Puerto Aventuras Reading the news online doesn’t count as a pleasure these days, if it ever did. The upshot in the domestic and international news seems to be that we are going into 2017 and ending a presidency of the 21st century by dialing the clock back to inaugurate a presidency of the mid-20th century.
The incoming administration and many of its cabinet positions and a frightening number of state houses are hopeful that women have forgotten what it was like to be standing up, leaning in, and having some modicum of control over their bodies and selves. A major conservative war party is coming after Planned Parenthood to not only deny them federal funding, but kneecap the Health and Human Services Department which has been the bulwark blocking states from also cutting them loose. We get to read credible reports that when Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi raises women’s issues to President-elect Trump, he literally hands the phone over to his daughter, Ivanka, to handle the call. Doesn’t that just take your breath away! Even after this campaign in which almost everything Trump did or said about women was called into question, he can’t even pretend to be interested enough in women’s issues to manage it through a phone call. We’re going to have a First Lady, who doesn’t even live in the White House it also seems. We’re going back to the 50s, so get ready for reruns of “Father Knows Best.”
On health care, it looks like they may want to take us back to the pre-Roosevelt 30’s rather than the 50’s. Dump the Affordable Car Act covering 30 million Americans, maybe with block grants to the states so that no one living in red states will live past 65, while blue state folks hang on to their 80s. Oh, but they are also going to try and privatize the Veterans Administration in order to take a slap at the sacrifices made by soldiers and cut back on Medicare for seniors as well, those freeloaders, so maybe no one will make it that far. It goes on and on.
Equality of the races and religions: forget about it! The efforts to move voting rights back to the 50s has been going on for years now, but expect it to go wild now. Respect for other religions? So far the attitude seems to be, why bother? Those Palestinians are Muslims, right?
Heck, it looks like we’re even going to dust off the Cold War again. We already knew it was coming when so many retired and often cashiered former generals were taken out of mothballs and the Fox News circuit to head up one agency and position after another. Now that President Obama has finally given a hand slap to the Russians for the hacking and interference in the recent elections and they have replied in kind by throwing 35 of our folks out to match the 35 eviction notices Obama served, it all seems so déjà vu. Castro may have died, but they want to bring back the Cold War with Cuba, too, it seems. And, let’s not forget about China.
For those of us who don’t remember the 50s being so swell, the next couple of years could be a bit of hell.