, magnified uncertainty and fear. We are nearing another trashing and looting of a neoliberal economy with festering dark corridors. If take it back means to cap this pustulating well of an empire, then power is with the people.

JULIE JAMAN

Port Townsend