Category Archives: Peace X Peace

Not a Good Time to Place Bets

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We are on a bridge of uncertainty and do not know what is on the other side. Mr. Rogers told us to look for the helpers. We are learning we are the helpers.

. . . . .

Admit it, you’re not sure of anything right now. Okay, maybe YOU are sure of something but most of us aren’t, and a lot of us would not agree with your version of things because even we introverts are getting a little stir crazy and a good argument would cut through the fog of not knowing. There is a desire to violate.

For me that would be something like drinking a coke. Not really blasphemous, only slightly harming myself. No god will destroy the world because I drank a coke or will turn me into a pillar of salt because I looked at the destruction.

Okay, it’s not a proven destruction yet. We don’t really know what it is, and not many of us believe there is a vengeful god wreaking havoc on us because we don’t fit its description of obedient servants. We did this on our own and mythology does not serve us well.

What is real is that only a few people are overarching leaders with sharp minds, compassionate souls, and the ability to pull best actions out of scientific facts—and we need such people now. (Saluting you, Dr. Fauci.)

Our administration is not equipped—mentally, emotionally, morally—to deal with a pandemic. They stumble blind in a maze of ignorance, arrogance, and surprise that a deadly inconvenience is disrupting their presumptions they made America great again. They have put us in peril.

We are on a bridge of uncertainty and do not know what is on the other side. Mr. Rogers told us to look for the helpers. We are learning we are the helpers. 

We have become creative, turning to our friends and neighbors, and returning to ourselves—some of us perhaps going through the pains (and joys) of self-discovery and taking a fearless moral inventory for the first time.

We reach out and have come closer to others by not being able to touch each other. We slow down, turn to the arts, and try not to violate others, not to slice through the fog as a defense against not knowing.

We do not know when it will end, we do not know how many will die, we do not know how many others will be weakened, we do not know who is in trouble, who will disappear, who will have food for themselves and their families and who will not, who will be destitute, who will wake and say “I am not who I thought I was.”

We do not know if lessons will be learned and kept that will change how we live, if we will stop destroying our beloved earth, if we will be kinder to others. We do not know.

Some people are buying guns as though a virus can be shot. Who do they think will attack them? I sense these are the same people who believe in a vengeful god, and that monsters exist in all people and that deprivation will make those monsters rise against them for their food and toilet paper.

Still, it is the doctors, and nurses, and garbage collectors, and grocery suppliers that lead—and the food banks and fruit and vegetable pickers. At great risk, at great risk. They do best actions with the facts before them.

May we all do the same. May we learn—actually feel—the connected rhythms of life that include viruses and fears along with love and blossoming. May we endure and embrace and sort though to what serves best.

We will create what is on the other side of the bridge, using or ignoring the lessons we learn now. We can join hands safety. We can create harmonies that hold and stabilize through troubles.

If we do not, . . . oh, well, just one more planet in an unending cosmos that either knows itself or does not, that gives birth and absorbs death with startling nonchalance.

Elephants cry. These large beautiful beasts cry. Somehow that is relevant. I don’t know how.


End of our World: This is not a time to be stupid

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Formation of earth—explosion, fire, water to land, hot core, first ferns, beginning of eyes, of seeing, hearing, knowing—to humanoids arriving in the last sliver of a 10-foot-long timeline or last millisecond of since forever. Yet, this truth never convinces us how wispy we are. After all, we tickled out the timelines. We are the culmination, where the timeline always intended to go. We are creatures that know we know.

Years ago in Davos, Switzerland I heard a woman crow that her astrophysicist husband had done the math and it is impossible that advanced life exists anywhere else in the cosmos. Please, if you’re going to be stupid, do it on your own merit, don’t borrow from someone else. 

But we are all delusional. We may read timelines but know nothing of what was before. We may split atoms, chart elements, discover there are no smudges, only separate units going infinitely into minutia and infinity. We may study weak and strong forces, gravity, magnetism, inertia, and pheromones, but we only learn what they do, not why they do it. 

