How a living American dinosaur views his country

    How truly fortunate this old American, who once practiced law, feels to be able to see on TV and online former U.S. Republican President Donald Trump hijack former U.S. Republican President Richard Nixon’s view that the U.S.  President can do no wrong and is immune to prosecution, on which the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments today.

    How truly fortunate this old American feels to be able to see on TV and online U.S. President Joe Biden giving Israel whatever it wants to finish the obliteration of Gaza and perhaps starting World War III in the Middle East. 

    Despite my Jewish ancestry through my Polish great grandfather on my father’s side of the family, I do not see why America feels it has a duty to God to give money and arms to Israel, which has caused many problems in Palestine, because it is convinced God wants Israel to be there, and thus Israel can carry on against its neighbors like the Israelites carried on in the Old Testament against their neighbors.

    Israel is run by religious fanatics. Hamas is run by religious fanatics. Hezbollah is run by religious fanatics. Iran is run by religious fanatics. Radical Islam is run by religious fanatics. The U.S. Supreme Court is run by Christian fanatics, thanks to President Donald Trump and the Christian Republican majority in the U.S. Congress, even though Amendment 1 of the U.S. Constitution begins, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

    I have had many dealings with religious fanatics.

    My mother used me to prove to my father and his and her parents that she was justified in leaving their Baptist Church and becoming an Episcopalian. She forced 11-year-old me to attend grueling Episcopal church services, instead of Sunday school, which I had liked at the Baptist church. She forced 12-year-old me through Confirmation classes every Saturday afternoon, MY DAY OFF, for I hated school, viewed it as being sent to prison. When the Episcopal Bishop of Alabama came to her church and performed the confirmation ceremony, my first taste ever of communion wine went down my throat wrong and it took every ounce of my will not to let on that I was choking to death on the blood of Christ.

    My mother told me that she started smoking 2 packs of Pall Malls a day at age 15 to rebel against her Puritan parents. When I was in law school, she contracted lung cancer and died quickly, and got her divorce form her parents and her husband, whom she had tried to divorce, but gave that up after her mother told her, “If you divorce Sloan, it will kill me.” So, my mother buried herself even deeper in her Episcopal church in Mountain Brook, Alabama, aka The Tiny Kingdom.

    Last night, I took a neighbor lady friend out to dinner. She is from Long Island. She worked in New York City. She knows more about Donald Trump than his MAGA base and the Republicans in Congress and elsewhere in America will ever know. She has no use for Trump as a person, nor as president. She marred a Frenchman, and they lived many years in France, and many years in Birmingham. She speaks French as well as she speaks English. She has dual citizenship. She has a view of America that Americans who have not lived overseas cannot have. She gets my email blasts, and in that way, and in our private conversations, she knows how I feel about Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Republicans, MAGAs and Democrats.

    We talked last night about old people like her and me, ailing physically and medically, getting older. We face ending up in a facility, which I can afford, thanks to an inheritance from my father, but she cannot afford. She said over in France, old people are allowed to choose how they die, it's between them  and their doctors. Whereas in America, merciful graceful exit is prohibited by religious fanatics such as President Biden, the U.S. Congress, and state governors and state legislatures-  lackeys of retrograde Christianity and huge commercial industries, which depend for their very survival on people like my friend and me living for as long and painfully as possible. 

    I think it would be a blessing for America and the world if the Lord took President Biden and Donald Trump today. I think it would be a blessing for the world, if it was free from religion as it is practiced in America, Israel, and much of Islam. 

    I told my friend last night that Donald Trump isn’t really the problem. The problems is the people who support him, oblivious to his disdain for them. The people who support and praise him and give him their money, because they think that makes him love them. They back him because he tells them what they want to hear, he stacked the Supreme Court with their ilk. It’s that simple. They do not see that he knows how to pull their religious fanatic strings.

    They are convinced they are God’s chosen people, and those who oppose them work for the Devil. It is not possible for them to entertain that they work for the Devil. They are America’s version of radical Islam and radical Israel. They are America’s version of Iran, Putin Russia, Red China and North Korea. They are America’s version of the Inquisition and Nazi Germany.

    While President Biden is trying very hard to start World War III.

    My advice to young Americans is they have U.S. passports and enough money set aside to leave America, if they wish to do so. For dinosaurs like me, leaving America is not particularly attractive, except to go to Canada or France, where we can decide when a doctor will put us down when we don’t feel we can endure what beloved pets are never forced to endure. Except Canada doesn’t want us, and I don’t speak French very well. So younguns, get fluent in a foreign language of a country where you might wish to live.

    If I were America’s president, I would ask Congress to give elders in America the same escape hatch elders in Canada and France have. I would cut Israel loose. I would tell NATO countries to help Ukraine, and America, as a member of NATO, will do its fair share. I would ask the United States Department of Justice and Congress to leave no stone unturned investigating Donald Trump’s ties to Russia and Saudi Arabia, and Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine.

    Saying all of that another way-

In a world where a depraved presidential candidate
sells red, white and blue bibles
to suckers born every minute 
to line his own pockets,
and his opponent keeps giving money and munitions
to one side of a religious freak war,
I wish I had renewed my passport,
but since I didn’t, 
and even if I had,
Americans ain’t all that welcome 
to live indefinitely 
like they once wuz,
at least not in Canada,
and since I have plenty of 
demons running amok nearby
and within,
I’m left with,
resolved,
or not,
to take yet another look 
in the mirror on the wall,
old and ornery,
wondering why the fuck 
I’m still here?
But since I am...  

Penni

Costa Rica is pretty accepting and it is warm and beautiful. Still- you may be needed here where the anti Christ continues to gain power even through the sales of the bible he thwarts at every turn.

Sloan Bashinsky
Spent 2 months in CR, early 2000. It was lovely then. Have heard it now is not so lovely. American expats back then had to take, or pay someone, to carry their passport, or visa, out of CR every six months, and bring back in through customs and get it stamped and renewed. Met several expats who had built homes, and that caused them to be stuck there, because no buyers. I don’t have a passport, and such now is more difficult to get. Have a throat doctor to take with me, if I want to remain able to talk

PERSONALITY DISORDERED

I felt that so deeply. I wrote a poem pondering the same thing. From the day we are born we are dying. In the flesh we no longer recognise. 
I’ve found a new hope in Christ. Yes I know what you’re thinking… I didn’t consider myself worthy, was skeptical about the whole Christian dedication thing. Though I’ve always been a ‘lukewarm’ non practicing Christian trust me, it was no easy feat and plain sailing. For I resisted the call until practicing new age opened some doors that were not meant to be opened. My story is far too complicated for your comments section! 

I just wanted to let you know that I wholeheartedly welcomed your poem. It was as if the Holy Spirit had made it known to me. I came across it completely by chance. You are a very talented writer 😃

Sloan Bashinsky

I think no such thing. Jesus and Archangel Michael shanghaied me in early 1987, after I  realized Christianity and the New Age, and moving out west, had not helped me and I asked God to help me and offered my life to human service. Those two, and some of their associates, turned me every which a way but loose, and upside down and inside out. They stood me before endless mirrors, looking at me. Their course in mirrors changed my perspective of everything. It included some miracles, which is my take on A Course in Miracles and Jesus in the Gospels. To the extent people live as he lived and taught, they are saved by him. Not Christendom’s view, but it is what I was taught. A really steep path, as Jesus in the Gospels said it was. A poem that fell out of me in the spring of 1995 still seems to sum it up. regardless of what name we give God, or whatever is running things.

“Sacred Prism” 

Earth,
The sacred prism
through which souls are refracted
into their elemental parts,
Purified in Holy Fire,
The one-forged
and sent on their way
to not even God knows where,
Simply because they are all
Unique Emanations of God,
Evolving . . .