Bulk can be overwhelming. Often, bullies are portrayed as bulky people who use their mass to intimidate and harm others.
The United States is currently at the mercy of a bully – or so it seems.
There’s a bulkiness to the mass of Executive Orders. Many of them aren’t legal. Some aren’t constitutional. None seem designed to help the American people, and they amount to something other than administering to the needs of the nation.
They are rule by fiat. They are an attack on the citizenry, a performative onslaught that includes an unelected billionaire with government contracts and subsidies which make up a large portion of his wealth literally barricading himself and his unqualified allies in government offices and denying elected government officials access.
It’s a terror campaign, all of it. It’s designed to overwhelm with the bulk of the actions. We are intended to be rendered helpless by the sheer volume of the “zone-flooding.”
But What Can We Do?
We can choose something else.
We can choose to remember that our president is intended to lead all of the people of the nation, not only those who voted for them. They swear an oath of office to defend the Constitution. This president violated that oath on January 6, 2021 when he chose to take no official action to stop the interruption of a Congressional action.
He has done so several times, it seems, since he took office on January 20 of this year.
But we the people aren’t helpless. It may be impossible for any one of us to keep up with all the cruelty and pettiness that’s being unleashed, all the questionable or downright illegal actions of this president and his allies.
But we can focus. We can network.
- If I focus on what will harm children, and you focus on financial actions and someone else on foreign policy, and another on the environment, and so forth, we can help inform each other. If those impacted by these orders by fiat bring legal action where they have standing, he can be limited in what he can accomplish.
- If we contact our representatives in national government on one or two issues that matter to us and make our voices heard, we can achieve a bulk of our own that stands up to the bulk of a petty and hostile man with far too much power. If we get involved with our local governments, we can begin to effect change right where we are.
- And maybe, most importantly, we can choose to be the best humans we can. We can work on making that bar higher over time. We can practice compassion and remember that we are all connected, all human.
- We can seek the joy in our lives and share it. We can stand for those who are being most targeted by these actions and offer them some of our strength.
- We can follow the words of the late Jimmy Carter, who lived them throughout his life, in and out of the Oval Office:
My faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I can, whenever I can, for as long as I can with whatever I have, to try to make a difference. Jimmy Carter.
May we all find the strength and wisdom to emulate that rather than bow under the bulk of the ugliness currently coming from the White House.
Bulk as a Weekend Theme:
My son brought home a bulky Forester trunkload of firewood this morning. It should be enough to get us through the upcoming storm.
I have lost access to my main blog (to be fair, I hadn’t posted to it since the end of 2023; life as a working widow of grown and home working offspring is busier than I expected!). In the quest to find something to identify it as mine, I revived an old email account and trashed a huge bulk of emails – over 11,000! And now I’m going through nearly 14,000 in my Trash to make sure I didn’t miss anything important in the mass purge…
It’s a frustrating hurdle, but I am making it into an opportunity to declutter my digital landscape (if you want to see my main blog, it’s got thousands of posts. It’s right there, but I can’t get into it yet).
I’ve noticed that in the bulk of images and interviews, Jimmy Carter was a happy, kind man. Mr. Trump appears to be an unhappy and vindictive one the bulk of the time.
I choose happiness!
Boilerplate:
This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Read more of this week’s posts and join in by clicking the image below!
Choosing happiness is always the best way. So nice to catch up with you again, Shan! <3
Lovely to be here, Linda!
Can’t promise every week, but I intend to not fall off the face of the blogosphere again!
Choosing happiness is a good plan, especially with all that’s going on in the US right now.
I think joy is a great strategy against bullies. Most bullies, and certainly Mr. Trump, don’t seem to be happy people. I don’t think they have power to deal with joy, which may be why they try so hard to take it away.
I will not comply.