Once again, I want to thank everyone who has participated in the Hullabaloo Happy Hollandaise fundraiser. This has been a hell of a year for all of us and I’m so grateful to all of you.
We can finally see the light at the end of what has been a very long, dark tunnel. The COVID vaccines are rolling out and Donald Trump is almost on his way to exile in Mar-a-lago. Huzzah!
Unfortunately, the trauma of this tragic pandemic and the four years of Trump are going to be with us for a while. (In fact, Trump himself is going to be with us for some time although, blessedly, we won’t have to pay as much attention to him.) And we have a terrible economic crisis on our hands that is going to require some very serious government attention at least for the next year as business and jobs ramp up, hopefully with enough pent up demand to create a strong recovery.
But our long-term challenges are going to require sustained attention on the part of our elected officials and activists. The right wing assault on democracy is an acute problem that cannot be ignored if we are to deal the big issues of wealth inequality to racial justice to climate change. We have come to a point at which action on all those fronts is mandatory if we expect to survive as a nation (and a planet.)
We have spent the last four years in a hallucinogenic political atmosphere, simply trying to wrap our minds around the surreality of the Donald Trump three ring circus on a daily basis. It was a very dangerous time and we didn’t escape unscathed, unfortunately, We have over 300,000 deaths, many of which could have been prevented if we’d had serious leadership, and tens of millions of our fellow Americans have been brainwashed into a bizarre conspiracy-theory cult driven by a demagogue and extremist media machine.
Now we are facing the fallout and it isn’t going to be easy. As much as we would like a break, the carnage they’ve left in their wake is extreme and those long term problems are even more urgent than before. Oh, and by the way, the Republican Party is more insane than it’s ever been before. We can’t afford to look away.
Hopefully, politics will least be operating on a more rational plane over the next few years (although I wouldn’t bet on it.) And we’ll be here to try to make sense of it as best we can, with as much insight, focus and humor that we can muster in these complicated times.
If you’d like to help us keep the lights on here at Hullabaloo to continue to do what we do, I would very much appreciate it. And thanks again to all who have given support already, past and present.
cheers,
digby