The Loyal Opposition October 8, 2025
WHAT'S NEW?
On Sunday, October 5, the Oregon Republican Party recently produced an online meme purporting to be real, purporting to be a photo from a protest in Portland Oregon. The photo conflated two in suggesting through fiery imagery that the ‘war’ in Portland President Trump has suggested has truly materialized. Wrong.
The photo came from a standoff in Brazil; and, for those who doubt, some of the large shields used by the police at the protest, in clearly saying "Policia," invited a more critical assessment. Oregon GOP published this brazen image on its social media website to suggest a conflagration and standoff in Portland. The photo-shopped image was first reported in the Guardian and then carried in Oregon on KPTV. In response on X the Oregon GOP stated: “We’re not reporters, just bad memers.”
Oh, those adolescent pranksters!
Two days later the posts were removed. Clever……??? Where, who are we—just now—in America? Well, here are a few things to consider:
Soybeans:
Having shut down the soybean trade with China, the Administration, flush with its tariff uncertainties and flip-flops that keep everybody guessing, but also concerned about its political base in rural America, has now proposed a soybean bail-out of $50 billion to assuage concerns over sharply-reduced or failing international markets.
Note to Readers:
Scott Bessent, our Treasury Secretary, owns over 1000 acres of land in South Dakota on which he grows soybeans. No doubt Scott is concerned and hearing from large growers, including insurance companies and other large land owners.
Under Trump I, a similar bail-out for farmers came in at $20 billion. ‘Bail-out’ is a hopeless, latch-ditch term. When one bails out water accumulating in a row boat, it’s also advisable to ascertain what caused the leak.
So what are we doing with respect to this ‘largess’ often directed towards the largest players in the Big Ag world? Why are the same folks—politicians so often invoking the failed ‘trickle down’ approach of decades to calm the waters of social and economic disparity—why are these folks so heartless and unyielding when it comes to drying up food bank support or school lunch programs or small farm loans already granted but denied through the same Ag Department?
Wilderness:
Just yesterday, President Trump signed one of his executive orders, this one in response to mining interests who are ‘lusting’ to mine Alaskan wilderness and who now want a 211 mile swath of highway to haul the goods out! The proposed road crosses over 11 streams, pristine waters essential to salmon survival. And for what? Money, of course. It’s called the Amber Access Project. Trump ordered the Interior Department and the Army Corps of Engineers “to issue all necessary permits for the road...,” according to Maxine Joselow and Lisa Friedman of the Times.
“Mine, baby mine,” exulted Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in response to this signing, but one must ask: What makes pristine water and pristine artic wilderness so bad? The Times article reported: “While the White House wrote on social media that Mr. Trump ‘approves’ the Amber project, it is unclear just how quickly the project would get underway.” Small comfort.
Note to Readers:
We need to change the ethic of destructive domination when it comes to wilderness and wildlife and it concomitant floral and fauna species denegration! How about an ethic of constructive reconstruction for the natural world with which we are entrusted? Let’s step outside of our current cultural silo of domination and appropriation and take the risk of wilderness preservation for the sake of future generations?
For my part, I want to know that there are still places where I cannot easily go – or cannot go at all. It’s a spiritual thing for me—a sense of otherness. Domination often become denegration. Why, spiritually and culturally speaking, cannot we live within limits? Why cannot we live within limits on guns, limits on highway speed which we ignore, limits on spending, limits on the use of force?
Vaccinations:
On October 8th, Maggie Astor of the Times reports that parents, seeking COVID and other vaccinations for their children under 8 are hitting a ‘wall.’ CVS doesn’t have any pediatric does in Womelsdorf Pennsylvania (near Reading) and Walgreens in Chicago along with pediatric clinics nearby have no doses for COVID. The same struggles exist for parents with young kids in Maine.
Across the nation, Astor reports: “it has been particularly difficult to secure shots for children, including infants and toddlers under the age of 2, who are a higher risk of severe illness from Covid even if they are healthy.” When the FDA under Robert Kennedy, whose raspy voice and debunked ‘facts’ are channeling us away from established science and into disaffected legend, introduced only limited approval for COVID shots in August, the new guidelines produced ripple effects. Astor: “Many pediatricians, as well as pharmacies that carry adult formulations, aren’t stocking pediatric does. Some cite low demand, but others cite uncertainty about Federal guidelines and logistical problems….”
