I can’t stay silent. My vision in starting this blog has been a better world, where all people can travel in safety, with choices about how to get there, and what they need on a daily basis is close by so they can travel by walking and bicycling most of the time. Livable places, and joyous lives! I am blessed to live in a place that approaches that, midtown Sacramento.

I have come to realize that proactively addressing equity is critical, because the transportation system we have created left out low income people, people of color, and everyone who doesn’t or can’t drive. We have spent billions for car drivers, and disinvested in communities. We have to make up for that by investing in walking, bicycling, transit, and housing. Continuing to invest in driving, in car dominance, is in no sense equitable.

And I have come to realize how important affordable housing is. We can’t have an effective transit system without a density of affordable housing, and we can’t have affordable housing without convenient, frequent, and affordable transit, and of course safe and convenient walking and bicycling.

The actions of Donald Trump and the coward Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court work against everything I believe in, and have promoted. They favor private motor vehicles over all other modes, and fossil fuels over cleaner alternatives. They have reduced support for transit, for affordable housing, for health care, for clean energy. And too many other things to list. They idealize an imagined 1950s, or 1850s, when citizens were rich white men and everyone else was subservient. It was an era of chrome and fins, polluting cars without safety features, and a crash and fatality rate even higher than today.

The Trump administration has made deportation of undocumented immigrants a core principle. If you think this is about immigration status, look more closely. They are targeting specifically people who came from, or look like they came from, south of the border, people who don’t look like their image of the white world. They have deported people with legal status. They have detained and threatened to deport born citizens. And Trump just said he wants to deport naturalized citizens. This is xenophobia, pure and simple. If you think this stops with Latinx, you aren’t paying attention. Trump has expressed at various times hatred for Jews (not Netanyahu, though), communists (not Putin, though), Democrats, gays, trans, Canadians, Europeans, Africans (except Afrikaners, of course), Muslims, Palestinians, and even rural whites. And even Republicans who don’t cow-tow. Basically, everyone who doesn’t match his ideal white person (Make America White Again). Of course once he has dealt with the ‘others’, it is likely he will go after the whites as well. His hatred knows no bounds.

And what if you don’t agree with this drift (and acceleration) towards authoritarianism? He promises retribution against everyone who disagrees with him. Though the courts have slowed him, almost every executive order and every administrative decision is an effort to extract retribution. If you think you won’t eventually be on his enemies list, you aren’t paying attention. The phrase “First they came for…” is completely appropriate to this time.

Trump is a megalomaniac and narcissist. He hates everyone and everything that is not himself. He hates democracy, he hates this country, he hates most of the people of this country. Of course what he most hates, at a very deep level, is himself. He will stop at nothing, and he will end by destroying everything good about this country. Unless we stop him.

If this post causes you to stop reading or following this blog, I wish you well. I am not the enemy, you are not the enemy.