Gilead

 For those of you who never read or watched "The Handmaids Tale"...Gilead is the US in the future...that future, 2005, now being our past...but recent and ongoing Supreme Court decisions...and their ripple throughout this country put us square in its formation...the lines of fiction and reality have never been more blurred...in this future society that has experienced a significant birth drop...an authoritarian patriarchy takes control and women are no longer people...individuals...but assigned to roles to keep the population going...sound eerily like recent days and you are right...all of this stems from religion...and the fear that if statistics are correct...by approximately 2070, Islam will be the dominant world religion, not Christianity...now, for me, being Jewish...not much changes...low in population except for in Israel, obviously, and in shrinking markets here...I pretty much expect to be part of a minority that is continuously picked on and scapegoated...as the old joke about our holidays goes...they tried to kill us, we won, let's eat...but this statistic about Islam is not sitting well with right-wing Evangelicals...nope...and so with the Evangelicals having the ear of the current Supreme Court majority...we find ourselves in reactionary times moving at  clip speed...back during his first campaign, Donald Trump said he could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose any voters...and so with the appointments of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett he has...as we try to catch our breath...and figure out what to do...do not sit on your laurels...election day is in a few months...do research...do not take what any candidate preaches as the gospel...they all may think they will do what's best for their constituencies...but most are owned by powerful donors...think real local for daily quality of life issues...think bigger for your personal freedoms...mostly keep thinking and reading...really reading...not Facebook or Twitter...if you have something to offer...think about running...run now before that heavy red cloak trips you...