  It’s easy to believe something really really weird is real, but hard to think how it could be.–7-year-old girl

We resist the bald truth that there seems to be no reason for us, that we may exist only because we can and the value of our lives is a construct of evolution that we should be happy and reproduce–or seek happiness and therefore reproduce. We resist it by creating myths that are not nearly so interesting.

  Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?—Mary Oliver 

The chill is still on for this spring. I sit inside by a fire with my dog beside me. I pet him behind his ears as we stare at flames as humans and gentler wolves have always done. Fire has been fire since the beginning of the timeline—atoms vibrate off each other faster and faster, faster than local gossip, faster than lust, touching our skin, our hopes, our tomorrows, taming and recharging us. 

There is nothing of his ancestors in my dog that I can see, his killer instinct limited to barking over his weight class and slamming himself against the door when men in uniform deliver packages or other dogs intrude on his territory. He is fed from cans supplemented by home-cooked basmati rice with ground chicken or turkey. He can carry a grudge but only for a little time. He is getting older and sometimes wobbles. I worry. A lot.

  A dog is one of the few things in life that is as it seems.—Mark J. Asher

You and I may never see hard evidence of complex life elsewhere in the universe, but we know that whatever created light and dogs isn’t going to stop with us. Whatever expands, creates, and melds substance with wave and intent is not going to stop now. 

If we demolish earth as a home for complex organisms, the universe will not care. We are a millisecond, a sliver. We will be hopped over for millennia until another life form emerges, new creatures that believe they know what they know. Perhaps they actually will, perhaps they will be kinder than we have been. 

God, I think, is what is alive in us. God is life—balance, rhythm, stop and start, nectar for bees, seeds for birds, buds for blooms. She is nesting, reproduction, line and form against line and form. She is what is physical and what is beyond physical, the transference from fire to air to face. She is movement, orbs, attraction, spinning atoms, laughter at strange times out of nowhere. 

Evolution will continue if we knock ourselves out of the running. Life does not need humans.

  Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, it’s not going to get better. It’s not.—The Lorax

We are a creative, beguiling, and misguided millisecond. If we wish for more than that, we can no longer be stupid on our own or borrowed from others.

GOODNESS IS A CHOICE: a lesson learned from Trump

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Only recently have I come to believe goodness—with its accompaniments of honesty, generosity, and inclusion—is a choice rather than an innate state of being. One might even say “state of grace.”

Perhaps I am late to this lesson, grounded in the mystical as I am, but having the character of our president smashed like a poisonous cream pie into our faces daily, the lies, the meanness, the duplicity, has shaken my faith in innate human kindness. He has no inner moral compass and, as he rants, hatred and division grow. Vast numbers of people are reveling in their darker selves. 

In my mind’s eye I see a graph with a straight horizontal line that represents a more or less benign baseline, though it feels more alive than benign. Moving over, under, and along it is a second line that may be wobbly, or as erratic as an EKG printout, or as jagged as a stock market index. It can roam or slide. It can meander but, if watched carefully, you see it tends upward or downward.

This second line charts the acts of goodness v. acts of selfishness of any and every individual—sometimes me. Simultaneously it measures what the person believes and feels because actions, beliefs, and feelings are co-joined. A continuing “state of grace” is not a guarantee.

Above the horizontal mid-line is the area of the graph showing compassionate, constructive actions of goodness—an acting out in our lives of love towards others—respect, generosity, doing unto others as you would wish them to do unto you, even basic politeness. Below the line are varying degrees of the opposite—selfishness, ignoring, harming. 

The very existence of this graph shows that in my personal striving for truth—a construct I am dependent upon—I have moved from a belief of goodness as an abiding impulse in everyone to a choice of individuals. This was, especially at first, a profound disappointment. A mooring is gone.

