The Taliban Within

General Rantings

“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

Matthew 7:3, The Holy Bible (King James Version)

That beam is the election of Donald Trump, if not by the majority of the people that live in this land…at least by the people who live on a very clear majority of the actual, physical land mass of the United States.  That brother…depending on what the Trump administration does to the rights of women and other equally important groups of people who aren’t white, Christian, and heterosexual…is the Taliban, about whom we as a nation may soon lose any right to complain.

I never went to college so my Alma Mater (though I never finished it either) was Berkeley High School.  There, where even Bob Dylan performed in my high school auditorium, I gathered for lunch every day with most of the rest of the students to make and listen to each other’s political speeches and calls to action.  In the link below you will see that, over a half century later, Berkeley High’s student population still congregates in the exact same places where we did in the 1960s.

It therefore comes as no surprise to me that half the student population walked out of Berkeley High School in protest against the man who was elected president.

To quote the words of the woman who did in fact win the election by popular vote, and would have been our next president were this country actually a democracy:  “Never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it.”

But, as we fight, we must still…at least in my opinion…heed that beam, in fact “own” that beam, in our own eye:  Whose rights…whose anger…did we so grievously ignore for such a long time that even just the Electoral College could elect a man with as much hate and as little political experience as Donald Trump?

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/91870480-132.html

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