Letter, April 17, 2017


Lucy Warner Today at 10:34 PM
To -----
Message body
APRIL 17, 2017

Thank you for your email today. I do want to explain to you, also. Forgive me, I can be neurotic, but I have, in fact, always felt that you didn't like me, just tolerated me as quietly as possible, but I can see it is probably because you are by nature very reserved, more so than I am. I did think you were saying to me that I shouldn't be so political and outspoken in my blog and Facebook. First, your voice is soft and my hearing is borderline in the right ear, so I was straining to hear you. I heard part of what you said, which I THOUGHT was something like "the amount of negative discussion (in the family and on the Internet) was causing the political climate in the country to be worse than it would be without it." I don't know what your personal political views are, but if you read this you will understand why I keep on blogging, and perhaps why I am explaining myself to you. I see you are honestly interested in me, and I want to let you know why I do so strongly feel that American citizens should look at the national and world situation, and VOTE even if we do feel we aren't totally up to date on all issues. I personally believe in voting my heart as well as my most logical thoughts. Achieving personal grandeur without caring is just simple conceit.

I do, also have to disagree with the view that conservative ideas -- as they exist today in our intellectually and spiritually degraded society -- are just as virtuous and as good for the country as are liberal and progressive thought. I am distressed that we are in another such stressful time in the US as the Vietnam War days; the atmosphere really is particularly angry and frightening, but my reasons for pitching in my two cents are these.

First, an unopposed bully is a triumphant bully, especially if he's a really big bruiser! I know Jesus said to be totally pacifist, but I just can't, and I don't even believe it to be a good idea. I have always remembered that Jesus himself took a bullwhip and drove the merchants out of the temple, though. He didn't kill anybody, but he certainly did make a point! I don't want to see bloodshed, heaven forbid, but Bernie's peaceful revolution would put us on the path to the great nation we can be. More than at any time period since Richard Nixon was making his controlling moves, just as Trump is now -- which are, in the opinion of myself and many others, absolutely against the spirit and the law of a free democracy; and are very much like what happened in Germany as Hitler was taking over. That's why the "Fascist" and "Nazi" words are being used so freely about him now. Nazism isn't just about government control and abuse, as Trump seems to think, it's about a total lack of concern about humans and their basic needs, one of which is safety within our own home and hometown. They are appropriate language, unpleasant though they may be, to express the situation. That same old Ultrarightist philosophy is taking over again. Like poison ivy, it never fully went away. The roots are still alive. I do think this scary upsurge now is mainly because our working class whites are doing worse and worse financially, and they are ANGRY. They want some Browns, Asians, Blacks and Hispanics to blame it on. That's why they keep railing against "Political Correctness." I particularly hate that phrase, because what they are talking about is politeness and common decency. I have very rarely used it, personally.

We are much too similar now to that period before WWII, and the same horrors have become more frequent now, rather than just occasional happenings. The KKK is marching again, Gays are being treated badly, "pointy headed intellectuals" are scorned. Most of those whites had neither the money nor the inclination to go to college, and didn't want to get into tens of thousands of dollars of debt, so I sympathize with them, but beating up on others because of it is unacceptable. (That's why we need to initiate Bernie's plan of four years of FREE COLLEGE at state institutions, healthcare including mental health care for all unconditionally, oh yes, and a guaranteed income.) As for mistreatment of the weaker people just because we can get away with it and we enjoy their pain, I totally detest that, wherever it exists.

I personally believe that if a White Male doctor had wanted the flight crew to go ask some other ticket holders to give up THEIR seats, they would have respectfully tried that route, and very likely found a volunteer. They claim that he was "belligerent," but I personally don't blame him. Not only was he probably fed up with such treatment, but he had a place were he needed to be. He is not a "Chink," but a medical doctor and should be respected. Also, as Gwen pointed out the other day, if they had offered $2,000 rather than $800 for somebody else to give up HIS seat, it might have worked. Less than a year ago there was another airline incident in which a black female American physician was on a plane and when the flight crew asked for a doctor to help a passenger, she went up and offered her services. They told her to go sit down and continued to ask for a doctor. (Really!) I believe in that case they did finally move aside and let her treat him -- the pilot intervened, I think -- but the skin color and gender prejudices almost prevented her from doing that. Things like that do make me furious. That isn't the best America that we can be. Just because we have had a good country doesn't mean we should complacently stop fighting the good fight! It's clear that the good country can disappear in one election.

