Why?

I know, I know. Start with the easy one yea?

It is November 21st, 2025. Despite the predictions of many, the world didn’t blow up yesterday. Donald Trump has been installed as the President of the United States of America for a bewildering second time and where, last time, we had the pussy-hat resistance and that “Resist” banner hanging from a crane behind the White House this time most folks seem to be sleepwalking into it with their hands in their pockets, chin down and focusing on their own individual lives. Let the oligarchs play the oligarchial games and the befuddled madman slur his way through his ridiculous statements for the next four years. I kinda wanna focus on feeding my kids.

I get it. I’ve also seen this before. It didn’t end well.

But that’s okay.

I honestly don’t know why I am doing this. As more and more people are being silenced I feel compelled to put my thoughts down. I am, despite years of training and mediation, a creature of ego by design. I am, after all, a middle aged white guy and as such often feel the need to express my opinon when for all intents and purposes it would be better for all if I just shut up and watch.

My name is Chris.

I am a queer secular Buddhist in Ottawa who currently divides his time between caregiving for folk and selling books. In the grand drama my teenaged self envisioned for my future self this was emphatically not it.

But it is a pretty good life, helping people and learning new things.

And as awful as the world seems right now, it really isn’t.

This is my attempt to explain this.

The Village People

Look, for what it’s worth… I appreciate their point of view. Music, at it’s heart, is a celebration that shouldn’t be branded to one political party or another. That said, the poster children of Queer Disco culture should be allowed to play at the innaugural despite sending Mr Trump a cease and desist for playing their song “Macho Man” at their rallies (because, no one needs to see the President gyrating to that song) and voting for Kamala.

Music, at it’s heart, touches everyone deeply inside. Our connection to music, our ability to transform vibrations of air molecules into a thing that can evoke so much feeling inside of us is a wonderful thing. It’s usually only when you add lyrics that things get all partisan and a little messed up.

That said… did any of them think the whole experience would be so unbelievably bizarre? Between Trump doing his (hilarious to us bath house denziens of old) two fisted pump dance the night before the inauguration to his sword dance at the Commander in Chief Ball to his family standing on stage blocking the performers like they were toddlers at the monkey pit in a zoo…

Day one didn’t bring an instant dictatorship… but man… it sure did double down upon the weird.

Some Thoughts On Day One

The Kingdom of Shambala this ain’t.

On a basic level, when you remove good and bad from the equation (because when you really think about it even our concepts of good and bad are dictated by where and when we are and the rules of the day and the norms of the land) there are two kinds of actions. Those that help and those that hurt. Life, as we live it, is basically a million single moments where you are given the choice to do the helpful thing or the damaging thing. One lightens the web of the world, one darkens it. In this, everything matters, and all of us are important. That said; after reading through all of Trumps executive orders from Day One… there are not a lot of things there that help anyone and a lot of things with the potential to bring about harm.

The End of Birthright Citizenship/ The Ending of All Refugee Travel to the United States/ Refugee Processing:

Even the president himself, in his weeks of taunting Canada about becoming the 51st state, referred to the border between our two countries as an arbitrary line on a map.

It was the closest thing to an enlightened thought he ever came up with.

I have weird views on Nationalism. I really do. We are obsessed with lines on maps and the accidents of our birthplaces. I get that it is inherent in our old monkey brains to want to link together in tribes for protection and security and comfort. But we’ve long past grown beyond the needs for that and our lingering obsession with nations and history as things that bind have grown into a kind of ridiculous addiction.

We were for millenia a nomadic people. And we will be again.

Our mistaken notion of dominance over the ecosystem is in fact making huge swaths of the planet basically unliveable. And our numbers keep growing. Environmental refugees are going to be the biggest percentage of the human race before this century is out. I suppose the helpful thing to do would be getting to work on that and not doubling down on ridiculous concepts of nationalism, lines on maps, and arbitrary rules that protect our things from people who suffer.

(Our in this case, being subdivided to the people who live within the boundaries of the country of Canada; which is ridiculous. We live on a planet that peoples. That’s what it does. That means we are all one thing in the ecosystem and should be living and working as one for the protection of all. Our has to mean human or we are toast. Probably literally.)

I like Canada. I have lived here all my life. My friends and my stuff are here. It doesn’t mean that I automatically hate everyone who says a bad thing about my country (let’s face it, there’s a lot they can say). It doesn’t give me magical powers. Canadians aren’t some group of mystic unicorns that deserve anything more than anyone else does.

America: Getting all gung ho over a nation usually means that you’re not paying to much attention to your personal situation and environment. Shutting down your borders to people who need help and ending birthright citizenship are the first tentative steps to the madness that is declaring that there is an actual difference between Americans and everyone else.

There isn’t.

You are American by the accident of your birth and the guts of one of your ancestors to… wait for it… be a refugee.

