We’ve only scraped the surface of the Epstein files and it’s already like I can’t get the water hot enough to feel clean. How I long for the good ol’ days, when Dick Cheney shooting someone on a hunting trip was the Big Coverup. Nothing so innocent with these guys. Not like Paul Newman and Robert Redford hiding out in a cabin together and riding a bike in flirtatious circles, no sir. I’ve seen the pictures of Jeffrey and Donald flying private to party with the rich and famous.
Apparently, what they lacked in morality, they more than made up for with greed and perversion. Newsflash: pedophiles are the lowest rung on the ladder of human condition — just ask anyone who has been to prison. It’s rape every time it’s not consensual, especially when the victims are under the legal age of consent. Yet here we are, watching the wealthy rape and pillage Americans.
It isn’t enough that we work 40 hours a week, some of us piecemealing more than one job at a time to make ends meet. (That way, the companies we work for aren’t required to pay benefits.) And it isn’t enough that we fill our homes with so much holiday flair on a seasonal schedule to keep the juggernaut of useless consumerism running. It isn’t even enough that we pay our taxes but have to start a GoFundMe whenever someone in our community gets injured or sick. Trump will never be satiated. He just keeps squeezing America by the throat, tighter and tighter.
The demented narcissist is using our tax money to pay private security firms like Allied Universal* to kidnap people and detain them indefinitely. And the conditions of these human warehouses are much worse than most of us can even imagine. People packed into standing-room-only: held for days, weeks, months, without adequate food or medicine, and not allowed outside. Our country is at DEFCON 1 for authoritarian takeover and even some of Dick Cheney’s cohorts are realizing we might not be able to hold it together for free and fair midterms.
I can’t really understand what happened to congressional Republicans. Did they all drink from the same water cooler? They are acting like those little whistle pigs who freeze while looking at you with side-eye, in complete denial of the fact that they are facing imminent death from Dad’s gun.
My dad just turned 85, and whenever someone asks how he’s doing, I say, “He’s good. He retired from Ski Patrol, now he sits on his porch shooting varmints in the yard — and no, that’s not a metaphor.”
I remember the first (and only!) time my dad took me hunting. We got up super early and headed up Mt. Sopris in his truck, which always had random tools, rope and ski boundary tape bouncing around by my feet. But I couldn’t give that my full attention, because I had to concentrate on not hitting the back of my head on the gunrack mounted to the window behind me.
We parked the truck and started walking into the aspen trees. I followed him closely, so excited to be going hunting with Dad that I didn’t even complain about how far we had to walk through the brush and bramble. I was never what you would call a tomboy, let’s be honest. Nature can be so uncomfortable, unforgiving in her disdain.
Finally, we stopped and hunkered down in the tall grass, waiting and watching… Then I saw it: a deer walking hesitantly towards the creek, her path crossing right in front of us. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my dad start to bring his rifle up to his eye and I instinctively called out in horror, “Daad!”
Both my dad and the deer looked at me before the deer leapt off into the trees and Dad shook his head slowly, starting to pack up to go home. In my naïve little imagination, I had not thought “hunting” all the way through. Hard to imagine, at the same age I was empathizing with Bambi, other kids are kidnapped and trafficked. Meanwhile, the people charged with protecting us all — and our country, do nothing.