Good?

What is or isn’t good? We all evaluate this. Keep in mind your own take on this as I share mine.

I’ll briefly share the basis for my take on what is good as a way of considering recent violations, domestically and internationally, of what I deem good. What is good is at the core of my unusual humanistic, naturalistic, deistic religion, this website, and our times.

If you’re not interested in such philosophy, skip this first section.

Those who read the sidebar here at earthlyreligion and many of the articles know I favor the goods described in Genesis 1 of the Bible.

To the skeptics and atheists already riled by this opening, please stay with me. I’m not trying to push the Bible or God on you. If there are believers still reading, please also stay with me, for it comes to the same thing. I merely acknowledge that our Western religions use this book as scripture and find in its two distinct but related creation stories a salvific coincidence.

It isn’t an imagined afterlife that concerns me: it’s this actual natural life on a planet that will reliably spin for eons, be that for good or ill.

The goods of the first story (the six “days” of creation) fix the ruination of those goods in the second. It says God says the Creation itself that we have evolved in, and including us in it, is “good,” even “very good.” Would that we love and further such natural goods, the goods that we’re built of, the goods that are in us!

I’m not pushing the Bible or claiming authority from its passages. Instead, I warn that taking the Bible as the “Word of God” is fraught with problems. Bending our mind to what some say it says is the very deception described in Genesis Two and Three, the second creation story in the Bible, the so-called Garden of Eden creation story involving Adam and Eve. I see that story as a warning to those who think they know more about good and evil than the gods do. We need to be wary of the “subtle deceiver” lest we lose what is originally called good, be cast out of Edenic wholeness into toil, suffering, and alienation, “bruising our heel on the head of the snake.”

Instead, I see the simple one-page Genesis One creation story, page one of the Bible, as fixing all the confusion about what is good. This natural cosmos, from light through water and land to plants and animals, including humans, male and female, is what is good. The creator God of Genesis 1, Elohim, not only generates natural, evolved existence but also values every stage of it as “good.” Taken all together on the sixth “day,” God calls it, “very good.”

I agree with God on this.

I don’t say, “God is on my side,” I say I’m on the side of the goods of natural Creation. I’m naturalistic, humanistic, and deistic. Believers and atheists all share the same ecosystem and are all caught in the dramas of our time. I’m with us as we naturally are, taking our time in history. What history will be told of our time?

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When I was anticipating writing this essay, a valued and intelligent friend wrote me an email suggesting I not get too worried or negative. He recommended I dwell more on what’s good about life and our culture. Fair warning that made me think. Dwelling on trouble locks us in reactivity. We play into a dire game of partisanship.

However, I had recently discovered the horrors my actual seventh great-grandfather and great-grandmother endured in the seventeenth century in England and Salem Village. Haunted by their experiences, I then read a book about the context that led to their mutual predicament, Diane Purkiss’ The English Civil War.

Heeding my friend’s advice, I won’t go into the rampant atrocities of that chaotic civil war. Suffice it to say, people were tortured and killed on all sides for their religious or political affiliations. Over 800,000 died, twice what came later in our own American Civil War. The “godly” hyper-religious who drove it soon came to the “New World.”

Similarly apprehensive, I had written a review of a recent movie about a potential civil war in our time here.

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Then, before I started my essay on what is good, Renee Nicole Good was tragically killed in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

What a last-name coincidence!

Renee had been observing the upheaval caused by some 2000 masked, armored ICE agents sent to her city to rout out dark-skinned Somalis living there. Supposedly, they were after “the worst of the worst,” according to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

Or is it Homeland Insecurity? What is the intent of such tension, anger, and confrontation? Was Renee Good an example of “the worst of the worst”?

“Get out of the fucking car!” shouted a gun-toting ICE agent, jerking at her door. Alarmed, she smiled and said to the man who would soon kill her, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”

Having waved other cars by, she drove off, either panicked or just clearing the road. Despite the rule that police are not supposed to shoot at moving cars, he might have taken it as a threat or her fleeing. In any case, he instantly shot three times, hitting her in the face, killing her.

Pleasant, likeable, poet-Mother Renee Nicole had her brains and blood splattered all over the air bag. Her children would soon know. The whole country would soon know. Her wife saw it, saying later, “We had whistles; they had guns.”

