Trump Gang Pulls Plug on Women’s Empowerment
In addition to slashing the U.S. contribution to the United Nations, the Trump administration plans to take the axe to a State Department program promoting women’s rights around the world: The Latest Blow to Women Worldwide
It’s another measure to find funds to increase the Defense Department’s budget by $54 billion.
It’s also another slab dumped on the mounting pile of wrongs meant to overwhelm the opposition. The Trump administration is waging war on many fronts: Women, the Poor, the Sick, Immigrants fleeing war and rule by street gangs, Science, Climate Change Resistance, Habitat Protection, Oceans, Lakes, and Waterways Protections, Renewable Energy, Voting Rights, the National Parks and Monuments, Native American Rights, Black Lives Matter. . . the list goes on.
Where to Resist? And How? Too Much Anti-Trump and Too Little Pro-something?
I admit to feeling a bit paralyzed in the face of so many attacks on decency. Where to start? I post comments on the websites of Senators Warner and Kaine (I don’t bother with my Tea Party and all-around ill-natured Congressman Tom Garrett) on select issues, but there are so many issues and I have only so much time and energy—the same for every reader of this blog.
Much of the thrust of last Saturday’s Climate March was simple antipathy to Donald Trump. That bothered me. Believe me, I have almost unbridled antipathy to Donald Trump and his worst minions, but the level of anger focused on Trump undermined the larger message. Example: I approached one man who was holding aloft a poster that said “Fuck Trump.” I asked him if he had considered that this offensive, inflammatory poke in the Trumpian eye ran the risk of alienating fence-straddlers—the people who needed to hear the Climate Change message. Why offend them? He had no justification except to say that he needed an outlet for his anger.
It wasn’t just that guy; there was a group handing out postcards addressed to Trump that said on the front, “Don’t Fuck This Up.” (It might have been “Don’t Fuck It Up.”) I realize at 71 years of age I may be out of step with the increasingly profane vernacular of the 21st Century, but I also realize that there’s a large cohort of seniors like myself who are no longer shocked but still annoyed by the indiscriminate use of obscenities—most of which seem meant to whip up anger or ridicule at the expense of serious communication. It’s not quite in the spirit of Michelle Obama’s when they go low, we go high.