Still, I have always thought that people who have done great harm and then decide to change their lives, outlooks, and actions are the bravest among us—the addict that rises into caregiving, the criminal who becomes a reformer. I understood they made choices. They knew what they were capable of and they chose to do good. I do not expect the same of our president.

Watching the evidence, I felt my certainty of human goodness slip away. We are feebler and stronger than creatures with guaranteed impulses toward goodness. Feebler because we are not imbedded with hard and true morals, and stronger because we can rise to goodness as a choice even if the benefits to ourselves are not immediately apparent.

The world presents plenty of evidence that good actions are not a given. We with food let people starve, we with opportunity shut out desperate people at our borders, we with fear let innocent people be bombed, we let animals be harmed and the earth be sacrificed. We choose not to see that we are the terrorists, the selfish, the withholders. Most of us justify ourselves blindly and shamelessly. 

Through our free will we determine not only how we will act, but, first, how we feel and what we believe. We make non-stop decisions that craft our lives. We cannot avoid this, but we can choose our options, decision by decision, action by action. We can build habits—venues is perhaps more accurate—of perceptions and actions that build the world we experience as real. We can curse what is dark and promulgate it or embrace what is light and share it.

Love is the resource, but free will determines if we access care, empathy, inclusion. It determines what we do about education for all, health care for all, financial means for all, care of our planet, and protection of the innocent. It allows us to see strangers as friends.

Goodness may be an option, but it is not a fantasy. It is real and the only viable option.

When Warriors Cry for Us

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We, who see teenagers cry in silence before us, remember there are warriors among us.

. . . .

We will never have an ideal world any more than earthquakes will stop and tsunamis lie to rest. Every atom moves, every thought flutters in and out of variations, everything recycles. You just cannot get rid of things. Action=reaction. Entropy=atrophy. It’s a bloody miracle, and to think you can put your hand on the steering wheel is a profound delusion, . . .

. . . and a common delusion in the face of what is real, what is beyond our control, like a cosmos that doesn’t even bother to sneer at us.

Yet we make claims. Just trying to figure it out has value. Religions, theories, intuitions, a piercing of the heart when we see a particularly astonishing sunset.

We get credit for this attempt. It is, after all, how we learned about atoms and that you cannot get rid of things. So we will keep trying.

That Overarching Principle that included us in its manifestations, like a footnote in the history of forever, must have a tender place in it. We, the fools, the strivers. We, who err over and over. We, who kill each other in vindication, or mere anger, or bad wiring in our brains. We, who cannot figure our way out of the paper bags we label “truth” and wrapped around our clan or our gang.

We, who can meld in sadness. We, who long for love, for home, who know intuitively we are not quite placed in the right place. We, who remember the Overarching Principle and want to call it by pet names like God, or Allah, or Yahweh, who demean it by pet names, who cannot accept that it is beyond names, and words, and our mind to know.

We, who see teenagers cry in silence before us, remember there are warriors among us. We, who start to see what is good, what is bad, and where to go and how badly we have failed to care for our planet and everyone in this footnote that is ours.

We, whose atoms never stop moving and whose thoughts never stop fluttering, but who know there are warriors rising among us, and we cry, too.

Beyond words we cry, and we rise, following warriors.

 

Listen to Your Conscience

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Your most intimate relationship is with your conscience. It won’t ever go away, even if you leave it huddled in a corner afraid of you and quivering at your ruthlessness. It will not go away.

You can trample on it, ignore it, deny it, but it will not leave. It may become ill, jaded, damaged, but it will not go away – but it can return to health if you change your awareness of it and change the patterns of your life. For some people that can be very difficult, especially older frightened people, especially people in power, especially people who like power.

Consciences whisper. Perhaps below your normal level of hearing, but they whisper, like itches on dry skin, like the scurry of small animal feet in the attic at night. If you’re a real bastard, you won’t even try to hear them. Instead you will make up your own theories of what is good and what is evil in line with what you believe serves you, and perhaps the inner ring of what you consider your “tribe” of people like you. You will literally create a “conscience dummy” and use it as a ventriloquist would to spout your made up beliefs.

