Dear Readers, 
 
I have watched with a heavy heart as the United States has slid into becoming an oligarchy such as my country has been.  I wish to address the citizens of that nation.  I see you have chosen a true oligarch over a mere puppet as your leader.  Personally, having dealt with both puppets and oligarchs, I prefer puppets.  They have some vestige of humanity left in them.
 
I see you talk of resistance.  Talk is brave and defiant.  Talk causes a heady rush of adrenalin.  Talk may get you in trouble, and talk by itself will get you nowhere. 
 
If you are serious about resistance, you must have the self-discipline of a martial arts master. You must have focus.  You must clearly define your goals.  You must seize every opportunity to advance the cause of democracy and social justice.
 
If you are serious about resistance, you must give up the notion of saving face or retaliating for the wrongs you have suffered. Every action you take must advance your goal.  Retaliation and vengeance are side issues that serve only to distract and divert.  Keep your eyes on the prize of justice with an equal voice for each and every citizen.
 
You must avoid the temptation to seek glory for yourself or to follow those who seek attention and glory.  In my country the names of those who worked behind the scenes for equality are known to only a few.  I know most of the leaders who planned and fought for justice in my country.  I know the university professors who drew up the grand plans.  I know the street drunks, who kept their eyes open and saved their knowledge until they could whisper it in the ear of someone who could use the information.  I know the young women who kept their eyes down and listened patiently then went about avoiding those businesses that exploit their laborers, taking their business to the markets owned by local people who supply goods and services to their own community. I know the old women who watched from windows and whispered their information in the halls until the whole nation was alive with the knowledge of the movement of evil around us.
 
I also count among my dearest friends members of the power elite, they have done much to bring about justice in my country. My friends have no desire for the fame and glory that comes with leadership, and they know the pitfalls of combining great wealth with political power.  I honor their integrity and wisdom in avoiding the seduction of combining wealth and political power.
 
In The Resistance hierarchical systems of command and power are detrimental to your goal.  Every person willing to work for social justice must be included and no small act should be considered as unworthy of recognition.  I still remember with chills the day one of the most disreputable citizens of our city brought me the information that led the prosecutors’ office to ultimately arrest the emperor and bring down the injustice of his government.  Listen to the street people and the prostitutes.  Listen to the students.  Listen to the housewives and the laborers.  Listen to the servants.  These are the invisible people that nobody sees, but together they see and hear much.  Together they are the greatest power in the nation.  Value the common person. 
 
Value the poets, singers and storytellers.  Facts and knowledge are found in the sciences and law.  Wisdom is gained through the arts.  Wisdom is vital to the success of the resistance.  Now is the time to cherish and meditate upon the wisdom of your artists.  They will give you the words and direction needed to keep you on course.
 
Bon Chance, my friends.  I will light a candle for your efforts, knowing the security and prosperity of my own country is tied to the level of justice in yours.  Above all else, remain humble. 
 
Your Servant
President Jake Jaconovich.
 
 

 I attended the Women’s March in Olympia WA.  We had a beautiful day the rain stopped and the sun came out just as I finished my walk.  I had a wonderful morning.  The friends I rode with commented on how much more hopeful they felt just looking at the crowds.  I took time to just stand and listen.  I heard music in the distance.  A plane flew overhead.  I heard laughter.  Someone laughed near me.  People farther away laughed and chatted.  Laughter was the prevalent sound out of all that happened around me.  I had expected chanting, and singing, but not so much laughter. 
 
With the cloud cover and dripping rain, I wondered, why did everybody look and sound so happy.  I think like my friend people looked around at the crowd and realized they were not alone in their concerns.  Getting out, seeing real people not just those on TV and seeing a massive crowd standing up for decency toward each other was like coming into the sunlight after being trapped in a dark cave with only a weak flashlight.  We were out in the light and taking action to support those issues that we care about.  It felt good.
 
What are the issues people cared about?  This being Washington State, many people carried signs about protecting our environment.  One sign read, “There is no planet B.” Other people talked about protecting our national parks and public lands.  Here on the West Coast people are well aware that the earth sustains and feeds us.  We must take care of our habitat so we can eat and breath clean air.  The concern is that our president has advocated for allowing private companies to conduct mining operations in our national parks.  He has suggested selling our public lands to private individuals, which would compromise fishing, logging, and tourist industries. 
 
Similar to those who were concerned about the environment, a segment of the protestors where promoting science.  How on earth did science get a bad rap in the first place? Why should scientific method need advocates and protection? When, why and how did people stop respecting science?  Science deniers are not new.  They’ve been around since time began.  But, why in this age, after all scientific method has produced, do we find this disrespect for science?  I was happy to see those who came to stand up for science. 
 