But the whole country was quickly misinformed by the top agents of our government. They spun it their way, not hers. Their deliberate lies and wild exaggerations quickly followed.

Kristi Noem said, “It was very clear this individual was harassing and impeding law enforcement operations,” which wasn’t the case.

Vice President J. D. Vance said, “It is a tragedy of her own making,” adding, “… our agents are protected by absolute immunity.” Exaggerating with preposterous logic, he claimed, “This was an attack on law and order. This was an attack on the American people.”

President Trump, who hadn’t even seen all the videos of the event, declared with his typical fantasy and overreaction, “It was a horrible thing to watch. The woman screaming was obviously a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viscously ran over the ICE officer, who seems to have shot her in self-defence. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.”

Which he wasn’t. Agent Ross had calmly walked away, commenting, “Fucking bitch.”

Trump went on, “We need to stand by and protect our Law Enforcement Officers from this Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate” (His capitalizations.) In his mind and in the narrative they’re pushing, such agents are the victims, not those they kill.

Kristi Noem said it best, “It was an act of domestic terror.”

True that.

It was an act of domestic terror, only the terrorists were the overreactive police and those who sent them, not the woman who was needlessly killed.

Projection is the psychological tendency to blame others for what we can’t or won’t see in ourselves. This goes beyond projection. It is a tactic.

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Minneapolis had been hit hard. A mile away from this incident, George Floyd was killed by police in 2020. That sparked the Black Lives Matter protests, which quickly morphed from anger at police killing blacks to associating the protests with anti-police sentiment in general.

In August, children praying in a Catholic church were gunned down, two killed and fourteen injured. Children!

Worse for Minnesota and us, Vance Boelter, with a fake face and a fake uniform, disguising himself as a law enforcement officer, murdered former Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, her husband, and her dog. He had earlier tried to kill other Democrats and had a long list of potential future targets.

Trump, instead of condemning the heinous act, reposted a wild conspiratorial video that suggested Governor Walz might have “ordered the hit.” (Cernovich, who created that video, is followed on X by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and White House adviser Stephen Miller.)

Moreover, Trump wouldn’t call Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to offer condolences, stating it would be a “waste of time,” calling Walz “grossly incompetent” and “a mess”.

Walz described Trump’s post as “dangerous, depraved behavior from the sitting president of the United States.” Trump didn’t call for flags to be flown at half mast then, like he later did for the death of Charlie Kirk. “In covering for an actual serial killer,” Walz had said, “he is going to get more innocent people killed. America is better than this.”

Then another innocent American, Renee Nicole Good, was killed.

Nor is it clear that America is better than this. There is rampant, riled protest. But officials are calling it “an affront to law and order.”

Refusing to investigate the officer who killed her, the DOJ instead launched investigations into Walz and Frey. They prevented Minnesota investigators from participating. Are they using George Orwell’s 1984 as a guidebook?

Of all the statements by officials, I like what Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said: “Trump is lying to you.”  In sharp contrast to the “Minnesota nice” stereotype, he went on to address ICE, “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis!”

President Trump responded by sending another thousand troops. Am I too partisan to wonder what good could come of that?

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What good will come of Trump’s having sent all branches of the military to Venezuela on the unusual basis of enforcing our domestic laws in a foreign country? Trump had riled up hatred towards Venezuela by accusing it of “killing Americans” with deadly fentanyl, an opioid stronger than heroin. But fentanyl doesn’t come through Venezuela; it arrives from other countries. Those people he had murdered in small boats were more likely to be moving the recreational drug, cocaine, in ways that couldn’t reach America. A lazy, compliant media treated such boats as coming from Venezuela, even when bombed in the Eastern Pacific, where Venezuela isn’t. Is this how they “cover the news”?

The more obvious target of his ire was the large underground oil reservoir. Trump calls it “our oil.” Our massive military is assigned to be pirates, confiscating that dirty oil lest it go to Russia and other countries. He even got Great Britain to confiscate an oil shipment in the northern Atlantic.

