BALAGAN GADOL

Way back in the 1950s when I was in elementary school, we used to have regular 'Atomic Bomb drills.'  Seriously.  They used to scare the hell out of us!  We even got to see videos and cartoons showing what it would be like to be vaporized, have your flesh burned off, and your bones crumble into dust, all in a matter of seconds.  It gave us nightmares!  The drill went like this: there would be a siren or a bell going off on the school PA system.  Then we would have to get under our little desks, fold ourselves up and put out hands over our heads, as if any of that would do any good in the middle of a fiery mushroom cloud.  Being 9 years old, we knew better.  Anyone my age remembers the joke: "Get under your desk, bend over, and kiss your ass goodbye."  It was funny if you were 9 and scared to death.  Well, it never happened; we grew up and lived to see the great Y2K millennium changeover in time.  Imagine being born in the 1940s before television, before the internet, before smartphones, when even telephones were  bakelite contraptions out in the hallway shared by an entire neighborhood; growing up and going to Vietnam; and growing old in the digital era.  You had to be rich to make a phone call when I was a little kid; it cost a whole nickel, more than the price of a loaf of bread!

So, what's the point of that memory?  The point is that all these years later we have to be scared of Atomic Bomb drills again, because there's a crazy person with his finger of the trigger of the world's biggest nuclear arsenal.  There are senators and other members of Congress who are now saying that they realize that he's crazy.  It's a relief to hear that, because up to now I thought he was an idiot.  But, I'm not sure if that makes things any better.

So, there's a crazy idiot running around the White House in his bathrobe, farting and thinking up Executive Orders in the middle of the night.  The halls and offices are mostly empty.  The 4,000 desks in the White House and support offices out in the Virginia suburbs are mostly unoccupied due to centralized paranoia and ignorance about how the machine of the federal government operates.

A billion dollar private family business can be operated by a small inner circle of 3 or 4 family members plus maybe 25 core employees, tops, who work with the family on a first name basis.  At any one time they may have roughly 35 projects going on, with only one or at most two that require their urgent attention.  That allows them to devote all of their energy and time to their single crisis, and not have to worry about anything else going on in the world that has nothing to do with their money.

It seemed logical to assume that "hey, we can run the United States of America the same way we ran our business; no problem."  Right?  Wrong.  There are roughly 3 million federal employees, running thousands of programs, paying close professional attention to hundreds of domestic and international crises at any given moment.  Reports and analysis are flowing up the chain of command constantly every second of the day, with high octane professional management types reviewing and processing all of it and deciding what goes forward up the chain of command.  There are mistakes, but generally it all runs like clockwork.  All of that has been tossed down the toilet.  No need to read any annoying reports, its all fake garbage, right?  There are three or four folks in their underwear sitting in a nearly empty White House insanely imagining that they've got everything under control.  Whenever someone points out that its Not under control, they get fired; bam, security badge ripped off their shirt and escorted out of the building, problem solved.  Not.

Every time Comrade T taps out a twitter on his unsecured phone or opens his mouth, people who have spent their careers protecting America are like, "WHAT THE.....? Is he nuts? Holy Sh..!" 

Every day the little band of White House know-it-all know-nothings pick a single problem to beat to death.  It does not matter if sixty five million homeless refugees around the world are starving and freezing to death this winter.  If you refuse to read reports and briefings, then these issues don't exist.  If you refuse to appoint the top 1000 people to write those reports, problem solved; "who needs all those people!" said the President.  No, the problem of the day in mid February was how to reverse the law ensuring equality for Transgender school children's right to pee in the loo consistent with their gender identity.  WHAT?  That's right, they decided that we can't have kids whizzing wherever they want to.  One school decided that a transgender teen can't go to the boys room and he certainly can't go to the girls room.  So, they told him he could go pee in the deep sink in the janitor's closet.  Seriously.  That case is going to the Supreme Court.  Will the Supreme Court of the United States of America have to consider and contemplate the proper position for transgender urination?  Remember, it was the President, as a candidate during a debate, who said on live television that the former Secretary of State's need to pee was "disgusting."  And now he's trying to keep kids from peeing!  Disgusting!

This website is dedicated to advocating the rights and benefits of LGBT service members and veterans, and all LGBT rights.  But, all that pales in importance when we are faced with a historically catastrophic screw-up!  (In modern Hebrew: Balagan Gadol).  This wasn't supposed to have happened, that we would end up electing an egomaniac megalomaniac fascist lunatic along with a clueless Congress of narrow minded nitwits crashing backwards in time to 1933 Germany.  In fact, we didn't.  They cheated, and that was not supposed to be able to have happened in America.  If a president and his team had absolutely no connection to Russian operatives, false government agency sponsored propaganda about his opponent, organized intentional suppression of minority voting, and more, then the president would want and insist on a Special Prosecutor to investigate and settle the matter as soon as possible.  If there was clearly no scandal, his cowardly Congress of appeasers would want to rush to prove that.  But, its not happening.  Every effort is being made to sweep the catastrophic scandals under the rug and sabotage American democracy.

On the first of March he addressed Congress and the nation.  Because he didn't take off his shoe and bang it on the podium, nor tug his trouser tops and bounce his junk as he did in a debate, nor shout incoherent hysterical paranoid lies, his speech was deemed 'nearly presidential.'  How we have lowered our standards in just one month from the world revered resounding wisdom spoken by Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Obama.  He still bragged about the balagan of his first month in office, he still made 'fantastic' predictions of achieving greatness without a shred of detail.   He still proclaimed coming glory by virtue of deporting foreigners, magically vanquishing enemies, and spending trillions while lowering taxes.  Its a wonder that he didn't click his heels and start shouting in German, or Russian.

And before the eyes of the world, democracy began to die.  You can pray all you like, but to defeat this catastrophe will take the kind of courage we had in World War II, it will take the kind of self determination that we had when we rose up for our rights and didn't stop until we won.  It will take the kind of heroes we had in the days of Harvey Milk, Martin Luther King Jr., and so many others who were unafraid to speak out and demand freedom.