Note to Readers:
I am old enough to remember polio. In my childhood, the term ‘iron lung’ was commonplace. And just three houses away, I witness my best friend’s older sister cry out in pain as her mother laid on her bare thighs steaming blankets designed to get her leg muscles in the throes of the disease to relent.
When the Salk Vaccine appeared in 1955, getting the vaccine was a celebratory event. Families lined up inside Sylvan grade school and parents greeted one another as we—an entire community—waited in line for a chance to be free from the scourge. There only smiling faces then. I do not remember anyone with a ravaged face staring at cameras spewing forth spurious rhetoric designed to create fear and hesitation in the face of the victory over polio that we were witnessing. Now, where I live—because of foolishness in the public health sector and the unwillingness of many to speak out and the bluster of individualism in the face of common cures for the common good—we have once again measles in Wisconsin.
Is polio next?
Other issues swirl in a cultural-political-social environment that is charged with intrigues, elusive facts, lies and disputations. The Biblical admonition from the New Testament (Ephesians 4:15) seems to have been totally disregarded, even by those wearing crosses around their necks: Speak the truth in love….
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The Loyal Opposition Tuesday, September 16, 2025
JUST SAYING...
I recently encountered a blog from the poet, scholar, retreat leader and minister Mark S. Burrows entitled “Starlight, Black Holes, and Generosity,” this from his webpage “Soul/In/Sight.”
Mark Burrows writes about what little we know and what we think we know of others, the world, and ourselves. I liked especially: “Be gentle with what you presume about what others have shown you of themselves.”
Burrows writes:
We experience others (and they experience us) not in terms of who we are in some absolute sense. No, we have glimpses of them, and they of us, given the light—or darknesses—we or they create. Not unlike those “moments” when we gaze at the stars in the vast canvas of the night sky, imagining that what we are seeing is the way things are.
Glimpses… We are living in a time when the ‘glimpse’ too often quickly metamorphizes into absolute reality. Not too many of us in these times are willing to call what we see or what we think we see ‘glimpses.’ We take a quick look and then put down this squinting, blinking ‘seeing’ as definitive.
Reactive ‘glimpses’—especially in our highly-charged political world—have become the new normal. We proclaim what we have seen in absolutist terms. Caricatures quickly emerge—distortions abound. When others react or question, we rush to affirm what we have seen as ‘insight’ in the midst of affirming ourselves. We bray, we scream, we slur our words, our speech. We leer. Often we rejoice with vehemence. We pronounce with whatever of foul-mouthed profanity we can muster to frame our desecrations and misconceptions.
In all of this, how can we be gentle with ourselves or with others?
How much of this is just entertainment…or opportunism? In the internet age, the age of twitter et. al., how much of what we are expressing or absorbing is just the sordid tabloid taken from its place on the stand near the check-out and lifted up into the ether?
We are transforming ourselves—even when we employ religion or come from earnest faith. Even there we can create places for vehemence as we gather true believers of one sort or another into a safe circle.
How much do we truly see, truly perceive? Before any of us says with confidence, “I DO!,” let us consider that in times of anger, we must pay our dues. Anger is corrosive! Hatred blind. What we say, think, or think we truly see—matters. In my earlier satiric piece below, I have chosen my words carefully. As we have witnessed too often, anger can become rage; and rage can be deadly.
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The Loyal Opposition Monday, August 25, 2025
CLEAN UP ON AISLE FOUR
You walk down an aisle in the MAGA Superstore and take a look around. What do you see?
Even from this distance up here on the Ridge—and even though the Store Manager asks me just to keep looking at the gleaming shelves—I cannot help but see a mess, right on the floor. Bottles have been swept off the shelves and down to the floor with little or no thought about what will happen when they shatter. And dry goods also have been lifted into the air only to fall in long, desperate arcs while some members of our society applaud as they are ripped open by their fall. They mix with the brown liquids and create a dangerous, slippery surface that we are asked to merely walk around. Don’t look down, the Store Manager says; find another aisle.
What is down there? Now I dare—in spite of the advice blaring over the store intercom speakers—to take a retrospective look at a mess, to date I mostly have avoided.
