The world is on fire but there is hope. Remember that the essential message of The Lord of the Rings is that despair if a failing because it presumes a determined future, and no one can know the future where unlikely events can produce unlikely and joyful outcomes.

The War in Ukraine

Certainly, over the last weekend things have improved for the Ukrainians. Russian lines have shattered in some sectors and there are reports that Ukrainian forces have reached parts of the Russian border. But the war is not over. We may, looking back with the advantage of history, see this as a turning point or we may see it as another battlefield fluctuation. What we need to do is continue supporting the Ukrainians in their fight with weapons, money, and morale.

American Politics

The political system of the United States is also aflame and here the structure is fully engulfed. The slow steady poisoning of the Republican party with racists and authoritarians has brought that body politic fully into its diseased state. From New Hampshire to Arizona the GOP is infected, controlled, and Led by people who have rejected democracy. The former president did not create this situation, he is a product of the infection not its cause. As someone who was a registered Republican from 1980 thru 2003 it boggles my mind to see the party in its current state. If you are someone born in the 90s this may seem ‘normal’ to you and that the GOP has merely thrown off the mask and revealed its true nature, but it doesn’t look that way to me.

To me it is far stranger and far more extreme than that.

In the 80s conservatives often anti-nuclear power and weapons movements ‘watermelons,’ because they were ‘green on the outside and red on the inside.’ The Soviet Union helped fund and promote those groups and movements to disrupt the West and NATO. These groups and associated travelers were considered foolish and gullible by the right for how they accepted Soviet propaganda as truth with any healthy skepticism and now those roles have been reversed. It is the conservatives embracing and promoting Russian propaganda with qualm or reservation. It is the conservative pulling Russian aggression to their bosom and declaring it just and good. It’s nearly incomprehensible to witness. Literally for decades I have heard conservatives rant and snarl about a supposed ‘deal’ from Edward Kennedy to take Russian assistance in a bid for the presidency. (A tale that has but one unverified source.) And now they openly proclaim that they would rather be Russian than a democrat. They turn a blind eye to mountains of evidence of Russian interference in American Politics. For those of that lived through the final stages of the Cold War this is a topsy-turvy as when Kirk found himself in the Dystopian Terran Empire. I hope that this year’s election defies the historical norms, that young people, so fickle in their off-year elections, arrive in droves and surprise us with Democratic victories, but even if that doesn’t come to be, the fight goes on and I will not despair.