Of course with congress chomping at the bit to dismantle the ACA, I saw many signs like the one that read, “Replace Before Repeal.”  Some people advocated single payer. Other people supported Planned Parenthood.  I saw some signs about Medicare, drug prices, affordable insurance and many, many signs with uteri on them. 
 
 As a side-issue to health care, abortion and a woman’s right to choose were a prominent theme at the march.  The march was not specifically about abortion, but it was one topic that was mentioned along with the other topics people were concerned about.  “Keep it Safe and Keep it Legal,” seemed to me to be the message of the abortion advocates. 
 
Voting rights advocates came out to protest gerrymandering and voter suppression.  Washington State with our mail-in system is really very open, but we do have some serious districting issues.  One district straddles a major mountain range so that the votes on one side of the mountains cancel the votes on the other side of the mountains and neither group gets adequate representation. Their Federal Rep. is a bought-and-paid-for puppet for the oligarchs.  He could not have been elected if the district where he lives was not diluted by those on the other side of the mountains who don’t know what type of person he is and got swept up by glossy ads.
 
Education advocates formed a noticeable presence at our March.  Some signs protested the appointment of DeVos.  Other signs read things like, “Fund the Future, Fund Education.”  The American school system needs to re-examine what is working for whom and what isn’t.  Science might help schools find schedules and programs that are more effective.  It should seem obvious to everybody that education is vital to a democracy, but like science, education is receiving a bad rap in our culture.  Yes, our massive systems have problems, but those problems are fixable.  Why should people need to come out in the rain to advocate for a system that mostly works? The need for education advocates to demonstrate seems to me to be a symptom of something seriously wrong in our society.
 
I saw signs focused on the current POTUS.  Most of the signs focused on issues like the tax returns and conflict of interest.  Some signs decried his sexist remarks about grabbing women.  On the topic of sexual assault, about a third of the women present wore pink pussy hats.  In case anyone is in doubt, grabbing women anywhere is wrong.  Women do have the right to defend their private areas.  I considered getting a pink hat, but later decided I wanted to focus on a more general theme.
 
Justice may have been one of the most prominent themes at our march.  My sign read People Before Profits, which spanned several of the topics.  Several people came dressed as Lady Liberty.  I saw a few signs about criminal justice, equal pay, equal rights.  I saw lots of rainbow flags and signs requesting we respect all marriages.  Some signs addressed specific justice issues, others supported the Bill of Rights, especially the first amendment.
 
Curiously, the three million people who turned out in all weather all over the globe to demonstrate have been roundly criticized for gathering, for not supporting the current POTUS, for not trusting the government to do what is right, for doing something unnecessary, and for disturbing the peace. 
 
I don’t think they understand what was happening.  First, marching was healing.  It proved to be educational.  It was a call for justice.  Mostly, the marches provided an opportunity for large numbers of people to meet and see that others shared their concerns.  We talked to each other.  We were nice to each other.  We were united.  We turned out with our concerns for the future, met others with similar concerns and came away feeling that there is hope for taking our nation and our world in a direction that offers justice and health for everybody.

In my work-in-progress Lucy Goes Home, one of the adolescent boys needs to write a paper for civics class.  This happens in a foreign country where civics is still taught as an important subject.  Alan chose to write on the topic of Five Dangers of Oligarchies.
 
After I left Alan in the library working on his paper, I decided I agreed with his teacher that the topic of oligarchies is important and Alan’s paper might be of some value. I am producing his paper here. Alan has some challenges as a student, but I think he did a good job for a teen with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.
 
Five Dangers Of Oligarchies by Alan McKinsey
 
Oligarchy (from Greek ὀλιγαρχία (oligarkhía); from ὀλίγος (olígos), meaning "few", and ἄρχω (arkho), meaning "to rule or to command") is a form of power structure in which power effectively rests with a small number of people.  –
 
(I copy and pasted this from Wikipedia, but I didn’t mean to cheat - Alan)
 
***
When a small number of people rule the country instead of everybody having a say in how things are done, lots of things can go wrong.
 
The first thing that can go wrong is that laborers are not paid enough money to live on, and they become very poor.  Being poor means they cannot take care of their children and give them the food, clothing and shelter necessary for the children to be good students and grow up to be healthy.  Many poor women will have an abortion to get rid of the babies they can’t afford.  They get pregnant because they can’t afford birth control.  Poor people don’t buy the things that our factories produce so the whole country suffers when nobody buys the things we make. Some poor people don’t even have apartments and live on the streets behind dumpsters.
 