The Mess on Aisle Four:
THE DECONSTRUCTION OF FEMA
MEDICAID HEALTH CARE CUTS
THE ABANDONMENT OF DEI
THE WHITE-WASHING OF HISTORY
THE POLITICALIZATION OF THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
THE RECENT AND ONGOING REVENGE CAMPAIGN
THE DOGE ‘EXPERIMENT’
THE DESECRATION OF USAID
THE ABANDONMENT OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH
THE REFUSAL TO COMBAT GLOBAL WARMING
Now some of these are things reserved for another time. They demand due consideration. And who am I to raise such concerns—just an ordinary citizen, and a senior to boot!
But I feel constrained. My country is slipping away, sliding back into a Gilded Age where Manifest Destiny was rampant and the Big Guys increasingly were running an oligarchy in the latter portion of the Nineteenth Century.
So—standing at the end of that messy Superstore aisle—let me at least for now look at one of these catastrophes that increasingly we are asked to encounter, even though the Manager says things are fine, even though our shoes are getting wet with grit and grime.
THE DESECRATION OF USAID
It was one of the first things to be pitched off the shelves.
That online free encyclopedia has something to say about this agency with footnotes. And this is what it says:
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was created to provide foreign aid, disaster relief, and economic development.[4] Established in 1961 during the Cold War by President John F. Kennedy, USAID was designed to counter the Soviet Union through the use of soft power across the world. In 1998, USAID was reorganized by Congress as an independent agency.[5][6]
With average annual disbursements of about $23 billion from 2001 to 2024, USAID had missions in over 100 countries, in areas as diverse as education, global health, environmental protection, and democratic governance. An estimated 91.8 million deaths, including 30.4 million among children younger than five years old, were likely prevented by USAID funding between 2001 and 2021.
Please walk around this mess sprawled out on Aisle Four. It’s a bit sticky. Especially that children part. Thirteen authors provided this perspective. You can find their piece in The Lancet: The Lancet. 406 (10500): 283–294. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(25)01186-9. ISSN 0140-6736. PMC 12274115. PMID 40609560.
But we are now told that these figures are highly exaggerated—without evidence—and that we should keep going. Ho..hum, the store clerks say. “You won’t even miss it….”
But THEY will.
During the reorganization of the shelves at The Store, they came for it right away. Just after closing they entered and began stripping the shelves. They kept the lights on so everyone could see as gleefully they slung the dry goods and lobbed the glass bottles onto the floor on Aisle Four. Then, they sent a hapless Store Employee to face the growing crowd outside to tell all present that everything was fine.
Really??
In the first half of 2025, the Trump administration terminated 83% of USAID's projects.[8][9] Before this, USAID was the world's largest foreign aid agency. In July 2025, the administration announced that USAID programs had been integrated into the State Department,[10] which now administers U.S. foreign assistance,[10] with USAID in the process of closing.[11][12] Nonetheless, budget requests,[13] the Office of Inspector General,[14] and court filings[15] have continued to acknowledge USAID’s existence beyond that date. As an independent agency of the U.S. government, only an act of Congress can abolish USAID,[16] despite it being effectively defunct. The defunding of USAID could result in at least 14 million preventable deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children under five.[17][7]
Like those numbers? Those preventable deaths? Those gaunt children with swollen stomachs or immune systems defunct in the face of AIDS and malaria and cholera? The assistant manager is now in charge of this mess and he is pretending that the agency, which still exists in some thin outline of its former self, was bloated and inefficient. So 83% of the goods and services lining that shelf on Aisle Four were simply swept away. Staff were summarily dismissed despite guarantees of due process.
The people waiting for AIDS medicine, including vaccines, stuff that would spell life in the face of death—well who are they for us to be caring about them? We’re here. They’re there—wherever they are. And that’s that.
“Just forget it,” the Store Manager urges the shoppers wandering the store. And then he turns, and to those closest to him he says, “Good work. Let’s play another round of golf.”
How many people have I met whose lives were enriched and whose perspectives enhanced by Peace Corps encounters when they served over the years? Were you one of them? Do you know someone who was gifted with that experience? Lift up your eyes and find a way to raise your voices and make things right! What they have done is going to be murderous over the next few years—and all of us, MAGA or NON, know it.
Get out the mop. It’s time for a clean-up on Aisle Four. Save those meds – billions of dollars of soft power waiting in Belgium storehouses before the Manager sends them into a dumpster fire. Instead, send them out!!!!
How powerless I feel. But together we can be more than powerless. We can save some lives.
Brian E. Backstrand