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If you build it, he will come

Trump

This is the most personal thing I have ever written.

I just rewatched Field of Dreams. I am not sure how many times I have seen it before but enough to know large parts of it by heart. It has always choked me up because it is a beautiful film and I love baseball. My reaction was different tonight was different. For the first time, watching Ray Kinsella reconnect with his father, John, hit me on a very personal level.

My relationship with my father, John Gill, was the most important of my early childhood. I lived and died by what he thought of me. I was a Met fan because he was. I loved the Niners because he did. It is possible that I volunteered on Democratic campaigns (starting at age 8) because maybe it was what I thought would make him appreciate me. I am not going to lie. I am feeling a bit rudderless right now. Who exactly am I?

There is something that happens to you when the one person from whom you get your sense of self and self-worth rejects you completely.

It took years of mental and physical abuse for me to turn on him. I mean years. Even after he tried to kill me, several times, I wanted to go home to his house.

I took the hurt of that early rejection and I mummified it in a coating of anger. Anger is a secondary emotion, hiding something else. That hurt was so deeply buried that I thought my anger was a primary emotion. I had (and have) plenty of real reasons to hate my father. He beat me, tried to kill me, sent private investigators to follow me. He made me feel unsafe in my own head and when I had nightmares about him, I soothed myself with you never have to get married.

This facade fell briefly when I came back to his (and my grandmother’s) house. I found dozens, if not hundreds, of letters from writers he had helped. My first reaction was that old rejection he helped all these people and he never helped me. I went back to hating him almost immediately. How can you feel sad about his death? He was an awful person. He was but that isn’t the point.

When Ray reconnects with his father, I cried because that reconnection was something I have always craved. Something I have always longed for. Even if I didn’t know it. Watching that scene made all that anger and hate fade away.

You don’t forgive people because they deserve it, you forgive them because you do. This anger has been eating me up for most of my life and I just cannot hold onto it anymore.

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More coffee with do the trick

Sam Bee needed more coffee before her bogus segment on Rwanda

Coffee! It’s what’s for dinner!

No, not really. Dinner around here is usually salmon, sweet potatoes and veggies but I do consume a lot of coffee.

People always ask, “What’s new?” I always want to respond, “Not much!” but that isn’t true right now. So, what’s doin’ in Stony Brook?

First, I heard that Samantha Bee did a segment in Rwanda with a focus on conservation and how they did with refugees. I wrote about that for Medium. The Human Rights Foundation had this to say:

On Monday, the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) sent a letter to television host and executive producer, Samantha Bee, expressing concerns over how Rwanda’s dictatorial regime will likely exploit her show’s segment, “Rwandans and the UNHCR Are Treating Refugees with Empathy,” to whitewash its long history of grave atrocities against refugees and refugee camps, following the country’s 1994 genocide, as well as its ongoing deadly campaign of espionage, extrajudicial executions, renditions, and intimidation against Rwandan dissident refugees living abroad.

The Human Rights Foundation.

I used to really like Samantha Bee. She was great on The Daily Show. She did a segment about someone I wrote for and I was offended that she lumped the website I wrote for in with a bunch of satire sites (I do write satire but try to keep a firewall between satire and general opinion). I haven’t watched her show recently. I do think it is incredibly irresponsible to do a piece on Rwanda about how they deal with refugees without looking at all the people who have been displaced (or worse) by President Paul Kagame.

From critic to being complicit

The view Bee gave of Rwanda was not even close to accurate and the segment will be used by the government as propaganda. Nice job, Sam! You went from being a critic to being complicit.

In other coffee needing news, I have several shows coming up that will be great.

  • Friday, August 6 @ 8 pm (doors open at 6). Governor’s Comedy Club — the Lil Room. Levittown, NY.
  • Saturday, August 14 @ 5:30 pm. Greenwich Village Comedy Club. NYC (this is my favorite venue!).
  • Friday, August 27 @ 9 pm. Clyde’s (used to be Barton’s Place). Miller Place, NY.

Can you help keep me employed?

Ok. I am asking. I work for several non-profits. We work to get companies to not make money from or give money to governments that commit genocide and other crimes against humanity, we are also working to support the people of Myanmar in their struggles post the coup in February and to stop the genocide against the Rohingya. We are also working to free Paul Rusesabagina (Hotel Rwanda).This is important work but we need your help. If you can, please donate here.

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Will you help us end genocide?

Genocide is all around us but we can stop it

If you are like most people, you probably don’t think about genocide a whole lot. In fact, when the Pew Research Center looked into it, the general, American knowledge of the Holocaust is depressing.

