Countering the Outrages to Stay Sane

Rally remarks Sept. 7, 2025

Welcome, everyone! Thanks so much for coming on this early-fall day, to show Poulsbo that we’re here, we’ll continue to be here, and that all good Poulsbo-hemians need to join us. Thank you for being the core of Poulsbo’s resistance, showing our fellow citizens that we won’t bow down before a dictator and his gang of thugs.

We’re starting off with outrages of the week. We think the most fitting response for items on this list is “THAT IS OBSCENE.”

Outrage #1: [Imagine drum rolls to introduce each.] Yesterday, as the Administration announced their plan to send the feds to invade Chicago any time now to start arresting and deporting brown people, Trump tweeted “Chi-pocalypse Now” and wrote, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning”—referring obscenely to a famous line in Apocalypse Now (1979) where Kilgore says “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” That is obscene.

Outrage #2: Speaking of arrests, how do you feel about the arrest of 475 South Koreans this week at a Hyundai plant in Georgia? This, while Trump is trying to attract Korean-based businesses to the United States!  That is obscene.

Outrage #3: Remember when Trump said on the campaign trail, “We’re gonna have tremendous job growth”? Hardly have his tariffs come into effect, and already unemployment has climbed to 4.3%, the highest in four years. Obscene, considering the booming economy he inherited.

Outrage #4: We probably all know that the Administration is changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War.  Obscene, for this reason: the name of the military’s department was changed in 1949--just after World War II--from the Department of War to the Department of Defense, precisely because after that awful conflict, with its death camps that killed six million and the development and deployment of the atomic bombs that killed and maimed hundreds of thousands, war was no longer a game to anyone.

Eisenhower and Congress considered the name “Department of Defense” more rational, stressing a rule-based world order and strength through peace.But then,

Outrage #4 ½: Genius Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said, regarding the present name change: “We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct.” What say we to Pete Hegseth? That is obscene. Ignorant, puerile, and obscene.

Outrage #5. The other day, in violation of all international law, Trump and Hegseth blew up a small boat off the coast of Venezuela a thousand miles from the US, which they claim was transporting illegal drugs to the US, and killed all eleven civilians on board. Presumably this enhanced the government’s macho image, but it’s an obscenely illegal, arrogant, outrageous act—one among so many that nobody appears to be challenging it in public.

Outrage #6:  As we know, RFK Jr. is the madman in charge of the health of the American people.  During his notorious Senate hearing the other day, Elizabeth Warren asked Kennedy whether he fired CDC director Susan Monariz because she wouldn’t carry out his unhinged vaccine policies. He answered no, he asked her to resign when she told him she was untrustworthy.  Obscenely unbelievable.

And it’s difficult to countenance the outrageous things happening internationally, but we cannot close this list without first decrying three of them.

First, there’s Trump’s heartbreaking stupidity in sending India into the arms of China and Russia, destroying decades of painstaking American diplomacy.  

Second, it is a source of utter despair that America simply stands by as Ukraine gets beaten up and eaten up.

Third, one gasps at Trump’s absolute lack of conscience and his complicity as Gaza is destroyed under Netanyahu’s relentless program of mass starvation and bombings. This behavior on the world scale is truly obscene.

After this dose of outrage, let us briefly mention a silver lining, something that’s being called soft secession. Blue states are beginning to deploy the very laws that Republicans passed during prior Democratic administrations to give states self-determination in the face of an intrusive federal government.

One sign of this new impulse is the health care pact that’s being quietly forged among California, Oregon, and Washington (Hawaii has just joined as well). These states are building a coalition to share medical research, vaccine development, and health care policy. That’s just one example of soft secession: get informed, read the article posted on Poulsbo for All, and Google, Google, Google for more.

The foremost message for today is perseverance. Keep informed, stay flexible, hold together as a community, and always find joy and humor. The main way we in Poulsbo can make a difference in the world is locally, and we are indeed making a difference.

We see it when we march through Front Street making good trouble: cars honk in support, tourists take pictures and give big smiles and thumbs up, people cheer and applaud, and some join us. We see it when disrupters try to disrupt and everyone watching sees how peaceful we are and how crudely belligerent they are. We see it when we talk to people and distribute information outside Home Depot, helping to change hearts and minds, helping to stir people into action who just need to know what to do in a police state. We see it in the eagerness of people to help—photocopying handouts for us, helping a family yesterday that was being harassed by a neighbor, just showing up as you do.  We see it when people get together and collect food and money for immigrants and for those suffering from the raging epidemic of racism, hate, and exploitation.

As the situation worsens over the next months, and it most probably will, you are our community, our sanity. We will all participate in boycotts, locally and nationally; we will strike and seriously dent that billionaire power structure; we will be part of the national network of resistance that will grow and win. Because when we fight, we win. WHEN WE FIGHT, WE WIN!