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Adios, Amigos!
I’ve never made secret my disaffection for Donald Trump. But within the dark clouds of his campaign and presidency, one bright ray of sunshine may be getting ready to pierce through the gloom:
Even before our new president began settling into the White House, a grassroots movement was already underway, gradually building momentum toward the singular goal of California seceding from the union.
According to the Washington Post, the activist group Yes California has responded to the Trump presidency by mobilizing its minions, which now constitute 53 chapters statewide, determined to gather the half-million votes necessary for getting the measure on the state ballot in 2018. I encourage readers to donate generously.
And here I offer these sage words of advice to the secessionists: look south.
A View from the Frontlines
Reporter Hunter Stuart describes how a strong dose of reality forced him to reconsider his biases and preconceptions.
In the summer of 2015, just three days after I moved to Israel for a one-and-a-half year stint freelance reporting in the region, I wrote down my feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A friend of mine in New York had mentioned that it would be interesting to see if living in Israel would change the way I felt about it. My friend probably suspected that things would look differently from the front-row seat, so to speak.
Boy was he right.
Profit is not enough
“Cybercrime is out of control.”
So says Caleb Barlow, Vice President at IBM Security. And if you’re already worried about credit card fraud and Russian hacking, you may not want to read any further.
On the other hand, there’s a lesson for all of us from the world of virtual villainy.
Most of us have come to accept internet espionage, phishing emails, and scam artists as part of life, the virtual equivalent of political kickbacks, muggings, and drive-by shootings. We don’t like them; but the real world is not a perfect world, so we learn to take the bad with the good.
In a recent Ted Talk, Caleb Barlow offered a terrifying and surreal account of criminal organizations operating like professional, legitimate businesses, with English-speaking help desks and fake banking websites. They operate anonymously on the Dark Web, which most of us relate to as something from a Kiefer Sutherland thriller.
But it’s real. So real, in fact, that if you stumbled across a dark website you’d think you were shopping on Amazon or checking reviews on Angie’s List.
Walking the Talk
If Diogenes couldn’t find an honest man 24 centuries ago in ancient Greece, it’s hard to imagine his search would prove more fruitful in modern-day Washington, D.C. or, lamentably, in modern-day America.
It’s not hard to understand why. In our age of personal gratification, truth has become more than merely inconvenient. It has become an utter nuisance.
Conservatives have been eager – and correctly so – to shine the light of hypocrisy on Sally Yates, the acting Attorney General fired by Donald Trump last week for refusing to enforce his recent executive order on refugees. Ms. Yates might have argued against the order’s constitutionality; instead, she based her decision primarily on personal bias.
Celebrated by the left for her stand on principle, what Ms. Yates really did was to violate her oath of office by failing to fulfill her duties. It’s her job to uphold the law, not her individual values. If conscience prevented her from performing her duties, she would have resigned in protest. But that would have required true principle. So much easier to merely participate in another round of partisan gamesmanship.
This brings us back to Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples back in 2015. She too claimed to stand on principle by refusing to honor her oath of office.
So why are the same voices that castigated Ms. Davis hailing Sally Yates as a hero? And where were the critics of Ms. Yates when Kim Davis was making herself a martyr in name only?
Jedediah Bila posed that very question on The View, prompting Whoopi Goldberg to go ballistic and invoke the popular refrain, it’s not the same thing.
Nowadays, principle is just a synonym for equivocation.
Excuses
If I were a tadpole, and you were a fish,
If the South China sea were a licorice dish,
If the King of Siam staged an off-Broadway play,
If the Man in the Moon weren’t afraid of the day,
If phones were not busy and lines never long,
If Fay Wray were a dozen times tall as King Kong,
If gators wore shirts with men stitched on the breast,
If the head of the pack could escape from the rest,
If the dark could be pierced by a single white flame,
If Professor Bob Knoll could remember my name,
If the sea didn’t swell and the ship didn’t rock,
If naive good intentions could turn back the clock,
If each moment could stretch to the end of our lives,
If bees came in gaggles and geese lived in hives,
If the hare beat the tortoise by less than a mile,
If the face in the mirror would give me a smile,
If the northern lights migrated south with the birds,
If my fluttering heart could be calmed by your words,
If I’d show you my heart, and you’d show me yours, too,
We’d have no more excuses.
Then what would we do?
Yonason Goldson 