Second – When people don’t buy stuff, businesses don’t make a lot of money selling their products, so they try to cut expenses more.  One thing they do is pollute. They don’t want to spend money for better incineration machines so they let toxic fumes and heavy metals into the air.  They don’t repair their equipment so they spill the toxic waste from their production plants into the surrounding farmland and streams. They can do this because the few people who rule also own the businesses, and they don’t want to pay for making things clean
 
Third – In an oligarchy only the rulers are considered important.  This is bad because the property rights and health of other people are not considered important.  If the rulers want to use somebody’s land so they can make money, they take that land for their own use.  This happens a lot to native people, small farmers, and people who live near natural resources.  Sometimes places that are owned by all the people, like parks and some beaches and docks are given to the rulers.  Health is like property rights.  The rulers do things like polluting and putting poisons in water or food because they don’t care about the health of the people when they can make more money by poisoning people. 
 
Fourth – In an oligarchy the laws are made to benefit the rulers and keep ordinary people under control so we don’t riot. This is bad because the laws say we can’t complain about unjust laws like not letting new businesses compete with businesses the rulers own.  The rulers make laws saying it is illegal to make and sell things like soap, or fabric, or clothes, or to collect rainwater or drill a well instead of buying these things from them. The oligarchs make these laws because they don’t want common people to compete with them.  In an oligarchy, the people can get in trouble if they march in the street or talk about these bad things on the TV.
 
Fifth – The oligarchs will go to war against other oligarchs in other countries or against rivals in this country.  When they do, they kill lots of innocent people.  Oligarchs are always fighting with each other to see who can control the most people.  Sometimes they do their fighting through political parties.  Those who own the TV and newspapers use their newspapers to start the fights.  Sometimes they use the police, or the army, or private armies called security companies to do their fighting.  Sometimes if the common people cause too much trouble the oligarchs will stop fighting with each other and work together to fight us.

Yesterday a fellow author made a distressed post on Facebook.  She declared that all her friends who are Democrats had gone crazy.  My guess is that they were all excited about the “Golden Showers” scandal.  She couldn’t understand how they could believe such a thing and thought they must be being willfully cruel. 
 
I thought my response to this author was a bit inspired.  I said, “Remember when Republicans believed that Obama was going to kick in their doors and take away their guns?  Remember when he was going to lock us all up in FEMA camps?  He didn’t do those things.  The belief was unrealistic.  I think we need to give Democrats the same opportunity to be unreasonable that the Republicans have exercised for the last eight years.” My friend felt much better after this somewhat insane definition of reality. I felt horrified that our society has devolved to the point where the best we can do is allow equal opportunity for craziness.
 
We can do better.
 
At this point, it doesn’t much matter what anybody believes about Obama or Trump.  Those men will be who they are whether we like them or approve or not.  Our challenge is to attempt to function when bombarded with craziness.  The first step we need to follow is to not get caught up in the craziness. We need to focus on what is really important to each of us as individuals. 
 
I have a dear friend who has her political preferences and started to get upset over the news, but she is a wise woman.  She sat down and thought about what is important to her.  She decided that she wanted to spend the remainder of her life working on making life better for women.  This is what she is going to do, and she isn’t going to ask for validation of her priorities from anybody.  She’s identifying individuals and organizations who have the same goals and starting to work.
 
I think my friend has found the best path forward.  By focusing on what is important to her, she will connect with her passion and actually make a difference in this world.  Her goal is reachable no matter what some man somewhere does. 
 
Think about it.  What is important to you?  Football?  What about supporting your local Jr. High football team?  You can make a difference in the lives of others.  It doesn’t matter what you are passionate about or what your priorities are, when you engage with what is important to you, you do make a difference in the lives of those around you.
 
I have a cousin who coached girls’ soccer for years.  He started coaching because his girls wanted to play soccer and didn’t have a coach.  He came to realize it was unfair that others wanted to coach boys but not girls, so long after his own girls were grown, he still coached girls’ soccer. He loved it and he cared.  He taught the girls sportsmanship and skills, and knowing this cousin, he taught them how to laugh and have fun.  He made a real positive difference in the lives of hundreds of people, perhaps more so than any great leader we see on TV. 
 
A local restaurant has a new owner.  This is an establishment that should do well, but has failed repeatedly over the years.  The new owner wants to make this place the social hub for our small community.  She’s sponsored game nights and an open mic for local poets and musicians.  Her own passion for parties and need for her business to succeed is getting people away from their TVs and helping them connect with their neighbors.  After only a couple months, this is making a huge difference in our small community.
 
Now is the time for you to make that first step forward. Forget the glitter and sensationalism of your favorite news source, look at yourself.  What is important to you?  What were the issues that prompted you to vote for one candidate over another?  Find that issue and start working on making lives better for others around that issue. You will feel better and actually make a difference in this world.