According to the survey of almost 11,000 Americans, 69% said the Holocaust happened between 1930 and 1950. One in 10 people thought it took place between 1910 and 1930, and 2% answered between 1890 and 1910. One in 100 people thought it was later than second world war, answering 1950-1970; and 18% did not know or gave no answer.

The Guardian

After World War II, there were lots of calls of, “Never Again.” The problem is the world didn’t really mean it. Bosnia. Rwanda. Darfur. All happened after World War II. Today, Genocide Watch has alerts for 20 different countries.

Moreover, companies today are still making money from genocide and other mass atrocities. Just about every company that makes athletic clothing uses cotton from the Xinjiang region of China. This is where more than one million Uyghurs have been placed in concentration camps. Let me repeat that. Today, in 2021, more than a million people are in concentration camps in China.

Head south from China and you will find yourself in Myanmar. Not only has the Muslim, Rohingya minority been persecuted for years but in February, the military arrested the recently, democratically elected government and took over the nation. Since then, military forces have killed 914 people. Meanwhile, companies like Chevron and Harry Winston (owned by Swatch) continue to do business with the military, enriching it and allowing it to continue its crimes against humanity.

What can I do about genocide?

No Business with Genocide (NBWG) is a nonprofit based in Washington, DC. It puts pressure on companies to stop funding or profiting from genocide. Its work led to Kirin Beer cutting all ties with the Myanmar military. It lobbies national, state, and local governments to pass resolutions condemning genocide and pledging not to use taxpayer dollars to fund it. Just last month, Gainesville, Florida passed such a resolution. This is also a way to educate people about the problem and to get a dialogue going.

Today, I am asking for your help.

NBWG is running a summer fundraising drive. Donations are tax-deductible. Your support will allow the organization to keep doing its important work.

PS. This is not just an issue for other countries. It can happen in the U.S., too.

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Goodbye, American democracy. You had a good run

Please note: This appeared on Addicting Info on January 20, 2018. That site is no longer working but thanks to the wonderful people at The Way Back Machine, I found it.

n 1838, Abraham Lincoln spoke to the Young Men’s Lyceum. In it, he warned that the United States’ fall would not come from abroad, as many feared, but from within. He said,

“Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

The actions this week, taken by President Trump, Congressman Devon Nunes (R-CA), Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), and others may be just the latest indication of how right Lincoln was and how close we are to the end of the American experiment.

People often conflate politics, government, and campaigning. That is understandable. The differences seem to become more without distinction every day. Here’s the thing: the agencies in the Executive Branch exist to promote the policy agenda of whatever administration is in power. Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) has different policy objectives than Obama’s. For example, the federal government’s thoughts on legalized pot have changed completely.

These agencies are not there to promote candidates or the political objectives of any administrations, as they seem to expected to do now. Trump has openly asked, why “the Trump DOJ” can’t do what he wants in terms of the investigation into any Russia connection. The reason is that they have a job to protect the Constitution and the rule of law, not Donald J. Trump.

This last year has seen unprecedented attacks on the American rule of law. So many times have people had to use “unprecedented” that its meaning has all been lost. By firing James Comey, forcing out Andrew McCabe and launching an endless attack on the FBI and DOJ, our president is effectively dismantling one of the things that is so special about our country. Our belief in the rule of law.Subscribe to our Youtube Channel

Now it appears, the Legislative Branch has become complicit. In years past, the Intelligence Committees in the U.S. House and Senate were considered to be “bastions of bipartisanship.” In both, no investigations were to be started without both sides weighing in. Nunes, who had recused himself from the Russian investigation last spring, ended that fine tradition by starting an investigation into how the FBI handled their Russian investigation without consulting Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA). Once again, that move was unprecedented, but does that mean anything today?

Apparently not because Ryan has said he is “letting the process play out.” No, this is not doing that at all. Now, Nunes’ committee will release a memo, he wrote about the Russian investigation (you know, the one he “recused” himself from) without putting out the other side of the story. PS. It is worth noting that Russian bots have been pushing for the Nunes’ memo to be released. It is also worth noting that changing the rules for how the committee conducts investigations without input from the minority should get Nunes booted from his chairmanship. Ryan is abdicating his main responsibilities as Speaker of the House.

Many believe that the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, will be the next to go (he was hired by Trump but ok’d the extension of the Carson Page FISA warrant). His replacement may either fire Robert Mueller or just make it impossible for him to do his job.

When we start destroying the foundations of our government (the DOJ is not alone, the State Department is also being decimated from within), we are participating in a kind of cannibalism. When our government acts only to get one side ahead of the other politically and we live in a time when each side lives by a different reality, how can anything positive come from that?

For decades, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union sought to weaken, if not destroy, the United States. Lincoln was right. They should have saved their money. We are going to do it for them.