And why rob others of their oil when the United States and the world have a glut of oil? Perhaps Trump’s shakedown of the fossil fuel corporations for a billion dollars for his campaign paid off. This comes amid his attack on solar, wind, and electric cars. He’s trying to stifle new clean-energy generation and the use of electric cars to keep the old, toxic habit of burning coal, oil, diesel, and gasoline. Fossil fuel corporations profit at the expense of all future generations.

Global warming hasn’t slowed because Trump calls it a hoax. Rainbombs and firestorms are on the rise. Crop loss is on the rise. The seas are on the rise. We’re suddenly altering a climate that usually changes over thousands to millions of years. We’re taking the slow process of plants and algae using sunlight to make cellulose, which compacts carbon dioxide over eons into coal and oil, and then hurriedly pumping it back into the sky, warming it.

Just as we’re recently learning we can have abundant travel and home comfort in clean, healthy, renewable ways, we’re opting to let a massive, widespread industrial fossil fuel fart into the face of Mother Nature. Our children’s children’s children will endure the mayhem of an overheated planet because of this stubborn habit of hurriedly burning ancient carbon back into the sky.

If conservatives conserve reliable goods, what is the good of needlessly doing this to ourselves?

Then there’s alienating our allies with flippant talk of invading NATO countries. Wouldn’t it be understandable if recently war-ravaged Europeans were to be wary and resentful? Greenland (a misnomer if ever there was one!) is sparsely populated. Denmark is historically polite. A Greenlander was asked if he was afraid. He dared to say, “I am concerned.”

Nor are Canada and Cuba eager to join the United States or to surrender to it.

When asked about adhering to international laws and norms, President Trump said he does not need international law, asserting that his actions are limited only by his “own morality” and “own mind.”

His own morality? His own mind?

We’ve seen for decades the sort of morality and mind he has. What’s to worry about what’s good? I suspect even Alfred E. Newman might worry.

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Enough of my worry and resentment. I could go on for pages about the deleterious effects of vast amoral wealth funding a misleading media and effectively buying our government and elsewhere. I could detail ad nauseam Trump’s morality and mind. I could only wince in anxious dread at how much worse it could get, domestically and globally.

Instead, I’ll go back to agree with my friend’s suggestion that I not get too negative and partisan. He wrote, “The pursuit of happiness can be distracted by propaganda that makes us fearful instead of creative and playful,” adding, “Were we to ground ourselves in the reality of breath and life, and collaborative synergy with the ecology we occupy, we might not be so distracted by the polarized sociopolitical positions.”

I agree with him. He favors that we sing and dance, eat well, be joyful, and take our gratitude into creative collaboration rather than being drawn into contentious stories. Me too, except we live in a contentious time that is ours to avoid, endure, or steer. We are the incarnate ones of all our ancestors, inheriting all the old stories now culminating in ours. We’re writing what one day will be history. No one else has this responsibility and opportunity.

“Be good” is the button celebrities wore at the Golden Globes. It is an homage to Renee Nicole Good as well as an affirmation and reminder of who and how we are.

My gripes in this essay are based on those goods I affirmed in the opening. Light, water, land, plants, animals, humans – all of these are good. A civilization that protects, pursues, and furthers such goods is one I choose to adopt and steer, if only by writing an essay that only a few will read.

Brain science has recently located and quantified how easily we can store patterns of fear and hate in our minds and moods. Depressive people can get caught by their own habitual thoughts: “it’s always bad,” “I’ve ruined it,” and “It’ll always be this way.” Personally and collectively, by detaching from such automatic negative thoughts, we can instead dwell on pleasant memories and gratitude for what’s good now. We can tell hopeful stories instead of downers.

In “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl remembered that those who survived later found meaning. He quoted Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Even crusty, atheistic, negative old Nietzsche can help us here.

I do not accuse President Trump of being a new Hitler. So far, that is. But he’s using techniques right out of such an authoritarian’s playbook on us. We don’t have gas chambers and ovens, but we do have Gaza, CECOT (in El Salvador), and more and more prisons using the sadistic treatment such places foment.

Those are foreigners; should we worry? Yes, we should. Here are just some of the buildings ICE wants to buy to create detention centers. Fortunately, even Republican mayors are objecting. They are, in order, in Colorado, Takoma, El Paso, Kansas City, Los Angeles, New Jersey, Orange County, and Hanover.

