Amidst of all the national gore, there is the stuff that really matters. The little stuff. We grew the basil. We made dinner together. We ate outside on the deck on the first cool evening that we’ve had in weeks. Dogga sat at our feet waiting for a bite of crust. We savored our moment.
I have the lyrics of a James Taylor song running through my mind: Well the sun is surely sinkin’ down/ But the moon is slowly risin’/ So this old world must still be spininn’ ’round/ And I still love you.
I suppose I can understand why white guys with big tires on their Silverados voted for this dangerous nonsense. I will never understand why women, people of color, veterans…or anyone with a half a brain, a sliver of heart, or a remnant of moral compass thought this Project 2025 march-to-authoritarianism was legitimate or remotely a good idea. The elimination of Constitutional and Civil rights, the gleeful resurrection of segregation, a broad brush white-washing of our history. The devaluation of women.
I’m dumbfounded. I’m staring at the very epicenter of dumb. It is brutal. It is dark. It is ugly.
I’m going to go make Kerri a sandwich.
*“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” is often interpreted as a symbolic journey of growing up and facing the uncertainties of life, particularly during adolescence. (AI Overview). In other words, MAGA world refuses to grow up and face the uncertainties of life – like free and fair elections. It’s apparently easier to rig the elections, throw up obstacles to voters, than it is to come to the table with honesty, with ideas to legislate that serve the greater community. They are swirling in perpetual adolescence; stunted growth. The Womanosphere (insert eye-roll) is just the latest jaw-dropping example.
Posted on January 18, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative
In the story of The Crescent Moon Bear, a young wife endures several trials on a journey to find medicine that might cure her ailing husband. In the end, the trials are the medicine. The trials teach her the path of healing. As we near the day of national disgrace, the inauguration of a despot, the Crescent Moon Bear story has been walking with me. Perhaps the trials we are about to face will be the medicine. Perhaps they will teach us or show us the path to heal what ails this nation.
This is what the story has already taught me: the young wife would not have kept walking, she would not have endured the hardship of her journey, had she not carried in her heart a greater purpose. A reason to endure. The healing of her beloved.
No one endures hardship without a heart-full of service to something greater than comfort, something more potent than personal gain. The red-hat-mob and oligarchs will learn this soon enough. Gluttony is vapid purpose, a flavorless reason for being.
Kerri just read to me a post by John Pavlovitz. The necessity of acknowledging – and being honest – about the dark despair we feel in this moment of national shame. I was struck by the common theme expressed in the many, many comments: people feeling alone, isolated in their disbelief and grief.
It occurred to me that those of us, discouraged by the election of hatred, fearful of what’s coming, will soon need to find one another in order to embark on a journey to discover a cure for the corrosive poison now coursing through the nation’s body. We need not walk this path alone. Our shared grief is a sure sign of our unity, our capacity to meet the coming trials with a greater – shared – sense of purpose.
Our hearts hurt. They should hurt. The despair we feel is natural, necessary, a compass to guide us as we embark together on this odyssey. We will, in our journey, if we come together and walk united, learn that we are the medicine we seek.
Posted on November 23, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative
Yes. We did. We spontaneously exploded our living spaces. We rearranged furniture all day. Nothing has landed for certain. It’s all a work in progress.
When the dust settled and we stopped to eat dinner, Kerri looked at me and said, “You know my favorite part of the day? The whole time I didn’t once think about politics.” I didn’t either. It was a refreshing respite from the coming storm, from the despot-elect and his clown-car-cabinet-nominees.
Our home became a sanctuary during Covid. We turned our creative hearts into making a safe haven, a beautiful space, a place in which we could isolate yet also continue to grow and move forward. Our spontaneous house rearrangement comes from the same impulse: in a nation dedicated to falling back into the fascist-dark, we will create a safe space in which we can nurture our hearts and minds and continue moving into the positive, the generative, the light.
Like all of us in this nation – and there are many – who refuse to surrender our decency and goose-step into the mistakes of the past, we are not going back. And that singular dedication begins in the one place we can control – our home.
Posted on November 16, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative
What is real? It’s not so easy to answer this very simple question these days. With A-I manufacturing videos and images that seem real, with foreign interference in our elections, with a pathological liar about to once again take the national bully pulpit and a propaganda fox willing to magnify his hooey, with people believing tik-tok, X and instagram are sources of news…it is damn hard to know what is real. It’s damn hard to believe the dull-witted-ness in ascendence.
Who is real? This is a much more complex question. A heartbreaking question.
Post election we’re everywhere seeing and hearing from the maga-madcaps the phrase , “Family over politics”. Yet, a vote for the despot-elect was a vote against my son who is gay. A vote for the rapist-in-chief was a vote against my daughter’s rights. It was a vote against my wife’s rights. She was raped so it’s not a small thing to her that half the nation, including family and friends, seem okay to look the other way. To minimize his multiple sexual assaults as locker room talk. She feels deeply in her body – her soul – the national endorsement of rape. The national assent of sexual violence.
Every time she sees the phrase,”Family over politics,” Kerri hisses, “Back-at-you!” Real family, real friends would have thought to protect our children’s health and well-being before voting against them. They would have thought to protect our nation from an avowed fascist with retribution fantasies; they would have thought before voting against basic morality. They would have had the simple dignity to consider the sexual predation, the pathological lying and gross indecency of their candidate. Instead, they cheered. They voted for it. It’s left us nauseous with the question, “Are you for real?”
