A Journey and Its Next Few Steps

Here's a quick post.  It now appears that Donald Trump has exhausted almost all of his avenues for attempting to challenge his loss of the 2020 Presidential election.  Therefore, it appears almost certain that Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the next President of the United States on January 20, 2021.  I feel like I can begin to breathe a sigh of relief.  The last four years have at times felt to me like a movie I saw when I was a kid, a movie in which a semi truck driven by a murderous maniac tries to kill a traveling salesman just for fun.  Except that I've felt like the traveling salesman and Trump has seemed to me to be the truck driver.  At the end of the movie, the truck runs off the edge of a cliff.  Trump, too, will one day reap what he's been sowing.  In fact, the reaping has already begun...

But that grand elephant of the G.O.P. has left an elephantine mess for the rest of us to clean up.  And part of that mess consists of the continued existence of authoritarian strongmen who exploit nations.  So as I mentioned in my last post, I will continue my series on strategic nonviolent resistance, using the book From Dictatorship to Democracy as a guide.  I believe that this will be useful for people in some of the countries which have shown up in my pageview statistics.  It will also continue to be useful for historically marginalized communities of color in the United States, as we learn how to apply the principles of community organizing to build our own power and liberate ourselves by means of our own self-sufficiency.

A key component of this liberation through building self-sufficiency is the ability to think strategically, to notice and accurately trace the emergent trends in our society, and to be able to see (and prepare for) the possible futures that might emerge from these trends.  Therefore, I will also try to do some trend-tracing on this blog.  I must warn you, however, that "Making predictions is hard - especially about the future," as Yogi Berra once said.  Take what I say with a grain of salt.

Lastly, I think I will update the layout of this blog.  Its layout may have been cutting-edge when it was first rolled out, but now the edge has dulled and the current layout looks somewhat klunky to me.  I will be trying out a few new layouts over the next few weeks.  Hopefully, the final result will be more readable and user-friendly.