Resistance is fertile

Every day President Dickhead does something worthy of a rant, but if I ranted about him every day, my head would explode. It really would. Yesterday a friend told me he just couldn’t get his head around the fact that this shit was really happening – and at such breakneck speed. I know the feeling.

Friday was Holocaust Remembrance Day. For Americans it is a day, amongst other things, to remember the many thousands of Jewish refugees who died in Nazi concentration camps after being refused entry to the United States. This, of all days, was the day Dickhead decided to ban entry of all refuges.

Daniel Drezner, a Tufts University professor, responded with this tweet:

Dear @POTUS : on Holocaust Remembrance Day my synagogue told me the Syrian refugee family we’re sponsoring is not coming. Go fuck yourself.

He later apologised for the profanity. I have no idea why he felt the need. This is the most spectacularly bad timing I’ve seen since the French government announced in 1995 – on the actual tenth anniversary of blowing up the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior – that they were going to resume nuclear testing.

I can’t call it a ray of sunshine or even light at the end of the tunnel, because these are dark, dark days, but I confess this did inspire me.

The huge women’s marches in Washington and around the globe on January 21 were impressive. They were also months in the planning. This and protests like it across the United States and around the globe happened in less than two days.

Whether it was ordering the building of two controversial pipelines last Tuesday or threatening to pull federal funding from so-called “sanctuary cities” (cities that have said they will not assist Dickhead in his proposed round up of illegal immigrants) last Wednesday, the flash mob response to the current president’s nasty agenda has been almost instantaneous.

For the moment resistance is fertile. Whether or not it can last for four years remains to be seen. One can but hope Dickhead’s presidency won’t last that long. (A misogynistic, homophobic Pence presidency would be no laughing matter either, but at least the world would spend less time worrying about which country Dickhead’s tiny fingers were pointing nuclear weapons at.)

Someone (Bill Maher? Trevor Noah?) said late last week that this was like the Tea Party movement all over again – but with more actual tea, better spelling and punctuation on the protest signs, and no guns. Indeed.

What I would like to know is how many of the people who’ve been out on the streets this past week stayed home on election day? I’d like to think the answer is many, because you, my shame-faced, stay-at-home friends, are responsible for this mess. Rumour has it that a special circle of hell has been reserved for you unless you get off your butts and out onto the streets every day.

And now for something completely different. I would like to thank Carlos Barria of Reuters for managing to take this photo just after the signing of the refugee ban order. It gave me the first laugh I’ve had since Dickhead’s inauguration.