We live in an era of ventriloquist “conscience dummies” where we are told we are safest (and still somehow good people) if we split up families and export people from our country where they have been living, contributing, working, adding to the GNP back to nations where they may be killed. We are told that walls are needed to keep out rapists and criminals. We are told the safest we can be is to have our nuclear arsenal ready as our leader taunts a crazy man with a nuclear arsenal.

We are told we are at our greatest when we are racist, engorge the wealthiest among us, strip health care not just for the neediest but nearly all of us, belittle minorities, align education with huge debts, own assault weapons, insult other nations, break treaties, degrade allies – and replace the science, and daily evidence, of disastrous climate change with voluntary ignorance that left unchecked will destroy human life.

Somewhere along the line, too many of us stopped listening to our conscience (and our own brain power) and started listening instead to voices of problematic, at best, government leaders, corporate leaders, media willing to compromise facts, hate groups, social media trolls, even some religious leaders who have limited understanding of “love your neighbor.” It has became natural to be foul-mouthed, disrespectful, and to express hate through social media.

It becomes easy to disrespect others when we do not respect our own conscience. Disrespect then becomes an inclination, a habit, a perspective on life that we claim as “reality,’ while cynicism is thought of as clever though it is only a cover for despair.

A conscience can be a pest. It can lead you to do things you never thought of, to be more bold than you ever imagined, to leap across divides, to reassign how you use your energy, to care less about some things, and a great deal more about others. It can urge you to change the world and keep after you until you do, no matter how small, no matter how large.

First you have to listen.

Then you join with others of conscience.

Then the world starts to make sense again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cappuccino in the Orphanage

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The four-year-old boy in the orphanage in the West Bank wanted only one thing. Cappuccino. He begged my friend who had promised each child a gift. She could not resist.

This is not a story about caffeine or what children “should” imbibe. This is a story of a child’s need to be loved.

You see, the children in the orphanage watch television a lot and there is an ad or a sitcom where a family drinks cappuccino together. He wants to be in that family, and in his mind they have adopted him, or he has adopted them.

When my friend returned a few days later, the boy ran across the large room to embrace her and ask if she had brought him cappuccino. She had, a month’s worth and the means to make it, and chocolate powder to sprinkle on top.

“You must share,” she said. “No, this is mine,” he said, and clutched the package to his chest.

She showed him how to make cappuccino and sprinkle the power. He sat cross-legged on the floor and drank it, slowly, contemplatively, putting it down quietly with both hands in between sips, as though he were listening to other members of his family talk.

Then he would pick it up again and sip until it was all gone.

After that day, he would do the ritual with the family on the television at their allotted time together. He made himself part of the family.

We are social animals and, yes, he knew the other orphans were called his “family,” but he needed his own.

After the month my friend replenished his supply. It is my belief he will drink cappuccino, and the other intense coffee variants for his life. He is Palestinian after all.

My friend told me the story in a luxury apartment overlooking NYC. We had just returned from lunch in a fine restaurant, followed by cappuccino. For me, decaf, which I prefer with almond milk.

It was a superb cup, but did not give me a family. It was a moment with my friend who has changed the lives of thousands of Palestinians.

Children make do with what they can. We all need embracing, we all need connection, but children need it most.

 

Going Gently into the Light

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All I want is to be gentle and to have the right to be gentle. It is not my time to protest anymore, but giving it up feels like an abandonment not only of those in need and those in pain and those in loss, but of myself, of the spirit of my younger self. It is confused by my physical weariness.

Some people climb the Himalayans in their 70s or even 80s, but that will not be me.

I am not complaining, though I am baffled. Doctors do not decipher my weariness, they prescribe or they look at me slightly askance as though someone who looks as I look must be a malingerer, or neurotic, certainly unrealistic and narcissistic. They are not inside my body.

I am not a malingerer. My body and my mind are weary. Wrong, only part of my mind is weary. One part is burstingly alive, radiant, claiming, grabbing, and appalled at the other half.

Forget names, forget the names of things, forget the sequence of events over the past week, forget spellings.

Doctors say is it usual. It is NOT usual. It is not acceptable, though I try, when I am not angry or frightened.

Have you noticed how we never grow up? How dreams and thoughts take us back to childhood, and there it revamps things? It makes memories and some good guys problematic, but more, it makes some bad guys good. We come to understand those who hurt us and accept the cages that destroyed them and harmed us. We become organisms that forgive, even as some people must be written off.

And even that loses meaning too with time.

I don’t want to be the old woman in the chair in the corner, and it is difficult to imagine I will be even as I might be. “She was so vital,” they’ll say. “She was something in her day.”

I just want to be gentle and gracious and generous and to have flashes of brilliances. Strangely I do have flashes of brilliance, mostly private. They come as gifts special delivery from a bright and shining light, and they blow me away. No, they lift me, and fly me to clean places where for a moment I am where forever lives.

I just want to be gentle and know that I too will be forgiven for wrongs and errors, and that I have a right to be gentle, that the world will be safe enough for the elderly to be gentle if they need be, without guilt, that we can mourn our losses quietly and let joy flow like light through our veins without guilt for not having done more.

Perhaps this will change, perhaps my body will find a key to turn that brings it back to power and rambunctiousness, and I would accept that gladly. Who wouldn’t? Reality has always included miracles we can work towards and be open to, but not command.

Perhaps the miracle is that, as my body gentles itself, love occupies all its spaces.

 

 

FLASH: Elder Dog Named “Trump” Disrupts World Peace

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Among the other god-awful things Trump has brought to us—rather, to the entire world—is the prospect of even greater war. He poked and continued to poke a dog that, while not entirely sleeping, could have been contained to its own yard.

That is, Trump, too, is a dog—mangy, snarling, yapping, attacking, aged, paranoid, howling at the moon, thinking it still rules the neighborhood, thinking its bark has value when all it does is set off other dogs. A dog who believes nothing exists beyond its own block, and doesn’t even like the people who live next door.

But, . . . but, . . . but if he were really a dog, there would be a muzzle on him by now. Instead he is the President of the United States and sullies the White House and claims the Constitution is paper to wipe it up with. Oh, sorry for ending that sentence with a preposition.

Donald is an immense test for those of us who want love, beauty, art, music, poems, science, exploration, meditation, and spiritual passages as central to our lives. Do we protest? Do we ignore? Do we shelter ourselves? Do we take up advanced wine tasting? Do we turn off the news? Do we go on retreats? Do we post photos of family members and friends bonding? Do we bury our heads in the necks of our pets?

Do we try to purify or go into the trenches? Are both possible at once?

Some answers are simple. We must protest. And we must shelter ourselves. We must watch carefully how much inane racket we can endure in one day, and adjust accordingly.

We must find ways to protest that harm no one else. We must raise awareness of the ugly truths of bigotry and inequality. We must not indulge in fake news ourselves.

We must criticize horrors and quotes that are verifiable but not do wholesale debunking. Melania may surprise us yet, and Ivanka hasn’t been heard from lately. They have been tasked with walking the dog, and that is not easy.

We must ask ourselves the variant of “what would Jesus do?” that suits our personal beliefs and predilections. I ask “What would love do?”

I also ask “Why is it so difficulty for so many people—Trump and beyond—to understand that all humans are made of the same stuff. Pain and loss feel the same in all nations and races.

Should we be surprised that hundreds of football players are “taking the knee”? Of course not. Their identification with those suffering from police bias and other forms of racial bias is close. They feel it in their bones and through their relatives and friends.

But Trump does not and cannot feel the pain and loss of others, and cares so little about it that he cannot even fake it. A bop on his nose mystifies him. Humans confuse him. All he wants is to be petted and called “good boy.”

