I almost got to Proctor which would be my fourth city in the Congressional District yesterday and put up signs. There were some yuks. One family with about 12 people were sunning themselves in West Duluth. A neighbor kindly pointed them out to me and I wondered if it was a set up. I poked my head around the corner of the house and introduced myself as a politician who didn’t want to intrude on their family time but with my face all over Duluth only the blind don’t have a hint what I’m up to. One young fellow told me the oldest man in the group would love to talk to me. I smiled and said I couldn’t help but wonder if I was being set up and that led to laughs in the group enjoying a sunny day. I gave my spiel on democracy and then joked a little and excused myself hearing someone in the group, I think the Trumper I presume I was mostly addressing saying. “I like that guy and chuckling to himself.”
Today’s NYT had an op ed warning Joe Biden not to make Abe Lincoln’s mistake of 1858 in the Lincoln Douglass Debates about quoting a Bible about almost certain national division. The line in the Bible is famous because of Lincoln a nation divided against itself can not stand. That sounded menacing but for Lincoln it was true and the Supreme Court weighed in preventing any free state from denying owners of human property from forbiding slavery within their borders. That’s the kind of Supreme Court it looks like Trump supporters want. Enforce Southern standards on liberal states……whatever the hell liberal means except they are my enemies.
Liberal and conservative get tossed around all the time to the point of meaninglessness. That’s why liberals opt to call themselves “progressives” except what the heck does that mean. We will progressively make progress even if it means every living organism above the Earth’s crust is riddled with the plastic waste that was so convenient for a couple generations to keep food fresh before it broke down and contaminated every living thing?
Does it justify polluting one of the last relatively pollution free water rich areas so that 500 white men can have good paying jobs for twenty years before the sulfides they throw away to get precious copper pollute this rare water for infinity? If so Pete clueless as a clam Stauber is a great progressive himself……..And I’m not against copper mining and yes, if we don’t do it someone will create an even bigger mess somewhere beyond our borders driving even more people to migrate to America like tons of desperate people escaping the living hells our Republican presidents have helped create.
Conservative to me always meant resisting change for the sake of change and spending money by throwing it willy-nilly at problems that are only poorly understood. But that’s a really boring use of the word. Today perhaps being a conservative is supporting a look the other way life when your minister is fiddling around with children because God has old testament heroes who did the same thing so the Bible makes it OK. Or how about conservatives as cultic followers of a sociopathic, narcissist braggart who says his supporters are so dumb they would let him shoot innocent people? If that’s “conservative” shit is now haute cuisine.
This morning I got an email from a rural county from a self described conservative who wants me to be part of a “meet and greet” with conservatives who are fed up with Stauber. My first thought is has this person looked through my anti trump website? Damned if I know. I’ll be giving her a call. I’ll get to Proctor this afternoon. In the mean time I have a couple hours laying out my traveling plans for the next fifty days. One week’s worth I will back off to spend time with my son and his family.
After a fine weekend it has finally dawned on me that I will likely remain a one man crusade against a “conservative” political party financed by secret first amendment protected bribery financed by billionaires getting trillion dollar tax cuts. The ten or twelve modest donations I’ve gotten leave me a little short. But I can call a cowardly traitor a cowardly traitor and I will keep putting up my lawnsigns across the one third of the state that is Minnesota’s 8th District. No one will be able to say they didn’t think there was alternative and I’ll be able to live with myself as I watch my grandchildren fill up with the Koch brothers waste petroleum products.
This is a good rough draft. I won’t reread it because I couldn’t help myself from editing it and I have 30,000 square miles to travel cover the next seven weeks. proof reading is a luxury
