(11-10-2016, 07:41 PM)taramarie Wrote: So sorry to hear he passed on.
We had some time to keep the ashes between the funeral and burial. My father did not die twice! My brother and I took them on some weekend trips more or less by defaultf, including to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Two days ago I took the ashes to my father's boyhood home, and asked the people living there if I could take their container through the house that had belonged to my grandfather until he died in 1999. The family allowed my request, and I told them a little of the story. The mother apologized for the condition of the house -- but I could only say that I doubted that my father was any better a housekeeper at his age than the current children living there.
...I am surprised that nobody caught on to the regret that I have of being alive during the Trump Presidency. I think that life has become much less precious than it had been, and it will become increasingly less precious. I think that most of us are going to be reduced to our economic roles in life, a degrading situation that nobody has ever found satisfying.
I expect to hate life. Just work as your masters demand, and ignore all else, for your productivity is your sole value as a creature no longer fully human. If Donald Trump starts some unjust War for Profit, then I hope that America loses that war, and the people culpable for it are obliged to account for war crimes. There could be no better fate for America than what America did to Germany, Italy, and Japan immediately after World War II -- utter defeat followed by the establishment of new or revived democratic institutions and more cultural freedom that negates the raw nationalism of the recent majoritarian culture.
Oh, by the way -- he was a Republican, but he recognized Donald Trump as a monster.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.