A Silver Spring Civic Association invites ALL who are sad, angry, depressed, and frightened on Monday, November 14, 2016 to come to an old, historic B&O Railroad Station, to reaffirm and celebrate a community which values diversity and which stands against the hatred, disrespect, and bigotry that we have seen erupt around the country, the county,  and close to home.

The striving for equal opportunity and mutual respect unites this community as well as probably more or less,  ALL communities of the United States.

In the case of the Silver Spring community, two churches have been vandalized after the results of the election of Donald Trump were officially announced.

One church is the Episcopal Church of Our Savior and the other is the Christ Congressional Church.

The first church had a mass in Spanish announcement which was vandalized by a graffiti on the other side of the sign which says ” Trump Nation – Whites Only “.

The second church had its “Black Lives Matter” sign vandalized by having the word “Black”  slashed off said sign.

Silver Spring, Maryland is a community which prides itself in being a vibrant mosaic of diversity, as it is a hate-vandalism, hate-crime free zone.

These signs are the product of a nation-wide sociopathic phenomenon carried out by fringe,  racist, hate and fear mongering elements which are opportunistically and hysterically exploiting the debacle of the Trump indirect election.

By the standards of the preponderant democracies of the world,  Donald Trump lost the election, just as George W. Bush lost his election, and in the latter case a series of horrific wars was ignited which in all probability would not have been the case, had the winner, namely Al Gore,  of the “direct” democratic vote been allowed to be sworn in.

The notion that “we the people” have an authentic participative democracy is badly flawed, since the “electors” of that bizarre relic of history called the Electors College, trump the democratic vote (no pun intended), and hence can be swayed to confirm or not, the direct vote, arbitrarily and without accountability rendering thereby the direct democratic vote a bit of charade.

This one reality literally has ruined badly two elections.

Additionally, the DNC under the misleaderhip of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, unethically, unintelligently, corruptedly, and hence scandalously  sabotaged the quest for the nomination of the Democratic progressive nominee, Bernie Sanders,  thwarting thereby the huge progressive movement coalescence moment whose time had finally arrived with a very likely Bernie Sanders nomination and a very likely Bernie Sanders victory over Donald Trump.

Additionally, to add insult to injury, had “we the people” not been robbed of an alternative which did  include the “lesser of two evils” which Hillary Clinton documentably was, by the imperative of the long overdue inception of the Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) system, then many more voters whose conscience did not allow them to vote for Hillary Clinton in view of her neoliberal, hegemonic, militarist foreign policies which caused literally the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent, unarmed, civilians in the criminal war on Iraq, which she supported and voted for, and the destruction of the nation of Libia, and the massacres of Saudi Arabia in Yemen, and those of Israel in Palestine (in Gaza),  then independents and progressive democrats could have been democratically afforded the choice of voting their conscience by voting for the eminently qualified Green Party candidate, Dr. Jill Stein, and still designate Hillary Clinton the recipient of  our anti-Trump vote.

These two electorally dysfunctional  realities literally have in the past and will in the future ruin the objective of providing Americans with a truly representative democracy, not to mention the reality of that miscarriage of Supreme Court justice ruling in “Citizens United v. FEC”.

So, the way forward calls for an immediate coalition of decent conservatives, liberals, independents to (a) abolish the abomination of that college of special extra  so-called “electors“, and (b) establish the IRV system to allow a third party alternative to the present “neocon/neolib” alternative which resembles a “Coca-Cola/Pepsi Cola” non-alternative, since both are variations of the same theme at the establishmentarian level and therefore both are unhealthy.

Now to return to the very healthy gatherings which communities like Silver Spring will be having nation-wide, we must look forward optimistically, and also understand that we can come together as a nation the moment we put aside artificially, superficial, polarizations since it is not an oxymoron to call oneself a “conservative liberal“, or even a “conservative progressive liberal”.

Californian culture inspires us in that eclectic understanding, since while this election took the White House to the extreme right, the 40 million state of California took a turn to a remarkably progressive  liberal side with conservative elements built into it.

Conservatives of particularly a fiscal nature can be rational and humane.  Conservationism and conservatives are not mutually exclusive as Theodore Roosevelt has shown.

More closer at home, one of the most inspiring members of the Maryland Senate, namely the unique, humanist, brilliant  professor of Constitutional Law at American University, namely Senator Jaimie Raskin,  was elected overwhelmingly as the next member of Congress from the 8th District which includes Silver Spring, and Takoma Park.

In Jaimie Raskin’s victory speech he declared :

“We must not be enemies,” Raskin said in his victory speech in Silver Spring. “We don’t want a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and we don’t want a wall between Democrats and Republicans, or between anyone else in America.”