In those days, the 1930s to 40s, many -- even in the USA -- did agree with Hitler, but (hopefully) most in Germany were just afraid of him. In those days, a lawless and hate-filled climate ruled in Germany as well as Europe as a whole, especially in regard to "the Jewish question." Hitler's people even set up a required informer program among the ordinary citizens, who must do it or face consequences if they failed to. Look up the term "kristallnacht" on Google for one of the beginning event leading to the rampage against Jews in Germany. I was born on the heels of WWII, so I just can't feel that we decent Americans shouldn't fight back while we still can, and fight strongly -- as Bernie said the day after election night, that he will work with them when he can, but when he can't he will "oppose them mightily." He really is a very clever and strong man, and decent as well. I want him for president in 2020, if not before. The way Trump's Russian problems are going, who knows??

Jews, of course, have been hounded and often killed throughout Europe and most of the world due to the simple fact that they aren't Christian and have strongly held onto their traditional ethnic identity and religion, like the Native Americans, Amish, Quakers, etc. Hebrew culture, and it is truly ancient and definitely Eastern in its' influence, like the Islamic groups of today, is still alive and well, and I admire all those groups greatly for their courage to withstand the pure crap that they have had to endure from Christians, especially Protestants. True they do look "different." Some highly religious sects wear long "earlocks," to honor the command not to cut there hair (in Islam the men always have to keep their beards) which has a certain beauty, but Westerners like us just don't understand it. There is a great movie of the 1970s or so, called "The Chosen," which you might like to see for that particular belief and culture. The young man and his Rabbi father were particularly well played.

“------,” my college roommate and good friend was a more modern Jew, and looked just like everybody else, except for being very pretty with one of those "good" well-rounded bodies. She also, like Bernie Sanders, was not a religious Jew,. She was pragmatic, logical, very smart and very "presentable." Still my husband's friend, a fellow grad student, came up to us as we were going to meet him in the cafeteria. He went up to her first, however, before she had quite reached us, and said something to her which I assumed must have been an antisemitic slur of some kind from the way she reacted (I didn't hear it) and she just stared at him hard with a frozen face for a second and turned on her heel and walked away. I left Clayton and his friend, no longer mine, and sat at another table with Lannie. That guy (whose name I'm blocking right now, sorry) glared at me and said, "I don't like Jews." I said, "I doubt if they like you very much either", and also stalked away. I have known some half a dozen Jewish people and black people as well, and I like them fine. They're smart, educated, open, no more dishonest than white people despite the stories told about them, and not "classist." I do hate having to compete with uppity people for a little recognition and respect, but my good luck is that I'm a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. I haven't had to put up with as much as those groups do.

Some of the more conservative Jewish groups especially, do simply refuse to do things like leave their skullcaps (yarmulkes) at home (ignorant Fascists like to call them "beanies" in order to be disrespectful to Jews). Many modern American Jews don't wear the hat (some are less "religious" than others) and they make friends outside their own group more than the more conservative Jews do. There's so much conformity in this culture of all kinds that doing anything out of the ordinary can make us the butt of jokes and worse. That's what I really DO NOT LIKE about America. I would like for all of us to read more and watch football less. Narrow mindedness and cruelty are encouraged by many or at any rate those who are being bullied are not defended. Bullying, scapegoating, etc. are accepted as inevitable by others or even condoned. I agree it's inevitable, but I refuse to go along with it without a fight, and if all citizens would speak up whenever they see it happening, things would improve. That's why police departments are straightening their officers out a little bit now. First, the BLM will come in large numbers and chant on the pavement outside their departments and the law is stepping in a bit, too. Chicago and some other cities are setting up plans to train and discipline their officers better, and fire those who prove themselves to sadists or stupid instead of good, honest peace keepers. To me, the "kneejerk" racial bigotry is unrealistic and downright silly, and it inhibits my right to make friends with people I really do like to be around, some of whom are not white and Christian.

Let's face it, it still is not really SAFE for Jews to allow themselves to be too open among many Christians to this day. They have been killed for no good reason and in shocking numbers, over and over down through the last 2,000 years, and slandered with phrases like "The Jews eat babies," and "the Jews killed Jesus." The ignorance and heartlessness of people like that appalls me. It's true that like the Islamic people, they do things in public like praying with a rocking movement which doesn't look like Christian prayer, and very likely frightens WASPS to some degree. Two conservative rabbis around a year ago were thrown off an airplane, like this Chinese doctor last week, for praying in that way. We are definitely in a new political period, largely due to the cruel and abusive behavior of our modern day White Supremacists and White Nationalists, who in some cases recently have been in the news for openly and loudly advocating a "White Christian" nation in the USA. I don't believe that will fly here, and I certainly am going to fight it. I notice our good SC Republican Senator LIndsey Graham has spoken out against Trump on several occasions, as have many others. At least two judges have blocked his moves like banning Muslims to come to America, that caused such a stir, and almost as soon as he was elected. If he would follow accepted patterns more, it wouldn't be quite as bad for him nor for the country.

Too many of those people and others who call themselves "conservative" and "Christian" have taken their places behind Donald Trump; and are responsible for electing him, even though they almost certainly don't really believe in pure Nazism. They just don't want to have to sit near or talk to a Black person. They're garden variety racists who probably wouldn't want to see a policy of incarcerating or killing hundreds of thousands of any group of people. Many of the younger ones, especially if they didn't study their history enough to understand it, probably don't even know much about that Nazi period of time. Of course, the fact that some of us "Bernie Progressives" refused to vote for Hillary over the DNC affair, and some more conservative people simply hate her personally -- after all she did quip "I don't bake cookies," which is the other half of the problem. I did vote for her. I have been most concerned, though, about the number of people in this country who don't actually like Trump, but who aren't politically aware enough to know that withholding their votes from Hillary would, by default, give Trump the presidency.

Not only has Trump gone out of his way to bring out the hateful crowd that is ALWAYS lurking in the shadows in any human society -- it's a psychiatric disorder, I fully believe, but it's literally contagious, and it's "going around" these days. It's scapegoating and an unthinking hatred of "the Other," which is what happened in Germany, also. Hitler didn't force the Germans to support him at first, though after he got himself elected to office, he enacted a military crackdown on the country, and then proceeded to make an almost successful attempt to take over the world. Just as in Russia, possibly even today, nobody at all was allowed to oppose the "Fearless Leader." For that quotation go to the Bullwinkle the Moose cartoons. Putin, unfortunately, is accused of murdering a number of his political enemies.

Those highly educated and intelligent people, such as Albert Einstein -- who made it out of Germany just in time -- were killed along with the Jews if they refused to go along with the Nazi agenda. Einstein, of course was Jewish, but other scholars, etc. were executed. Many were killed because they had physical disabilities, for instance. Hitler was literally breeding those whom he considered to be the "pure" Aryan individuals, and vastly superior to everyone else -- tall, blonde, blue eyed, athletic, etc. Many such highly educated people as scientists, teachers, philosophers, the religious, let's face it, are truly "dangerous" to a repressive group like the Nazis; they see the evil, they don't condone it, and they rebel. I do hope we won't see that kind of oppression being allowed to grow among us here. Wikipedia probably has a good timeline on what happened then and a good discussion that you might want to check out if you happen to be interested. I really love Wikipedia articles for being thorough and to the point. It is also almost always written in plain English rather than legalese, etc. There are very few subjects that I haven't been able to find on Google if I search a few minutes.

The Trump crowd includes a large number of far right "anti-everybody else" people, especially the Black, Hispanic and Islamic people, but the Jews also; a synagogue and a Jewish graveyard were defaced within the last six months or so with swastikas and crude insults. It began to escalate as soon as Trump was elected, and in the run-up to the election. I hadn't heard of anything like that in this country against Jews before he came along -- Blacks, yes. Trump has given those people political cover and encouragement, so they have even done things like give Nazi salutes to both Trump and at least one of his openly Fascist followers ("Milo Yiannopolous) who gives rousing proNazi and pro-Trump speeches, and the crowd just eats it up with a spoon! Steve Bannon, Trump's "advisor" until the last week or two, is a rabble rouser on the Internet for the Fascist, White Supremacist, and White Nationalist milleu in the US and abroad, now being called the Alt-Right. Breitbart is Bannon's home website. His good friend and lie spinner is Alex Jones. He makes up the conspiracy theories that those people like so much -- and then has the gall to call CNN, NBC, CBS, NPR, BBC etc. "Fake News." Take a look at Breitbart, Infowars, Stormfront, etc. to see what really chills my blood, and makes me very concerned about the grave danger to our country posed by our decent people's failing to speak out against these people or even voting for another candidate (such as poor Hillary) in order to block him from getting in. I voted for her, though I had to hold my nose to do it! Unfortunately he was elected, and he is daily removing the "safety net" for the poor (that means my subsidized housing) and a number of other things that lots of Americans depend on and love. Being "proud of America" means to me valuing the good societal things like public schooling for all, the right for us as citizens to openly be what we are (gay, less than white, Spanish speaking, etc. etc.), more than our military exploits. That's what "Making America Great" means to me.

The truth is that though Gwen and I love each other, we are very different politically. She came from a whole different "America" than I did, because of the way this country changed from the late 1930s to the mid 1940s, and especially the 1950s when things started to get better -- such as the Great Depression ending. My date of birth is 1945, so I grew up with more frequent news footage of Hitler raving in front of crowds holding their arms up and shouting "Heil Hitler", the horror of the atomic bomb, and belligerent crowds of white people confronting blacks, with or without a hood over their faces. I was so young that I absorbed it for what it is, rather than having my patriotism, traditionalism and classism up before my eyes a shield against the truth. The South in particular is still full of those things. Within the last 20 years both Bojangles and Cracker Barrel refused service to Blacks. I still fight it, as a result, even though our county has improved greatly. You don't see whites only signs on restaurant doors, bathrooms, and water fountains anymore. Black people can stay in motels and hotels. Nothing but a strong hand by the Federal government and millions of civil rights marchers could have brought that about. Trying to change people like the KKK and now these Nazi followers with rational and compassionate discussion alone just doesn't work. I do think that teaching those benign ideas like toleration and respect in the schools, alongside some really honest information about Jim Crow could do that, but a number of those Tea Partiers have tried to stop that, along with evolution and environmental protection, because they think it is "indoctrination." I have a feeling they also think that the Rapture is coming any day now, so WHO CARES? Well, maybe teaching those things is a form of persuasion, but it's persuasion in the right direction!

There are people these days who actually claim that the Nazi Holocaust never happened. To prove it to themselves, they should look at the photos and horrific videos from concentration camps where the American soldiers visited after Hitler was defeated. The Jewish people, who were clearly starved, were staring at the soldiers and newsmen from behind a chain link fence, some clearly encouraged and happy to see them, but others simply looked dead mentally and emotionally.

For a fuller view of what's going on in the US, which has me so concerned, go to Huffington Post, "POLITICS, 03/05/2016 06:24 pm ET | Updated Mar 05, 2016, "This Donald Trump Rally Looks Like A Scene From Nazi Germany. It is getting way too scary." Go to this site below, read the article, and look at the pictures and videos. This Donald Trump Rally Looks Like A Scene From Nazi Germany. Just click on the link or on the photo and it should come up.

I am telling you all this because this is why those of us who are, yes, always interested in politics and always Progressive or Liberal -- are frankly frightened now. Gwen believes "everything will work out," and that our oppositional writings are "extreme" and more damaging than Trump is, but that is exactly why Trump was elected. We have become complacent in this country and I'm afraid it may really be our downfall. All this business of Russia helping him get elected also should be a loud alarm bell to us. Should we really trust Vladimir Putin? Putting a lot of cream in this particular cup of coffee isn't going to make it taste any better. Too many in this country thought it was just "politics as usual," and it isn't. Many Bernie followers refused to vote for Hillary even against Trump, which was a very foolish mistake, and the very opposite of what Bernie asked them to do. Some of them even called him a "sellout." I say, "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know," as the saying goes. I do agree with Trump on one or two things, and one is that Hillary really is "crooked," but she isn't Fascist and an arouser of racial hatred as he is. That's it. This flow of thoughts has all run out, now. Goodnight, and may The Higher Power bless you.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-right-hand-salute_us_56db50d8e4b03a405678e27a.
This Donald Trump Rally Looks Like A Scene From Nazi Germany
It is getting way too scary.
By Janie Velencia




From: -------------
Sent: Monday, April 17, 2017 11:31 AM
Subject: Re: CONVERSATION

Hi Lucy - got your voice message yesterday - we had company. I'm at work today and have a full schedule this evening and then it will be bad time for your time zone.

Could I please ask topic? It sounds like you thought I said something offensive? I can't imagine what that would be and suspect you misheard as I would never intentionally say anything offensive to anyone. I like and respect you very much and have always enjoyed conversing with you at family gatherings. I am not as much a political enthusiast as you so perhaps I fumbled something in discussing the political goings on?

On the go - back to work. I would appreciate knowing context but in advance if any apology is needed from me you will get it.

Love,
Tracy

On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 11:49 AM Tracy Jane Comer wrote:
Hi Lucy - I'm on the go most of the day and this evening, but maybe totomorrow? My cell is 608-215-1183. I'm a moving target most days and rarely answer phone but if I see a call from FL I will pick up if I can. (I'm not really a phone person!)

May I ask topic?

XO
Tracy

On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 4:12 PM Lucy Warner wrote:
Feb. 9, 2017

Hi, Tracy. I have a question I want to ask you. Could you call me on the phone, or give me a time that would be good for me to call you to talk ten minutes or so? I'm awake and ready to talk 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM most days. My phone # is 904-924-7041. Also, I don't have your cell phone number. I have one in my book for Allen, but I assume you have a separate one also. I need to update my information on your address also.

I guess you're snowed in up there, aren't you? It's cool and sunny here, but I have my windows open. Pollen is out and irritating my eyes and nose, unfortunately, but that's life.

Love,
Lucy