Op-Ed

Let’s use up the planet and bless the future with its corpse.

If politics involved speaking the truth, those words could well be the core slogan of mainstream politicians and their media cohorts, with the purpose of the election process (you know, democracy) being, simply, to choose the specific ways in which we continue exploiting the planet and ignoring the consequences.

Should we destroy the rainforests quickly or slowly? How much should be invest in the next generation of nuclear weapons and — come on! — when do we get to use them to protect our freedoms? We can’t afford to save the planet but we can definitely afford to kill it. But let’s do it carefully and responsibly.

There’s an alternative to this thinking, but I’m not sure when or how it will gain sufficient political and economic traction in today’s world to have an impact: to change official thinking and basic assumptions about the nature of reality. This alternative emerges from wisdom at the core of human consciousness, which the “developed” world chose to abandon and forget in millennia past. It’s often referred to these days as indigenous thinking, but it doesn’t belong in a museum.

“Get out of the car! Get out of the car NOW!!”

The officer — the mad man with a badge — probably shouts those words 50 times at the driver, Second Lt. Caron Nazario, at a gas station in Windsor, Va., all the while holding a gun a foot from his face. Nazario, who is black and Latino, had just been pulled over for not having a rear license plate (he did have one but, you know, we all make mistakes) and . . . fasten your seatbelts! . . . driving with tinted windows. Of course the cops had their guns drawn.

The anniversary of his assassination always brings a flood of tributes to Martin Luther King Jr., and this Sunday will surely be no exception. But those tributes -- including from countless organizations calling themselves progressive -- are routinely evasive about the anti-militarist ideals that King passionately expressed during the final year of his life.

You could call it evasion by omission.

The standard liberal canon waxes fondly nostalgic about King’s “I have a dream” speech in 1963 and his efforts against racial segregation. But in memory lane, the Dr. King who lived his last year is persona non grata.

The Lorax speaks for the trees.

Trump canceled him.

Trump’s Zombie Cultists are in a snit about Dr. Seuss. They whine about questioning his older books over issues of racism, sexism, and antisemitism. They moan about a “cancel culture.”

WE CALL BS!!!!

Theodore Seuss Geisel’s sixty-plus books have sold more than 700,000,000 copies worldwide. They are uniquely brilliant …charming, funny, irreverent, sassy, thought-provoking. They preach tolerance, fellowship, responsibility, good will, creative thinking … all the stuff Trump and his disciples so clearly hate.

Anti-authoritarian (Yertle the Turtle) and anti-materialistic (The Grinch Who Stole Christmas), Seuss provoked (like Mad Magazine), some of the first out-of-the-box excursions for millions of readers, young and younger.

Like early Disney, the Marx Brothers’ Day at the Races, and other ancient icons, some of Dr. Seuss’s early works have cringe-worthy passages with racist and sexist imagery.

Pardon me while I break the fourth wall.

I’m in the human stew right now, you might say: drowning in politics, technology, the weather and my own crazy ego. I’m trying to write a column.

What makes this one different . . .well, I’ve been forced today to set aside my certainties, norms and expectations — virtually all of them. Certainty number one: that my computer will keep functioning as I write.

This morning — a dozen or so hours ago — I sat at my machine and it was working fine except for one thing: letters didn’t appear on my screen when I hit the keys. This is called writing. I’m an excellent writer, or so I tell myself, but my computer pointed out to me that if I can’t create letters and form them into words, then I can’t write. This was certainly an infuriating mystery, but I still had a few possibilities I could access to maintain situation normal. Well, I had one possibility. Call Geek Squad.

Imagine a “USA!” that has truly outgrown – transcended – racism. Would it still have a Republican Party?

One recent and shocking – but hardly surprising – piece of news is the huge scramble in legislatures, especially the Republican-controlled ones, all across the country to draft and pass legislation restricting the ability of Americans (some of them, anyway) to vote. It’s as though there’s a national effort going on to repeal the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and return to a happier time: Let’s make America great again!

“It is long past time for . . . a sea change in the United States’ approach to national and human security . . .”

Yes, yes, yes. These words cut to the soul. Can we create a grown-up America? This is how it begins.

The quote is from a letter to President Biden, put forward in early February by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Center for Victims of Torture and signed by 111 organizations, demanding that the new president shut down, at long last, the prison hellhole at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

This month, many are cheering the news that the NRA is now as financially bankrupt as it is morally. Last year, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued four current or former NRA executives for "illegal financial conduct," leading to the gun group's recent declaration of bankruptcy. Among James' charges were that Wayne LaPierre, CEO and executive vice president of the NRA, received "hundreds of thousands of dollars" of complimentary safaris in Africa.

The group said it would reincorporate in Texas after a century in New York.

As the New Year asserts itself — a year that begins in global lockdown and political shock-and-awe — an extraordinary question emerges: Are we on the brink of real change?

Are we moving, politically speaking, beyond the small and stupid? Is the era of Trump really over? Assuming that to be the case is far too easy. Trump, after all, was and is part of the change, the breakdown of the status quo. You might say he’s been the coronavirus of American politics — he certainly has been infectious.

But simply “going back to normal” — swearing Biden in, returning to the political clichés we’re used to, appropriating another trillion dollars for national defense and corporate militarism, feigning concern over climate change but essentially ignoring it, yada, yada — leaves us wide open to the looming collapse.