And so, the old dog barks, snarls, and attacks, boasting in proxy of his younger days when he saw himself as a Casanova who got away with it.

We are in trouble when what we want is a creative dynamic serenity. We want to explore the immense universe, the music of life, the awesome facts of time and space. We want to study life as a beautiful thing, not destroy and abuse it.

Creating harmony within the din of fear, lies, and chaos is extremely difficult, but hopefully it is possible, because it is necessary.

Do not let yourself be swamped. Take time to gather your senses, find your truths, and act upon them in ways that share and expand your visions without harming others.

Somewhere in here we can agree Trump is not only scary and bloody annoying, but a clear and present danger. Somewhere in here is a muzzle. Or fences, or barriers.

We must protect what is good and work to change what is ugly. We are neighbors, and he is a menace, a mongrel doing war-mongering.

 

 

 

Rape Comes to Kalorama

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Three nights ago a woman was bound, blind-folded, assaulted, and raped in her home—a block from me as a crow would fly through our gardens. But we have no crows in Kalorama.

We have cardinals, robins, the occasional blue jay, wrens, and song birds. I once saw a hawk. Mallards have twice in two years tried to claim my pool. I made the mistake of letting the grandchildren give them breadcrumbs. Ducks are aggressive and seem to have long memories.

The woman told the police she did not know how the man got into her house. I know how one would get into my house. Over the garden gate, along the walk between my neighbor’s fence and my home, into the garden, and through the three glass French doors that open from the garden into my dining room. My dog would be confused, but he would bark if a strange man came into my bedroom—bark and attack. I hope. Though, when Fourth of July fireworks go off, he hides in corners and whimpers, so I probably should rethink my supposition.

I light my garden well at night now, and set my alarm for the first time in a couple years. I also moved the tazer—does it still work?—from the far night stand to the near night stand.

Still, there is a high-pitched screech in my cells when I think of her being bound, blindfolded, and raped. Also robbed, but that’s meaningless.

I watch carefully now when I walk my dog. The detectives at the door told me I had walked my dog at the same time the rapist was in the neighborhood—they have him on camera.

President and Michelle Obama, Malia, and Sasha live four blocks away, Ivanka Trump and husband Jared are three blocks away. Jeff Bezos is a block away if the crow flew in the opposite direction of the house of the woman who was raped, and Rex Tillerson is ½ block away, between my house and the house of the woman who was raped.

We prided ourselves on being a quiet neighborhood. Now we have one street blocked off by police cars and concrete barricades, and black Secret Service Suburbans along the street I drive to pick up my grandchildren from school. Tourists ask me directions.

It’s okay. I would sacrifice a lot to have Barack and Michelle nearby. That part feels cozy despite the concrete blocks.

But I write not out of coziness but because of the high-pitched screech in my cells—I write because I am one of three women living alone along my street. We are known as “the three graces.”

I write because assault against any woman feels like personal assault, and when it is a block away it stings your skin like an acidic breeze.

I remember “hit hard up the bridge of the nose so it jams into their head.” I remember I’ve always thought that the knee to the balls was “iffy.” The odds of getting that right seem minimal and I would be caught with one leg off the ground.

I remember that in the street you scream, you fight, you run. I remember at all costs not to get into a car.

I never learned what to do if the assailant is in your home and there are secret police out of reach just a block away.

I write because one of the detectives said “It was an assault, but no one was killed.”

She was bound, blindfolded, and raped—but no one was killed. We don’t do murders in Kalorama, evidently—only rapes.

I write because I am angry because rape is attempted murder of a woman’s—or man’s—soul. I write because people harm each other. I write in order to reach the place where I can cry.

 

THE STEPS TO AUTOCRACY . . . and, btw, also genocide

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#1. Promote yourself as the savior, often by glitter and large buildings, who will return your nation or culture to greatness and lift “your” people out of humiliation and make them safe by eliminating “dangerous elements.”

