Pieces Of A Peace Plan

 By the way it's been more than (checks watch) twenty-four hours since the Sterile Cuckoo took office, so his promise to end the war in Ukraine seems to have been yet another limp attempt at a promise that he has not been able to keep. A little like the oath he took to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. To release the Epstein files. To make America Great Again. To make America Affordable again. To flush after hours of sitting on the toilet posting to "Truth" Social. 

Promises made, promises forgotten. 

This past week was particularly galling as one of those late night sit-downs with his phone resulted in the announcement that the United States had carried out strikes against terrorists in NIgeria. On Christmas Eve. There were also military actions against that "narco-terrorist" threat Venezuala. If this seems a little confusing to you since you know that war cannot be declared without consulting Congress, that may be because under the leadership of Mike "I hadn't heard about that" Johnson, the House of Representatives only worked eighty-seven days last year. But don't worry about those folks. They received full salary and health benefits while they let the Affordable Care Act subsidies disappear. 

Fret not, because there is a plan. Or so the Cuckoo promised. Concepts of a plan.

Meanwhile, back in Mar-A-Lago, marching orders were given and obeyed by the "peace team" by none other than the guy who invaded Ukraine in the first place. Vlad "The Inhaler" Putin called his minion the convicted felon just before negotiations were to begin with President Zelenskyy to make sure the concepts of that plan were clear. Putin later recounted that call for Russia's state news: The Kremlin further said that Epstein's favorite customer “was shocked by this news, literally outraged.” That news was the "terrorist attack" Ukraine launched against one of Vlad's residences. “He said he couldn’t even imagine such crazy actions. And, as stated, this will undoubtedly impact American approaches to working with Zelenskyy, whom, as Trump himself said, thank God, the current administration hasn’t given ‘Tomahawks,’” continued the only voice to which our twice-impeached "president" responds.

Shockingly, this is the same guy who won the recently invented FIFA Peace Prize. 

I suppose there's a lot about soccer I still don't understand. 

2026

 Twenty twenty-six

It's another chance

An opportunity

If you will

To turn things

not just left

or to the right

To change course

To make room

for all of us

To make changes

for all of us

To correct

some of the wrongs

To shine a light

To start to break free

Two hundred fifty years

It feels like time

To let freedom ring

For everyone

A new year

A very old idea

Let's begin again

Look Back In Anger

 It's been another hard day on the planet. A whole mess of them, as a matter of fact. This past year will not be remembered for all of the joy and excitement it brought to this world. 

2025 saw the loss of Rob Reiner, Diane Keaton and Ozzy Osbourne to name just a few. It might not be too rough an angle to suggest that these were the ones who perhaps cosmically got off easily. They didn't have to stick around and watch as things went from rotten to really rotten. Finding a corner of this past calendar that was not diminished in some way by the convicted felon who somehow found his way into the rubble that used to be the White House would be a fool's errand. 

Not that there have not been moments of sunlight poking through the gloom. I truly enjoyed my trip to the moving picture show of the most recent iteration of Superman. For a couple of hours, I actually enjoyed watching a hero, an immigrant, working to save his home from the machinations of an evil billionaire bent on putting his name on everything he touches. Spoiler alert: Supes doesn't beat him up. His dog does. 

If I ruminated on things long enough, I might be able to come up with a few more moments of hope and peace, but mostly there was that seemingly omnipresent orange haze that seemed to obscure most every interaction, experience and home appliance. Each day brought a new absurd hatefully delivered message or decree. The Department of Defense morphed into the Department of War. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency had its budget increased to nearly thirty billion dollars, while the former head of World Wrestling Entertainment was hired to shut down the Department of Education. 

The United States is blowing up fishing boats and bombing Nigeria on Christmas.

Big Bird was sent packing as well as Public Broadcasting would not be spared. Sesame Street has been eliminated. Meanwhile, the richest man in the world stepped in to make the government more efficient by leaving children across the globe to starve. 

As prices continue to climb for most everything from groceries to health care, more and more Americans will suffer and starve while the convicted felon continues to promote himself and the fancy new marble armrests he wants to install in the Epstein Center for the Performing Arts. Sounds a little excessive, but he doesn't care. He's not paying for it. 

We are. 

Every day. 

This year.

Yuck. 

Passing

 I sat in a pew near the back of a Baptist church in East Oakland and thought about how much my father would have loved it. 

The call and response. The exhortation for amens. The singing. The sermons. The not-so-silent prayers. 

He was a fan of gospel. It made him get al misty-eyed. If he had been in attendance for my fifth grade colleague's memorial service, he would have been sobbing. 

As a result, I was moved as well. I could feel the spirit in the room as I nodded and swayed to the powerful cadences created by the reverend. I am sure that because, as we all discovered, Mister Lynch was also known as The Reverend Doctor Lynch that we were gifted with a series of preachers all of whom were there to pay tribute to their brother. The chapel was awash in all things holy. 

So I set my cynically agnostic brain on standby and let the warm glow of the proceedings fill my heart and soul. The past two weeks leading up to the service had been a struggle, filled with all the doubts and pain that grief present. All of which centered on the hole created by losing a member of our community. When the reverend asked those of us who had worked with The Reverend Doctor Mister Lynch to stand, a full two rows of us rose. I could feel the love and support of those in attendance rush over us.

Amen. 

