Not Gloating
I posted this map on Facebook and received a query as to why, as a Canadian, I’m ‘obsessed’ with what goes down down there. I wish to respond with a brief autobiography of my involvement with America:
I am British/Canadian, but lived in the States from the age of 9 until 34, when I moved here to B.C.. I was 11 years in Florida (Miami), 10 years in San Francisco, 3 years in NYC, and 5 months in Alaska. I’ve been to every one of the continental United States, living for short stints in Denver, Boston and Dallas. I was involved in social activism from the age of 15, in Florida, California and New York (Civil Rights, anti-Vietnam, anti-U.S. Intervention in Central and South America March on Washington, ERA with Gloria Steinem, Bella Absug et al, Environmental activism with Starhawk and others, Women’s Movement, etc., etc.), and anti-defamation initiatives.
My remaining close family live in the States, as well as friends that go back to the summer between 5th and 6th grade in Florida. I have ex-partners who are current close friends, musical artistic partners and co-collaborators who live there, in Florida, Vermont, California and New York. My first husband is a Vietnam veteran (two tours) and currently lives in Florida.
I am fiercely passionate about the United States and its wellbeing and have been since arriving in the city of Baltimore from England at 9, felt the American brand of misogyny punch me in the face (instead of the open-hand slap of British misogyny), and saw the abuses going on in the Catholic Cathedral School to which I was sent, as I was too advanced for the public school system, which told my parents not to send me there because, as the bedraggled inner city school principal said, “We will ruin them” (my younger brother also facing kindergarden). When we moved to Miami and I saw Southern American racism up close, I was radicalized beyond complacency forever.
The current Trump phenomenon has the effect of drawing salve upon a festering boil, where the social pus that’s been fomenting since the founding, and actively suppurating since the moral apocalypse of values that was slavery, has been brought to the surface in an ugly but necessary denouement, as I see it. This is the TIME.
I’m not really on Facebook for social networking. For me it is a vehicle for doing what I’ve always been doing since landing on this continent and the rude awakening I experienced from my British childhood. To not publicize what I regard as a world and environment-threatening national malaise and its principal actors, enablers and abettors would be a dereliction of the duties and responsibilities entailed in consciousness. Plus, as this writer from Slate has pointed out, there is no getting away from what goes down in America — anywhere in the world, let alone right here literally right on the border with the behemoth. This is what is meant by economic, ideological and militaristic hegemony. (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/10/move-to-canada-trump.html?fbclid=IwAR36VJJv38CC6-LvMl0aPyB96bK8-UDrkfnq8yYinxHfQjk_CuouPgtYmQQ)
I never posted about U.S. politics much at all until the start of 2016, when it became evident that Trump’s run was serious. Then, as the horror dawned, my research brain jumped into action and I started learning as much as I could about the actors behind the debacle like Robert Mercer, Rebecca Mercer, Christopher Wiley (from Victoria), Cambridge Analytica, AggregateIQ (here in Victoria also, its psi-operations based on Chris Wiley’s algorithms, and its IP owned by Robert Mercer), Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale, et al.
I began publishing everything I came up with on Medium and Quora, then these articles and opinion pieces posting here, along with other news items from trusted sources working in the ‘Resistance.’ Basically, my posts on this theme will cease entirely after November 3rd, whichever way it goes, as there will no longer be any point. I readily copped to my motivations and my level of shock at Trump’s election in 2017, in the Preface to “Essays From the Fringe or How the Hell Did We Get Here? An Anthology of Semi-Serious, Mostly Rude Essays on the Utterly Bizarre Trump Phenomenon and Other Bewildering Conundrums.”
Previous to that I’d been basking in my love and pride in Americans, and in the human species generally, for the U.S. having elected Obama. (I always knew the U,S. would elect a Black man to the presidency before it would elect a woman of any colour, and have been saying as much since the 70s.) Apart form the atrocities in Yemen and Palestine perpetuated during Obama’s eight years, there was nothing to warrant my full social focus being brought to bear on the matter of America. But we here in Canada, at least those of a certain level of social consciousness, have always carefully watched the U.S. presidency and elections.
I remember when Bush Jr. stole the election from Al Gore. A group of us — the 13th House Mystery School lawyer and co-Founder, her next door neighbours, a Gay couple who who worked for the Greens, my protege in 13th House, artist, writer and musician Kristin Sweetland, and I had gathered to watch the election results come in, full well knowing what was at stake. We veered through passionate elation and plummeted toward genuine despair toward midnight, and we saw the writing on the wall for the planet with Bush driving the car, which is to say the hegemony.
We could not then anticipate, of course, the level of catastrophically bad judgements that would come from that administration, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush’s informal ‘spiritual’ advisor, Billy Graham, et al., in the wake of 9–11. Eight years of Republican chicanery almost did the planet in that time — with close calls only revealed by political and military insiders after the fact of their war hawk regime. The world can not afford stupidity at the helm of the U.S. government, and whether they know it or not, it is truly everyone’s key concern.
Posting this map is not the act of a smug Canadian gloating over the discrepancy in how we are cared for by our respective governments. My remaining close family, friends and current artistic partners live there. I’m anxious for them. I’m not obsessed. I’m passionate about what goes down in the (still) most influential democracy on the planet.
This post is a function of mourning what Trump has done, not just to you — to us all. To People. I want this scourge upon the face of the Earth gone. Badly. This predicament is down to Trump, as you know, and we are on the eve of an election. I say ‘we,’ as it effects us all.