He also added that he is as well a conservative in that he wants to conserve the purity of our air, our water, our environment and more good things that need to be conserved.

Indeed, we can ALL be conservative progressives if we conserve the good in us and in what decades and decades of the American democratic evolution brought us to where we are, no matter how flawed it still is.

We must conserve most importantly and immediately our treasury and the blood of our soldiers and those innocent, unarmed, civilians worldwide who we have been bombing, obliterating with drones, since 9/11 with nothing but catastrophic results which generated reprisal killings of innocents by Al Qaeda, Al Nousra, and ISIS / Daesh.

If “Lives Matter” we cannot condone the obscene characterization of the unintended killings in war being “collateral damage”, a term used by George H. Bush to rationalize the brutal invasion of Panama, and a term frivolously use during the Vietnam war which resulted in the death of some 2 million Vietnamese.

The only “winners” in this depressing set of trillion-dollar wars have been Wall Street and that sector of greedy multibillionaire investors in that execrable “industrial / contractor / military ” complex which our good conservative Republican President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell address.   BTW, what the mainstream media does studiously avoid to inform the American public about, is that President Eisenhower assertively criticized the fact that the United States became the first and only country to deploy nuclear weapons on innocent, unarmed civilians and this at a time when the Japanese had already agreed to sign the surrender document.

Finally when it comes to “Lives that Matter”  it goes without saying that they all do.

But, most particularly the “Lives that Matter “are those of the most vulnerable, poor, sick, unarmed, hopeless, homeless, jobless,  men, women, and children, and those who are the victims of hate crimes was described and documented by the prestigious Southern Poverty Law Center “SPLC”.

Additionally the “Lives that Matter” of our professional, ethical, dedicated law enforcement officers, fire and rescue volunteers, and many other who risk their lives in the line of duty, must be protected.

And among “Lives that Matter” abroad are the lives of the egregiously abused refugees of the 2003 Cheney/ Bush neon/neolib power structure  initiated trillion-dollar wars carried out on the basis of falsehoods on Iraq , a spark which lit up the region to this day.  The British Chilcot Iraq Inquiry report to England’s credit has documentably established the criminality of that initial invasion for which its ideologues can and must still be held accountable, since they exploited callously the 9/11 tragedy by generating a smokescreen on the Saudi connection to said tragedy,  by hate and fear mongering about Iraq to galvanize public opinion for the invasion and ruination of Iraq which had nothing to do with 9/11.

The “Lives that Matter” also must include the lives of millions of Palestinians who since 1948 and most particularly since 1967 have been massacred, forced into refugee camps, have been the victims of the demolition of some 25 thousands of their homes during decades of criminal abuse by the colonialist Israelis led by extreme right-wing Zionist misleaderhips, who in brazen violation of international law to this day, continue to establish their Apartheid “state” which is the embodiment of the nationalization for the Jewish religion, something which has been strenuously opposed by countless of hundreds of thousands if not millions of decent Jews throughout the world and even by Jews in Israel.

And yes, the lives of the decent humanist Jews who by no fault of their own are injured and/or killed by Palestinian reprisal fighters are equally “Lives that Matter” .

And last but not least, the lives of the Yemeni victims of the Saudi Arabian mass killing bombardments which both, Great Britain and the U.S. enabled by the sale of billions of armaments and F-16 fighter planes, are all “Lives that Matter”.

The Anglo-American silence and support for the unspeakable human rights violations by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel constitute a dark page in the history of of both nations.
Bottom line though, violence generates violence.

War and nuclear weapons must be abolished now, and “we the people” , decent conservatives, liberals, and independent eclectics can and will unite to end the nightmare of perpetual omnipresent armed violence.

Regardless as to what the Trump election-by-default will lead to, to  buttress documentary-wise the supra expression of sentiment about the imperative for the end of our military interventionism abroad, the following historical/statistical facts are presented.

The source of this information is Global Research.

Global Research has just published an article titled “U.S. Day of Reckoning ?” / Thoughts About US Foreign Policy.

The author is William Blum, and the date of publication is, November 6, 2016.

William Blum is an American author, historian, and critic of United States foreign policy.  He also worked at the United States Department of State.

This synopsis, requires one to first kick back, chill, and perhaps have a martini, or something of that nature, so as to facilitate one’s assimilation of these facts with due philosophical detachment.

Since the end of World War 2, the United States has:

1. Attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically elected.
2. Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
3. Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.
4. Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries.
5. Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.*
6. Plus … although not easily quantified … has been more involved in the practice of torture than any other country in the world … for over a century … not just performing the actual torture, but teaching it, providing the manuals, and furnishing the equipment.

*See chapter 18 of William Blum, “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower”