but it is OK
if it doesn’t cost something
not a principle

Adapted from the passage:

So, yeah, I’m keeping my bank account, my pension, my football team (for now) and, I hope, my marriage. This exercise is not about rejecting the modern world or the pleasures and comforts of modern life. It’s about turning away from America and turning towards Europe. One day I’d love to go back to the States and eat a cheeseburger in a Brooklyn dive bar, toasting old friends and new with shots of rail bourbon in the Land of the Free. But not for the time being, not under the current regime.

But it’s OK. It’s not a principle if it doesn’t cost you something.

From the article, This unAmerican life: can you really divest yourself of everything from the US? by By Jeremy Ettinghausen (Sat 19 Apr 2025).

You know what day it is?

April 19, 2025?

2025 marks 250 years since the Battle of Lexington and the start of the American Revolution.

The redcoats are coming.

Paul Revere.

The Minutemen.

British Regulars Advance on Lexington Green.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

250 years of steady progress.

And one guy and his minions undo a lot of it in just 3 months.

Time to go back to the village green and take a stand.

Scary times.

Scary times to take a stand.

We have met the enemy and they are … US.

But it’s OK. It’s not a principle if it doesn’t cost you something.

knowing not enough …
we must apply – willing not …
enough – we must do

Based on the aphorism of poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre-director, and critic Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that goes:

“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”

(As it appears in Maxims and Reflections by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders, Macmillan, London, 1908 – Page 130 #324)

According to Wikipedia, “In a letter written to Leopold Casper in 1932, Einstein wrote that he admired Goethe as ‘a poet without peer, and as one of the smartest and wisest men of all time’. He goes on to say, ‘even his scholarly ideas deserve to be held in high esteem, and his faults are those of any great man’.“

And that is good enough for me.

An aphorism, according to the Online Merriam Webster, was originally used in the world of medicine. Credit Hippocrates, the Greek physician regarded as the father of modern medicine, with influencing our use of the word. He used aphorismos (a Greek ancestor of aphorism meaning “definition” or “aphorism”) in titling a book outlining his principles on the diagnosis and treatment of disease. That volume offered many examples that helped to define aphorism, beginning with the statement that starts the book’s introduction: “Life is short, Art long, Occasion sudden and dangerous, Experience deceitful, and Judgment difficult.“

Knowing is not enough; we must apply.

Willing is not enough; we must do.

Almost every minute of everyday there someone calling out that they know what the current administration is doing is wrong.

Folks know it.

Folks are willing to do something about it.

But nothing seems to get done.

We MUST DO!

we’ll need a word for
right wingers who can’t live in
world they helped build

Adapted from a passage in the New York Times Opinion Essay, The Vibe Shifts Against the Right by Michelle Goldberg, where Ms. Goldberg writes:

Irving Kristol famously said that neoconservatives were liberals who’d been “mugged by reality.” Maybe soon we’ll need a similar word for the right wingers who can’t stand to live in the world they helped build.

According to the NYT, Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.

According to Wikipedia, Irving William Kristol January 22, 1920 – September 18, 2009) was an American journalist and writer. As a founder, editor, and contributor to various magazines, he played an influential role in the intellectual and political culture of the latter half of the twentieth century, He was dubbed the “godfather of neoconservatism”. After his death, he was described by The Daily Telegraph as being “perhaps the most consequential public intellectual of the latter half of the century”. He is the father of political writer Bill Kristol.

It would almost be fun to be able to sit back on watch as reality (this IS Reality BTW, not a reality game show) comes over the right wing as the realize what they have done.

The cold water creeping over in the bath type of slow change.

The problem is, we are all in the bath together on this one.