I listened to the words. I felt the warmth that helped to soothe the confusion. I was a part of something much bigger, and I felt better than I had since I had gotten the call with the news. And at the same time I felt an associated burden, one of connection and responsibility to go out from this place and remember all the things that this man had been and done. 

And I thought of my father who left far too soon. 

And how much he would have loved this. 

Amen. 

Way Out

 Please show me the way out of 2025. 

While I can say that personally I have enjoyed a great many moments throughout this past trip around the sun, I can honestly say that my experience as an American citizen has been far less than fulfilling. 

My career as an elementary teacher has brought me great satisfaction as I have been navigating ever closer to its somewhat tumultuous end. I have been heartened to feel the warmth and camaraderie brought on by spending all those years at the same location. Unfortunately, I find myself at the same time confronted by the real value impressed on education in this great land of ours by once again struggling against budget shortfalls and a salary that pretends to acknowledge the depth of my commitment. I feel somewhat foolish turning once again to the community that I serve to ask them to rally behind us once again as teachers go begging for conditions and compensation that correspond to the service we render. 

This year has been a nearly constant reminder of the value set by those in power for education. Rather than feeling rewarded for a job conscientiously and well done, we have seen budgets for those departments meant to oppress get fed while teachers are left to fight for scraps. 

I know. Sounds a little bit like I am unsatisfied with the basic tennents of my employment. In a country that continues to attempt to alleviate public funding for public schools? Yes, I suppose you could say that I am at odds with that reality. 

And yet, each morning I rise to tilt with those same windmills. 

Happily, I do this quixotic task with a group of like-minded individuals who either never noticed that they are not being paid for all the extra jobs they take on over the course of any and every day or cheerfully take them on (ready for the cliche?) for the kids. 

That cliche is precisely what keeps me tumbling out of bed to face another day in a job that can be one of the most satisfying I can imagine. The edge is taken off just a touch by marching headlong into the fray with a band of like-minded individuals who show up ready to help me roll that boulder up to the top of the hill, if only to pause for a moment before realizing that the same task awaits us the next day. The next week. 

The next semester. 

It's coming. And I am planning on being there to meet that challenge. Forgive me if I sometimes notice the struggle. 

Golden Ticket

 How much do you suppose Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory would go for on today's market? The minimal research I did to estimate the yearly cost to run the place came in around two hundred million dollars a year. This estimate includes a salary and heathcare plan for the Oompa Loompas who rightly control the means of production, That alone runs in the neighborhood of eighty million a year, which obviously brings up the question of fair compensation for tiny chocolatiers and just what amounts to a living wage for what I had assumed was essentially slave labor. And does Mister Wonka really need to keep that chocolate river running twenty-four/seven?

I started ruminating on this when I read that one ticket was selected to win the one point eight billion dollar Powerball jackpot last week. This grand prize was projected to pay off at eight hundred thirty-four million. 

An interesting thing, this taxing of brand new billionaires. If I'm doing the math correctly, I notice that the government is getting more than half of the jackpot, which reminds me of the chorus of "what abouts" that surround every major financial windfall. Oh sure, I could love to win a couple billion dollars, but "what about the taxes?"

Elongated Mush would have a fit, not to be confused with his regularly scheduled fits, if he had to pay more than fifty percent of his earnings in taxes. This also suggests that he might make an excellent candidate for taking over the Wonka enterprise if his limited capacity for imagination would allow him to accept a world of pure imagination. Jeff Bezos also has some experience running business with minimally compensated labor, so he might also be a good candidate. 

But now we are left to ponder just what this lone new nearly-billionaire will do with the fortune they have just fallen into. Perhaps instead of taking over a chocolate factory, they might like to buy the world a Coke. That one-shot bit of altruism would cost you nearly ten billion dollars. Back in 1971 when the cola giant set that notion afloat, the commercial they made cost a quarter of a million dollars just to get those fresh-faced hippies up on that hill to sing in perfect harmony. 

It's nice not to have the worries that all that money brings. 

Sonny The POTUS

 If, and this is on a high degree of conditionality, you believe Faux News "personality" Jesse Watters, the Cheeto In Chief told him that the reason he is building a beast of a ballroom where the East Wing of the White House used to stand: "I’m building a monument to myself because no one else will."

Which tracks pretty well, all things considered. 

There is a scientific basis for all this renaming and tacking up gaudy bric-a-brac on any and all surfaces around him. Consider, if you will, the cuckoo bird. 

Leaving aside for a moment or two the alleged addictive these avians have for a certain chocolatey breakfast cereal, let us instead focus on the way cuckoos tend to house themselves. They practice a very rare trait called brood parasitism, meaning that they tend to steal other birds' nests. Once their eggs are in place, they kick the actual owner's eggs out and make the place their own. 

Cuckoos do this just a little more surrepticiously than the Orange Worst. They don't tend to hire contractors to place giant golden Ts on the front of the nest or declare that they deserve to be recognized in perpetuity for building something that has been part of the collective cuckoo history for decades. This is how they differ from the flightless orange bird who is currently stealing the nest of American Democracy. 

In many ways, the way that your average dog marks his territory has more in common with the way the convicted felon is attempting to insinuate himself into our culture. As a measuring stick, even Putin and Kim Jong Un lack the temerity to name an entire class of naval ships after themselves. 

Not content to wait around to see if his legacy sticks, the featured player in the Trumpstein Files seems compelled to make his mark on a country that even now wonders how this buffoon got where he is in the first place. 

The answer is simple.

He's cuckoo.