Buildings are just a part of the cost. Ten years ago, the ICE budget was $6 billion; now it is the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement agency, at $85 billion. This is more than the annual expenditures on police by state and local governments in all 50 states and the District of Columbia combined, eclipsing funding to agencies whose law enforcement missions involve pursuing terrorists, violent criminals, sex offenders, fentanyl and other drug traffickers, and gun traffickers!

There is lots of money to hire more ICE agents. The signing bonus for some is $50,000, more than the median income of most Americans. ICE has the funds (largely from The Big Beautiful Bill, which shunts tax savings to billionaires and diverts them from domestic and foreign needs) to hire another 14,000 agents and is seeking more this week (the last week of January 2026).

“America has been invaded by criminals and predators. We need YOU to get them out,” ICE’s recruiting website says. It is microtargeting the sorts of people they want. A $100 million dollar, one-year media blitz calls for “wartime recruitment.” It targets conservative radio show listeners, gun-rights advocates, and those following military affairs. “Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys?” one ad says. They are using “geofencing” to search for places near military bases, NASCAR races, gun shows, and certain online “influencers.”

“They’re aiming for that sweet spot of people who’ve got something to prove, who want to have that power, under the guise of patriotism,” Americus Reed, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told the Washington Post, as described in The Guardian.

Patriotism? Power? How is that power being deployed?

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Between writing this and posting it for my readers, Alex Pretti, who was trying to help a woman who had been pepper-sprayed, was himself pepper-sprayed, ganged up on by ICE and Border Patrol agents, thrown to the ground, bashed with a tear gas cannister, disarmed, and shot in the back ten times, killing him instantly. Agents tore open his shirt to count the bullet holes.

Alex was a gentle and well-liked ICU nurse tending to the Vets. A week prior to this, he had his rib broken by ICE agents. He may have angrily kicked out the rear tail light lens on the unmarked SUV the ICE agents were using. Some use this as a supposed partial justification for his murder. In tribal warfare, any murder is justified.

As with the killing of Nicole Good, local police were barred from sharing in an investigation of this. At first, even the FBI was barred. The crime scene was quickly trampled. The state, which should be in charge of investigating and prosecuting a murder in its jurisdiction, is being blocked by the agency whose agent did the killing. Giving in to pressure, they let the FBI join the investigation, the same FBI that Trump earlier took control of via Kash Patel and the emptying of scores of key personnel.

It’s the same FBI that put one thousand agents on the Epstein Files long before Congress compelled those files be released. A month after the deadline for that release, less than one percent has been released, and most of those are so heavily redacted that none of the information is apparent on page after page. (Since writing this, some three million files, heavily redacted, were released, and another three million were kept in hiding.) Does this inspire confidence in these agencies?

Trump and his cohort have gone way beyond accusing the news of being fake. They’ve gone far beyond “alternative facts.” They’ve gone far beyond dismissing credible news organizations from press conferences, replacing them with toadies of the right, or insulting them, like “piggy.” They create alternative news, as if it were truer than what you and I see.

All the religions of our world agree that lying is a sin.

A British commentator (I’m sorry; I forgot to write down his name and the exact quote) said something like this: Once you’re in a party, cult, or tribe, it is your duty to lie along with the others. He noticed how President Trump floods the zone with simultaneous entertainment and horror. He (or perhaps another commentator) added that the Republicans who express doubts about supporting President Trump in private don’t voice that outloud because they are afraid of the violence they might receive from the militantly radical right.

American founder Thomas Paine famously wrote, “THESE are the times that try men’s souls.” To him, complacency in the face of lies is an offence to the truth. Writing “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” He didn’t preemptively mean Fox News exactly, but his old quote applies: “The cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf.” He warned, “Suspicion is the companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society.” Our souls are being challenged.

When Good was killed, Trump, who hadn’t yet seen the footage, nonetheless occupied the news with his pronouncements. He posted that she had, “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer,” going on to add it is “hard to believe he is alive.” He went on to assert she was “very disorderly,” and that she and her wife were “highly disrespectful of law enforcement,” labelling them as “professional agitators.”

All of his statements were either mistakes or deliberate lies.

