This posting is a bummer. Don't read it.

I know it’s been two months since my last blog post. This hasn’t been because I have nothing to say. Just the opposite, in fact.

But, what I have had to say sickens me to say it. It’s something I wish wasn’t true, but every day,  the evidence mounts. The need to write this down grows greater, as does the sadness that I have to say it. OK, here goes…

Hurricane Harvey hit Texas hard back in September.

Climate scientists are in agreement that global warming has made hurricanes more severe in nature. Also, rising sea levels, and hence flooding, are attributed to global warming.

If you live in Europe, Africa or in Asia, in a coastal village, or in a large port city, you have already been affected by global warming. The land mass that makes up your country is getting a little smaller every year, as the ocean creeps up and erodes away your coastline.

But, this isn’t just happening in other countries, it’s happening in the USA, as well.

When Houston flooded, the rest of the world might have looked to the United States to see if we were now concerned about man-made global climate change. But, if they did, they would have certainly been disappointed. Texas has been losing significant coast line and experiencing flooding for years. They have lost roads and other infrastructure due to climate change. The same goes for Florida and other states in our union. Flooding and hurricanes will not bring legislators who are ideologically-steeped in a “thoughts and prayers” mentality to take action on climate change. Nor will cataclysmic events sway their base. They have been brainwashed throughout the years by Right Wing media to vote against their own self-interest.

So, our neighbors around the world watch as President Trump pulls out of the Paris Accord, as he appoints anti-science heads to science-related departments, as he placates the fossil fuel industry and pushes pro-global warming agendas. Our neighbors watch their nations disappear, as Trump’s base bolsters his “screw you” message to the rest of the world. Trumpsters cheer even as his actions cost them and their communities jobs and infrastructure at home and refugees and civil unrest around the world.

If I lived in another country, I could only come to one conclusion. America is controlled by people who are cut from the same cloth as someone who is a perpetrator of a murder-suicide.

We look to the jihadists who blow themselves up in an attempt to kill others in an act of terrorism, and we shake our heads in disbelief. But, we have our own in this country who strap on their ideological suicide vests. They get jacked up on Rush Limbaugh and FoxNews as much as any terrorist Muslim or terrorist Christian gets jacked up on their ideology. And they do not care if they kill themselves in the end, as long as they get to kill those of us around the world whom they think are “problems.”

A person who commits murder-suicide is usually someone, it seems, who faces to lose something, and seeks to make sure nobody else will ever have it either. A man whose wife is leaving him is probably the most common perpetrator. He is angry, jealous and possessive. It is the ultimate abuse of another person to kill her. It’s also a unique crime where the perpetrator escapes any justice that society may dole out. Instead, the perpetrator takes his own life. This is the ultimate last stand of control over others, over society and over his situation.

After the Hurricane, we had more hurricanes and more bizarre responses from the Perpetrator-in-Chief to the plight of displaced Americans. Then we had the shooting in Las Vegas - a  mass-murder-suicide. Civilized nations look to our gun laws and shake their heads again. But they shouldn’t. It is consistent with a murder-suicide ethos.

We pay five times as much for our healthcare in our nation as the country with the second-most-expensive healthcare system in the world, all the while achieving worse outcomes. We commit suicide, financially and literally because a faction in our country wants to protect a system which kills them. Their ideology and their programming demands it.

Up until recently, the pattern of creating better working conditions and better pay for working Americans followed a very sane format. A group of workers who unionize exert pressure on an organization for better pay and benefits. Another group of people see how well union workers are getting paid and they unionize. One union gets a benefit, the other unions see it and they want the same. Eventually, pay and benefits go up for all because of this “wanting what the other guy got.” This progression was good for nonunion workers too. In order to compete for workers, management had to offer something close to what union workers received.

