Mother Nature projected gloom on a raw, cold, foggy Christmas Eve in 1985 as I took the family’s poodle, Jennifer, for a walk through our Madrona neighborhood. There was no way of knowing that a heinous crime was being committed in a house past which we walked.
During Eucharist at Epiphany two hours later, as we offered prayers of the faithful, I learned of the lethal stabbing attack on popular Seattle attorney Chuck Goldmark and his family. The deranged assailant believed he was fighting communism.
We are getting a reminder 40 years later as thousands gather at Bondi Beach near Sydney to remember 15 Hanukkah victims, murdered because they were Jewish. One was an elderly Holocaust survivor.
The world is an ugly, brutish place these days. In some places, life is risky and short. Violence has been the order of the year, from nations to neighborhoods. Sixty thousand Palestinians lay dead from Israel’s invasion of Gaza, while not a day goes by that Seattle TV news does not feature a teenage shooting. Were 2025 a fish, I would throw it back in the water. We’ve seen a bevy of unwelcome comebacks.
It starts with the John Birch Society, with an anti-fluoride, anti-vaxxer activist named Secretary of Health and Human Services. RFK, Jr., is the first-ever Cabinet Secretary denounced by his own family. Then there’s Trump bringing back fossil fuels. The POTUS cancels wind energy farms while the administration orders that our region’s one remaining coal power plant remain in operation. No matter that CO2 in the atmosphere is reaching record levels.
Ukraine, a major World War II battlefield, scene of genocide, is being ravaged by an invader once more. Russian missiles are slamming into its cities, Russian soldiers are again dying by the tens of thousands on its battlefields while its people seek peace and liberty. Kursk, scene of a decisive, slaughterhouse WWII battle, is once again, an epicenter of warfare.
Eighty years after demise of the Third Reich, nativism and racism have again reared their ugly heads, even in our own country, where we’ve seen mass assassinations targeting African-Americans in Buffalo, Jews in Pittsburgh, and Latinos in El Paso. All because of faith, skin color and place of origin.
Our vice president skirts the edges of master race theory, while white replacement demagoguery — the stuff of Tucker Carlson and the far right — is our equivalent of the stab-in-back rhetoric, directed at Jews, that poisoned Germany’s political atmosphere after World War I.
The year’s been ugly with conspiracy theories, podcasters like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens poisoning social media and our Vice President taking out after Somali immigrants. The latest ugliness out of J.D. Vance: calling for Minnesota State Sen. Omer Fateh — candidate for mayor of Minneapolis — to “run for mayor of Mogadishu.”
We have also entered a new Gilded Age. The mega-millionaires of the 1890s strutted their stuff with mega-mansions. The mega-billionaires of the 21st Century retreat to mega-compounds and mega-yachts. They underwrite the politicians who keep the federal minimum wage low while reaping more billions from Trump tax cuts.
And there is corruption, the intermingling of public and private business exemplified by the President’s family. It even has a symbol, the luxury Boeing 747 “gifted” by Qatar as the new Trump Force One.
Dictatorial nomenclature is again on the upswing. We used to have Cuidad Trujillo, Stalingrad, Karl Marx Stadt, and Adolf Hitler Platz. Now we have the Trump Institute for Peace and the Trump Kennedy Center.
The battleship apparently long ago met its demise starting December 10, 1941, when Japanese bombers sank H.M.S. Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaya. The biggest-ever battle wagon, the Yamato, went down off Okinawa, in April of 1945. But our leader has just rolled out plans for “Trump Class” battleships.
Manifest Destiny is returning with Trump plans to seize Greenland and appropriate “our oil” from Venezuela. Bling is ever with us, but has its symbol in the $400 million White House ballroom. The First Amendment is on a downward spiral. Censorship and self-censorship is in. Trump has recently shaken down CBS for a $16 million settlement of a lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. The same network has just pulled — temporarily, one hopes — a 60 Minutes report on torture of “illegals” deported to El Salvador.
What’s happened to our nation, we asked ourselves as I lunched this week with a high school classmate. Nancy and I grew up when the federal government was a force for good, and a graceful, insightful President Kennedy steered the world clear fof a nuclear confrontation.
But it is testament to the strength of our Republic and people that America has endured recent presidents and that blowback has greeted overreach. We saw unmistakable signs last month in New Jersey and Virginia, this past week in Miami. And the 60 Minutes El Salvador report has surfaced in full.
Trump is overreach on steroids, the Godzilla of overreach. The pushback must be equally powerful. I end with words spoken by Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (Sr.) in Indianapolis hours after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr: “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago, tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”
This article also appears in The Cascadia Advocate.
Discover more from Post Alley
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