He went deeper, revealing his character. “I know her parents were big Trump fans — makes me feel bad anyway, but, I mean, I guess you could say even worse,” later adding his lament that her parents were “tremendous Trump people, Trump fans.” At a later press briefing, he added about her father, “I hope he still feels that way [a supporter]”. He did admit the incident was a tragedy and that it was horrible, but went on to defend the actions of law enforcement, saying, “ICE is going to be too rough with somebody… they’re going to make a mistake sometimes”.

This is what he feels bad about? “Too rough”? “Mistakes,” “sometimes”?

Earlier, on the Good killing, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said, “Our officer followed his training, did exactly what he’s been taught to do in that situation.” Followed his training? How reassuring is that, given that the deployment of ICE agents to L.A., Portland, and Minneapolis was also justified as “training”?

Vice President J.D. Vance had claimed it was “a tragedy of her own making” that she “rammed” the ICE officer and that he shot her in “self-defence” as she drove around him. He piously summarized: “The purpose of being in the current position for a brief time is to achieve the greatest possible good for God and the nation”.

“Good for God and the nation”?

When Alex Pretti was similarly killed in an overly riled situation, the reactions of Trump et al were similarly misleading, accusatory, and defensive.

Trump called it “a very unfortunate incident,” quickly adding he didn’t like it that Pretti had a pistol in his holster, “I don’t like it that he had a gun. I don’t like that he had two fully loaded magazines.” Pretti did have those, and he had a legal permit to carry them. They were in his holster when he was taken down by a group of ICE or Border Patrol agents.

The national news media dwelt on enlarged pictures of the gun and bullets he had on him.

They didn’t show the ten bullet holes in his back.

Trump earlier told reporters he wanted a “very honorable and honest investigation” into Pretti’s shooting. He didn’t add that the investigation excluded the town of Minneapolis or the state of Minnesota. Only the state can bring charges if warranted.

Noem claimed Pretti was “brandishing” a gun. She somehow knew he “wished to inflict harm” on the officers. Stephen Miller, chief advisor to President Trump, took it further with his paranoid rantings: “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.”

Notice the irony of those claiming to be pursuing and protecting “law and order” are themselves disobeying law and order? They take over the agencies that should uphold law and order, then flaunt their lawlessness.

Steve Bannon smirks, ‘What are you going to do about it?’

We can protest. We can boycott. We can write our representatives. We can hope the courts can exert some power. We can watch our TVs as masked, armed, literal jack-booted thugs make both murder and lies about it normative.

All of these lies bring to our shocked souls the idiom “adding insult to injury.”

Not to worry, for the same news channels intersperse such news with cheerful ads of people dancing in their kitchens to peppy music because of the medicine they’re taking.

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Okay, readers, I wanted to explore just what is good and what is not. I had hoped not burden us with bad news and worry. So far, it’s mostly not good.

Sorry, it gets worse.

Worse than the young girls and boys trafficked, as not yet exposed in the Epstein Files, bad as that is, is Epstein’s long association with lots of money moving here or there, and with Israel. How that matters in economic and political realms has not yet been revealed. I cannot prove my suspicions are justified.

The pro-Israel slant of the American evangelicals who helped elect and support Trump, coupled with the power of the AIPAC lobby in our national and regional elections, is enormous. The hopes and plans for a “greater Israel” are not to be ignored, especially as President Trump is now sending aircraft carriers and other military might to pressure Iran. The chumming up with Saudi Arabia (despite their involvement with 9-11 and the murder and dismemberment of Khashoggi) and the sweetheart deals with Qatar and the United Arab Emirates should alarm us, especially given Trump’s grandiose aspirations, his brazen lawlessness on the high seas, and his teaming up with Israel’s Netanyahu in destroying and claiming Gaza.

Should I tamp down my concern for fear I’ll be called antisemitic? No. That’s an old ploy, an automatic defence of anything Israel does, no matter how much it has increasingly tended towards Nazish treatment of Palestinians since it was founded in 1948. There aren’t trains leading to gas chambers, but there is a city collapsed on the people who lived there.

It isn’t Germans who are to be blamed for the Holocaust, or Jews for Gaza, or Christians for the Inquisition. It is anyone who treats other human beings as suitable for self-righteous slaughter. Jews for Netanyahu, Americans for Trump – we’re all due criticism if we can’t control those who act in our name.

I’m similarly fed up with those who advise us not get negative and instead “work on ourselves.” We’ve worked on ourselves for generations. Meanwhile, those who have taken over our social media and government mock those who work on themselves. They know a crude ego is audacious and therefore wields power.

Steve Bannon mocks the left as too elitist, too concerned with the working class, too inept to counter audacious moves by the right. He advises the right to flood the zone with shit. To him, focusing on “going high when they go low” is a sign of weakness and failure to understand the nature of the “war”.

Since Newt Gingrich’s “Key Mechanisms of Control” and Trump’s early lawyer, Ray Cohen, who trained him on tactics, we’ve endured a relentless onslaught of insults and assaults. Gingrich taught GOP candidates to use two sets of words: glittering generalities when talking about themselves and name-calling words when speaking of others. Cohen was even more Machiavellian in his advice to the young Donald. “The pursuit of power is the ultimate adventure,” he taught, along with, “True power lies in controlling the narrative.”

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Here are two links to fuller descriptions of this dragging of our political understandings into the sewer of the swamp:

https://propagandacritic.com/indexz.php/propaganda-examples/newts-name-calling-words/

and

The Trump Leadership Playbook–And Why It Matters

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Could President Trump “Wag the Dog” with wider war, despite his stated love of peace? He tends to lie, break things, and take pride in his role in chaos. Besides the tragic incidents already explored in this essay, the attack on Venezuela and the threats on Greenland, and the plans for huge prisons as shown above, what else is he up to? How is any of it good?

Trump’s buddies and funders, like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, aspire to independent “freedom cities,” free from national and international constraints. They mock and undermine our government and others. Musk has transplanetary ambitions, and he recently gave a mere $15 million (“mere,” compared to his financial worth) to support President Trump and congressional Republicans. (That’s $5 million each to the Congressional Leadership Fund, the Senate Leadership Fund, and MAGA Inc. Will my meager $5 here and there counter such clout?)

This is just the publicly admitted donations. Because of Citizens United, such billionaires can hide the money they would otherwise publicly give, since it is considered “free speech” by our Supreme Court. They see corporations as “persons” and the money, no matter how much, as “free speech.”

Here I am, with very little money and only a few readers, trying to use my free speech. I’m a nobody, trying to be a citizen of my country and planet. I have no power. Yet, I try.

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Okay, I’ll try to pop the dreary mood I’ve created from all this bad news by sharing a joke.

One reviewer of the new movie “Melania” said that if it were shown on an airplane, people would walk out.

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Part of my meaning in life is to remember the horrors of my grandparents (links to those Astonishing stories are above), the horror of the Holocaust, the horror of the bomb that exploded two hours after I was born (huge, but tiny compared to thousands of newer, bigger ones), the divisive tensions of the McCarthy era, and be wary of the huge social, political, and technological dangers of our current trends.

My friend, mentioned at the top of this essay, knows how much I like to sing and dance. He’s read my essays and knows why I favor clean, renewable energy and a live-and-let-live society. I could go on and on about what is good. Just this morning, my cat walked on me to wake me before dawn. That’s good, as was the potato and salad I had for dinner last night. There’s value in brain science’s recommendation to embed positive pathways in our thinking and stories to counter the tendency to get trapped in negativity.

There are now 3,000 ICE agents in Minneapolis, compared to the 600 in its police force. Doing what? To what end? President Trump has decreed an end to DEI efforts in our country. I had thought that diversity, equity, and inclusion were core values and aspirations for our pluralistic, self-governed republic. Both Christianity and the Enlightenment founded those values. (Well, Jesus had such values; Christianity? Too often not.) Somehow, a demented madman is wielding the domestic and international steering wheel of power, steering us towards – what?

Where are we in history, and what will we do about it? What goods do we have?

What’s good is the comedians who mock the madness, the judges who stall it, the religious leaders who denounce it, the millions who vociferously object, and especially, the inherent, unalienable spirit of creation in us that doesn’t want it. What’s good is the intent of people who look for it in church and at the voting booth. What’s good is built into the children now entering their time in history.

Did you know that the artist formerly known as Prince came from Minneapolis?