But that was back in the good-old sane days. Today, a group of workers might note that unionized workers are being compensated better than they are, and with the murder-suicide mindset, they seek to de-unionize those workers. In other words, they don’t seek to do better. They are OK with  not doing well so long as they can make other people do poorly too. This is a testament to the power of media demonizing unions and other socialistic avenues for the betterment of all.

I also think the murder-suicide ethos points to an overall cowardice of a small segment of our population. They seek to bolster this cowardice by imbibing in media options which make them angry, make them subservient to the voices and will of a “master,” and which, in the end, makes them always deadly to themselves and others.

I have other examples of what I have been observing - from the path Donald Trump wants to put us on with North Korea to local governments selling off municipal water rights. Some operations are truly a murder-suicide in the works, while others are just a beginning.

And the world watches.

Our nation is not a majority of murder-suicide practitioners. But, I believe that the small minority who now call the shots for our country are. They are angry. They are hurtful. They feel cheated. They are arrogant and ignorant. And they drink from a well which deepens these qualities.

It took me along time to make myself write this because I wish it weren’t true. I wish there was a way out but only solutions I came up were these:

1. Enlightenment and Redirection. The small segment of murder-suiciders, many of whom reside in today’s Republican base, will see the light once they actually see they are killing themselves too. This is the most far-fetched solution. For one thing, if they were able to change their mind, or at least change the channel or the radio station, they would have done so by now. Also, they never make the connection between how they vote and how it affects their lives. You can blame a lot of this on compassionate Democratic politicians who seem to always step in to save these folks from themselves. Repealing Obamacare would have been terrible, but there would have been a few who might have regretted that their ideology cost them their insurance. A very few would have made the connection.

2. Intervention. If I were a leader of another country and had to watch my country’s economy and welfare literally sink due to the actions of another country, I might consider doing something about it. Also, other countries seem to have compassion for the misfortunates in other lands. Watching us continually punch ourselves in the face has to make some wish to step in and stop us. The richest nation on the planet is a place where when you get sick and die because you can’t afford to do otherwise. It’s a place where millions go into inescapable debt because, unlike other countries, we pay big bucks for a post-secondary education. It’s a place where we spend more on our military than almost the rest of the world combined.

I don’t believe Germany is thinking that “the third time’s the charm.” Maybe they believe that if we do our thing long enough we will eliminate ourselves from the world stage soon enough. However, it’s a race against a literal rising tide.

Not much of a chance for this option either.

3. Disarm the little monster. If we had democracy, or true representational democracy, right now, we would not be in this boat. George W. Bush would not have been elected. Donald Trump would not have been elected. A democracy of any stripe would not allow electoral college appointments of a president.

Likewise, gerrymandering and voter suppression hamstring the power of the majority. They contribute greatly to giving the minority, the murder-suiciders, the reins of our nation.

Even something seemingly so benign as our senate erodes the safeguard of democracy. When I vote for a senator, my vote does not hold the same power as someone’s vote in a sparsely populated rural state. Our forefathers saw the electoral college as a protection for rural slave-owning states. Maybe, it’s time to reconsider these protections for slave owners.

Democracy would also be protective for the small slice of our nation who now have their savior - the failed businessman, conman and game show host - Donald Trump as POTUS. They will have to own this thing now and everything about it.

If people start looking for who to blame when the nukes fly, when their kid gets killed in Iran, when they lose their home to medical bills, when their sister gets shot in a shopping mall, when they lose their home to a hurricane, when they lose their jobs due to a con-job economy, when their mom dies of a rare cancer because of deregulation, etc., they will know who to blame. It will be the rube in the “Make America Great Again” hat. And it won’t be pretty. If his vote counted the same as the rest of ours, we wouldn’t be in this mess and he wouldn’t be left holding the bag.

Again, not a very likely scenario. How do you make changes when there is no electoral avenue to do this?

OK. Now do you see why I didn’t want to write this? I hope I am wrong. Hopefully, now that it has been said, I can quit thinking about it. If you read this, I hope I didn’t bum you out. If I did, I am sorry.