The January 6th Redemption Choir:

Well, it was no real surprise he was going to let them out was it? Presidential pardons all around. I was actually a bit surprised by this one. I had really thought that once the techbros took the knee to him he would have forgotten all about his base and the people who tried to overthrow the last election’s results. When January 6th happened I was sitting in a six hour meditation session. I heard that there was a planned rally and speech and then went to the meditation hall and sat down for a long bit of quiet time. And when I came out I sat in a pub on Elgin eating a sandwhich watching, well, chaos. (It really says something about me I always seem to be in a random pub when the big moments in American history happened. I watched 9-11 from the bar at The Honest Lawyer after getting sent home for the day for security reasons and I watched January 6th from… whatever that place is. Everyone has been there. No one knows the name. Pubwells?)

Let’s talk about attachment. The Buddha mentions attachment a lot. It is basically the source of all misery in your life. A lot of people misinterpret it to mean to not have things. Happiness doesn’t come from things. That’s not really it. I think a better word is clinging. Don’t cling to things. Don’t cling to possessions. Don’t cling to the idea that you are a single individual life form against the world. Don’t cling to ideas at all, even Buddhist ones. Thoughts come and go. Moments come and go. Happiness is in the moment: not swallowing so much kool aid about Presidents and stolen elections and Freedom that you get swept up in a crowd smashing cops in the head with flag poles and taking dumps on politicians desks. I feel sympathy and compassion for them now, as I did then. To the man they were a bunch of sad, deluded, disenfranchised people so lost in the hopelessness oftheir lives that they latched on to the world’s most successful grifter to the point that they would do violence and do time for the lie.

America really needs meditation teachers in prisons. After all, you have nothing but time when you are inside. That the Q-Anon Shaman, the self proclaimed spiritual leader of the lot (in that, he was the only one who ever talked about anything other than politics (okay, maybe two percent of the time)) got out and his first words were about buying himself some guns.

He let the foot soldiers out. A nod to his base.

I honestly didn’t think he had it in him.

While We’re On the Subject of Not So Subtle Racism:

Anyone else notice that the Spanish-Translated version of the White House website went offline? Almost instantaneously? The unhealthy embrace of American is going to lead to another tragedy. There were executive orders for cosmetic pieces of change yesterday. The Gulf of Mexico has been decreed The Gulf of America. Okay. Sure. Denali, the third tallest peak in the world is being stripped of it’s First Nation’s name and being given back it’s white person name Mount McKinley. A few rules have been slipped into place concerning the names of parks, statues and military bases (a lot of Confederacy idols will likely be returning). The Office of Federal Management has been ordered to furlough everyone working for the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Agency and all federal offices are basically trashing their DEI rules and regulations. A federal emergency has been declared on the Southern Border (whatever happened to that wall?) and armed forces are being deployed. The round ups haven’t started yet because no one can figure out how the hell they can pay for it but it seems that everyone in the government thinks it’s a good idea.

It is really, really hard to not see this as “Make America White Again.”

They are probably going to have to burn the history books soon because all it will take is ten minutes with one book to point out, fellas, America wasn’t white to begin with.

Silk Roads

Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht. Not many people know who Ross is. I guarantee you Trump had no idea who he is. Ross created and ran The Silk Roads, a dark web trading site that, honestly, was the Amazon for crime. Using cryptocurrencies you could buy anything on the Silk Roads. It was a warehouse for illict drug trades with who knows how many OD deaths connected to it. You need untraceable weapons? Illegal pornography? Someone to spend your nights with that no one cares about? Someone who can make your problem disappear for good? Hit the Silk Roads.

Every new innovation, everything we create, everything we devise can be (and almost always is) twisted for unhealthy use. The exchange of ideas on the internet led to the exchange of disinformation of social media. The age of pornography online led to tubesites and Motherless. The age of commerce on the internet led to The Silk Roads. Ross was in the tank for life because he created the means for unhealthy people to do unhealthy things; ie, he facilitated pain and suffering for a profit.

I came across Ross and the Roads a few years back when I was deep diving on the rise of the Right Wing Infosphere online (which lead to a lot of reading on all the major tech companies, porn companies and the Chans). It was not happy reading. It was not a happy time. But it was kind of a crucial education. So much of what is happening in the world, politically, financially and socially makes sense when you understand Filterworld and Bubbles and Echo Chambers and Algorithms. And so much of what has happened in the last two days makes sense when you learn about who the Techbros actually are. The short bios and 1200 word articles online don’t even begin to do them justice. Hit the books. It’s fascinating. And terrifying.

Catering to fear, and desire, and addiction to make money.

How is that a healthy way to live?

I cannot help but wonder which of the Techbro Oligarchs got in to Trump’s ear about letting him out. I cannot help but wonder what will happen when he starts working for Amazon or X.

The Genders/Women’s Rights

This, requires it’s own section which I will work on tonight. Being queer and having had friends and partners from all over the gender spectrum this one hits close to home and thus requires some thought and some meditation. Like a lot of my friends, I got a little angry that this election became about hating on my kind. Like a lot of my friends, I am a little worried about the safety of my brothers and sisters south of the border. Plus, if I put it in a stand alone section my right wing readers can just skip over it because they are really, really set in their ways today because they are being held aloft by group hysteria. Again.