The steps to become a dictator, an all-authoritarian ruler, are the same as the ones required to achieve genocide. While I do not believe, by any stretch, that the United States is headed towards genocide, I recognize that the actions by our president are aligned with the actions necessary for genocide. It is a question only of degree and goals.

My study of strongmen gaining control of governments and, ultimately, achieving genocide began in 2003 when I co-directed and produced the documentary film Peace by Peace: Women on the Frontlines. The film showed the work of women rebuilding their nations after massive devastation, including in Burundi and Bosnia.

It was ten years after the genocide in Burundi, concurrent with the genocide in Rwanda, by Hutus of Tutsis and moderate Hutus, and seven years since the end of the four-year siege of Sarajevo by Bosnia Serbs.

The documentary, which debuted at the United Nations and was aired by PBS television, shows women in Burundi using reconciliation radio programs and face-to-face interactions to build peace and connections across the land. In those verdant hills a civil war continued to simmer. One day after filming our local handlers told us as we were driving away that guerrillas had come to that village the day before and they had killed people.

In Bosnia, we filmed women in Sarajevo and across the countryside rebuilding the economy through small businesses and micro-loans. A tepid peace was maintained by the presence of United Nations peace keepers.

To understand the causes and effects of genocide I observed and researched, among other things, the strategies of strongmen in Bosnia and Burundi and other nations, including Germany. What steps are required to achieve the power of an autocrat?

Below are my findings from that time, with a few updated side comments. They are more or less in sequence:

1. Promote yourself as the savior, often by glitter and large buildings, who will return your nation or culture to greatness and lift “your” people out of humiliation and make them safe by eliminating “dangerous elements.”

2. Instill fear in the hearts and minds of your citizens. Fear in the majority of the minorities so the majority align with you for protection. Fear in the minorities of you and the majority so they stay silent and weakened.

3. Gain control of the media by silencing, weakening, and defaming legitimate media and setting up false media to carry your messages of fear, hate, and alternative “truths,” i.e. propaganda. This is key.

4. Begin and maintain a steady drumbeat through media and every way possible of demeaning and debasing one or more minorities. Nothing you say is too extreme and there is no need for it to be truthful. They are killers, rapists, dirty, and, eventually, “cockroaches.”

5. Gain control of the military by degrading the leaders who would oppose you and replacing them with those who will do what you say – usually for their own gain.

6. Do the same with the judiciary system.

5. Attack and weaken educational institutions, scientists, and professional leaders. Condemn and weaken the “effete intellectuals.” They are your enemy. They must be silenced. They are infiltrators who do not like you and have their own agendas.

6. Set up paramilitary groups across the land with arms to patrol, intimidate, and harm “the other.” If you don’t have guns, machetes will do.

7. Restrict the selected scapegoat minorities, saying it is for the safety of the majority. Restrict their travel, opportunities, access to education and professions and places to live. Tighten restrictions over time with systematically applied “rules” about what they can and cannot do. If possible, build a wall to isolate them.

8. If you wish to enact a genocide, look for, or create, an event to use as a catalyst, as a spark to the tinder you have prepared, to launch slaughter, randomly or orderly depending on your preference and what is possible. Watch the fire burn.

Our president, his staff, and appointees know he is striving for personal power beyond “checks and balances,” but they probably don’t label it as turning our democracy into an autocracy. Trump certainly has no internal existence except “Trump First” and that does not allow for self-review of his actions and their consequences. It also means he does not have a clue of the nature of a democracy let alone know how to be president of one. He doesn’t have the equipment.

We, however, are becoming aware of the signs of an emerging autocracy and must continue to rise against it en masse – majority and minorities, women and men – to prevent immense damage to our democracy, our nation’s fiber, and our personal morals.

If looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, the chances are it will behave like a duck because it IS a duck. It is what ducks know to do.

Donald, Duck-esque, only knows what he knows to do. It might work well in his personal fantasy land, but it does not work in our real world. En masse is the accumulation of concerned people. Rise up!