It Is Time, My Grandchildren, to Go

My dear grandchildren:

I know that some of you worked hard to achieve a different result in  this election.  I know that most of you cast your ballots for the most qualified candidates.  I know that despite the overwhelming odds against you, you made some of the contests close.

But we awakened today needing to confront a sad reality.  None of you will ever live in a free, democratic United States.

I hope that those of you who can will become expatriates.  Political exile is not a formula for happiness, but it is arguably better than enslavement in a police state whose principal purpose is war and the engorgement of the richest few at the expense of the impoverished many.

Go, if you can.  Go to Holland, or France, or Germany or Switzerland. Go to one of the struggling Latin socialist democracies, struggling to keep our CIA from  from pulling off one of its dirty, ill-disguised coups de etat. Go to New Zealand. To Scotland. To Moscow, to work beside Edward Snowden. Anywhere that you can find breathing room. A remote Pacific island is no longer an option; soon it will lie beneath warmed, polluted seas. But go.

Here, there is no choice but to submit.  A weak, failed presidency is all that stands between you and enslavement.  The militarized police and octopoid national spy apparatus assure that no revolution can ever succeed. Protest or dissent will be ever more ruthlessly suppressed. The de facto legalization of torture will one day be formalized.  Stay and you will all become Winstons, betraying your Julias. Abstractions like justice, truth and ethical humanism will be banished from the state vocabulary as liberal treason, punishable by death or penal exile in some Guantanamo. There is no escape from this if you stay. It will only get worse, as it has been doing, with the process hastening, bit by bit, until we can realize the magnitude of our loss only by looking  far back in our history.  

The ruling oligarchy spent $3.7 billion or so — the most expensive election in our history, yet a paltry sum, petty cash, given their real wealth — to buy  this election.  The money wasn’t really spent, just recycled.  It was paid to the media to propagate lies, to brainwash a supine electorate.  Six huge companies, owned and run for the profit of oligarchs who are part of the ruling cabal, pocketed the money.  They will use it to perpetuate the mythology that blinds the people to the truth of how this country works, to continue the policies that make the rich richer, the poor poorer and to maintain an economy fed by the filthy lucre of endless war. It is a self-perpetuating machine, this ugly, dehumanizing system that governs us.

Stay and soon you will live in a nation without wildlife or wilderness, breathing increasingly polluted air and paying dearly for access to a privatized, diminishing supply of potable water.  This is a real fear, based in clinical probability, not the manufactured fear of bloody poop while being beheaded, as John Stewart mocked the lies to which we were recently exposed. Ebola?  What about frack-poisoned aquifers.  Radical Muslims?  What about radical, frighteningly ignorant right-wing politicians. 

We are close to life’s finish line, my mate and I.  “Our” government will gradually take away our retirement income, make our health care unaffordable and allow criminal bankers to raid our meager savings.  Odds are that we’ll die before the thugs can finish the job.

But you, beloved grandchildren, have a lot of life ahead of you.  Go while you can.  Go someplace where that life still has a bit of value beyond dollar signs.  There are better places than this.  Go to them.