A TEST RUN

Posted

I’m running a bit behind on blogs. It’s because the last one I tried to post did not appear here on PTL.com. No one has been able to determine just why. Even though I wrote of Donald Trump, there was no objectionable profanity involved, for instance. Too bad. It featured Donald Trump’s prominent posterior in tennis shorts, with the text consisting of examples of his sexist insults to women and their appearance over the years. Hypocrisy in full bloom.

So here’s another item I wrote for myself a couple of weeks ago and stuck into my file:

A TRAIN OF THOUGHT—Read most any news story these days and you can extrapolate in all directions in connecting up the dots of the Big Picture of how things are going with Donald Trump at the helm. Take, for instance:

The Chicago Tribune, June. 23:“The Trump administration on Friday slashed $400,000 in federal funding for one of the few U. S. groups that combat white extremism but [the same Trump administration] denied that it is now focusing only on fighting radial islamists. A grant announcement by the Department of Homeland Security eliminated funding for the Chicago-based Life after Hate, which was initially awarded the money in January during the closing days of the Obama administration.

“Life after Hate, run by a former skinhead, is among a handful of domestic programs dedicated to helping people leave white power groups including  neo-Nazi organizations and the Ku Klux Klan, and it was the only one of the original grant recipients dedicated solely to combatting white extremism . . .”

For more detail, see: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-funding-cut-for-chicago-group-combatting-white-extremism-20170623-story.html

That turned my thoughts straight to Trump’s empowerment—through action and speech—of racial discrimination, white supremacy and all. You can argue otherwise until the cows come home but the fact is that hate crime is well on the rise since Trump took office. Muslims, Mexicans and African-Americans are under attack and anti-Semitism also has increased. Misogyny also more blatant as Trump-inspired troglodytes drag their knuckles out of their caves.

Which leads one to thing about Trump’s budget proposals, such as defunding of Planned Parenthood. 

And that takes us to but Trump budget in general, which includes among other things  massive cuts in funding of the Center for Disease Control and related agencies. In a society that apparently has learned little from Aids, ebola, zika, etc. 

And that leads me to muse that apathy seems to be a true epidemic in this fast-moving, self-indulgent and instant-gratification world. A good example that is the measly 17% of qualified voters in the 18- to 24-year-old age class who turned out for the 2016 election that put Trump into office.

NOTE—in the past I have been challenged over my reference to an increase of hate crimes since Trump jumped onto the political stage. Just this morning, July 6, The Seattle Times carried on its front page a story on an uptick of hate crimes, of racial animus, “fueled by coarsening of conversations that began with presidential campaign.” And no, this is not something to be breezily dismissed as “fake news.” See: http://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/cases-of-hangmans-noose-are-a-part-of-uptick-in-hate-crimes/

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