They put politics (if you can call it that) over family (if you can call it that). For real.
Posted on November 9, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative
Apparently social media is smoking hot with maga-voters who finally decided to look-up the word “tariff”. It seems that they are astounded to discover that they (we) pay the tax, not China. Or Mexico. They are somehow puzzled to learn that the cost of living under their candidate’s tariff plan is – and always was – promised to escalate the cost of living. Also on the info-grill: the reality of the phrase “mass deportation” is beginning to dawn on the red voters. It’s just now occurring to them that their vote has actual consequences that impact their family and friends.
A little bit of illumination a lotta bit too late.
This quote from an NPR interview with Republican strategist Sarah Longwell is worthy of a laugh/cry. It’s crossed my screen a few times this morning: “When I ask voters in focus groups if they think Donald Trump is an authoritarian, the #1 response by far is, “What’s an authoritarian?”
What’s an authoritarian? Good question. Well. I guess we’re about to find out.
ignorance (noun): lack of knowledge and information*
*dear trump voter: authoritarians rely on your ignorance and exploit your rage.**
**It may feel good up front to vote your rage but that good-feeling rapidly dissipates when a little-bit-of-knowledge-and-a-lotta-bit-of-reality sets in. Next time, if there is a next time (look up the word “authoritarian”) you might want to pull your head out of the fox-misinformation-hole, ask a few relevant questions and look up a word or two before you fill in the bubble.***
***informing yourself is a relatively easy thing to do and as you may have just discovered only takes a few minutes (for instance, how long did it take to look up the word “tariff”?). On the other hand, cleaning up the horror created by an authoritarian takes generations. Look it up.
Posted on October 26, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative
You may have noticed two things. First, our weekly Smack-Dab uses the same artwork every week. Our explanation: Kerri’s computer died weeks ago and, since she is her mother’s daughter, she will resist replacing it until all possible work-arounds are exhausted. Therefore the Smack-Dab dialogue changes because we can edit it. The images…not so much.
There is creative liberation in limitation. Years ago we created a cartoon featuring the eternal optimist DogDog and the ever-cynical BabyCat conversing at the front door. The dialogue changed while the images remained constant. It was a riot of fun. The unchanging image – the visual parameters – often determined the dialogue possibilities. This morning I realized that Smack-Dab has become At-The-Door.
Second, Smack-Dab is now a political cartoon. In a recent interview, historian Heather Cox Richardson spoke of the critical times in our nation’s history that democracy was threatened and the people of the nation rose to meet the challenge and preserve the constitution. She said, “Now, it is our turn. It is our time to rise and meet the challenge to our democracy.”
We never dreamed that Smack-Dab would become a political cartoon, Neither did we ever dream that our democracy would give rise to an authoritarian with so many of our fellow citizens wholeheartedly supporting his fascist intentions.
We – all of us – are sitting at the existential door. The question we consider is basic: do we believe in democracy and the way of life enshrined in our constitution? Or, do we swear an oath the rantings of a fascist madman? He’s a cartoon but he’s not funny.
We are asking momentous questions in our cartoon. We will answer these questions with our vote. The way we meet this historic challenge to our democracy couldn’t be more serious. It’s our turn. It’s our time to preserve for future generations the Constitution of The United States.
Posted on October 12, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative
I wrote to Horatio that COVID comes as advertised. It is no joke.
The prescription is to rest and get plenty of sleep. The resting part is easy since there is no energy for anything else. Walking is a chore. Sitting is a chore. Thinking is out of the question. What remains is called rest.
The sleeping part, on the other hand, is nigh-on-impossible. We both brought it home from our travels so our dueling coughs, hacks, and wheezes make sleep an impossibility. Moving to the couch to be alone with my hack-n-wheeze was a losing strategy. It’s hard to sleep when every atom aches. I didn’t know that atoms could ache. I have atoms I never knew I had.
The lemonade from so many lemons? In my pursuit of new experiences I can now say I have a visceral understanding of COVID. Perhaps in the future I should be more discerning about what I am and am not willing to learn. A consideration for later. Right now, thinking – and sleeping – are out of the question.
Posted on October 5, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative
We’ve been on the road. It daily reminds me to make a list of all the things I take for granted, the too-many-things-to count gratitudes that I miss each day.
Posted on September 28, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative
It’s taken me some time to learn but I now know exactly what to do. Stay. Out. Of. The. Way.
The length of the trip does not matter. My man-brain defaults to simplicity and allows me to pack in a few minutes with minimal thought and no stress. That is not true for Kerri. For her, packing takes weeks. Weeks. She suffers. She angsts. She frets. She loses sleep. In fact, it is common for us to complete the trip, be home unpacking – and she will continue to roll doubt through her choices. “Oh, I should have taken…”
The worst thing I can do is try to help. The second worst thing I can do is to finish packing before she zips her bag. So, while she climbs this mountain, fords this river, bears this burden…I will remain unhelpful, purposefully scarce, eerily quiet and strategically unpacked, yet I will live to travel another day.
The Direction of Intention 