EVERYTHING SEEMS UPSIDE DOWN
I woke up this morning with butterflies in my stomach, wondering what else has turned upside down since the previous evening.
I wondered if the Environmental Protection Agency had destroyed another national forest while I slept. I’m concerned that yet another endangered species is now on the road to extinction. I worry that safe emissions protections have been demolished or if water safety regulations were eliminated overnight. I feared that our air quality is also now at risk.
Before breakfast, I thought about struggling families who lost their homes when lending institutions forged names and information that placed their homes out of reach of their pocketbooks, falling behind on payments that sometimes were underpaid by a few cents. I remember the “good old days” a few years ago when Elizabeth Warren help develop the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (one brief bright spot in the day). My mind quickly shoved the bright spot away & forced me to remember that the CFPB no longer helps consumers. It now actually makes it easier for employers and corporations to continue previous frauds with little, or no, regulation.
As a retired teacher and principal, I read an article about Betsy DeVoss’ “leadership” of the Dept. of Education, which made me extremely sad. She chairs the Federal Commission on School Safety, but refused discuss gun safety. Later, an aide said they’d consider “narrow aspects of gun ownership, possibly age restrictions for certain firearms purchases. Not enough. She still doesn’t understand the protections students with disabilities have and thinks men charged with sexual assaults don’t have enough rights. Her focus is, and always has been, on “school choice,” “vouchers,” and “charter schools.” She shows no respect for Education for All. I fear for our children, especially when she pronounces her belief that climate change doesn’t exist. I could feel the pain that science teachers world-wide felt when hearing that.
Late this afternoon, I cried when I heard that more than 600 parents have already been deported—without their children, who may, or may not, still be in the U.S. somewhere. No one seemed to be able to answer that question.
This evening I watched the Helsinki press conference again from last Monday. One of the most significant questions posed came from Jeff Mason from Reuters. His question, which had two parts, was, “President Putin, did you want President Trump to win the election and did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?” According to the translator, Mr. Putin replied, “Yes, I did. Yes, I did.”
Russians later stated that Putin did not actually say those exact words once, much less twice. Instead, in Russian, Putin roughly said, “Yes, I wanted him to win, because he talked about the normalization of Russian–American relations.” In other words, he was apparently answering the first part of Mason’s question but not the second about whether he directed help Trump’s way.
The strange thing about this is that the official White House transcript, the first question of Mr. Mason’s has been deleted. The White House’s official video also cut out that same first question.
The Russian transcript completely eliminates Mr. Mason’s question in its entirety!
I was confused when reading and seeing all of the above about the Summit, but it became clearer when I read this comment from Trump to the VFW group he was addressing this afternoon, “Remember, what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening.”
Read that again: “Remember, what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening.”
If you haven’t read Orwell’s book “1984” recently, here’s the original statement: "The party told you to reject the evidence of your Eyes and Ears."
It’s time to sleep again. I hope for good dreams and a calm stomach when I arise tomorrow.