Reading around the last few days, Democrats and Democratic Socialists seem to be debating whether to spend the next two years fixing things or sending Donald Trump and Co. to jail. Both are admirable pursuits, and while I read Georgia Senator Rev. Warnock say “we can walk and chew gum at the same time” regarding the subject (man, that’s a wonderful line), if things come to push/shove and there’s only time/political capital to do one of ’em, I’d say getting things done slightly “trumps” sending the Corruptmobile to prison.

And that’s only because there is SO much that needs to be done.

One way of summing up the past two years is that it’s consisted of a wannabe dictator trying to tell us his dicatatorship is absolutely required to “make us great again” when it was actually just all about making him a dictator because his psychosis requires it. Just about nothing got done in the process except the attempted/successful destruction of many things government does/tries to do. The exceptions to nothing have been fascistic application of “policy” regarding immigration, women’s bodies, and political opposition.

Which has only added to the SO much that needs to be done.

I could provide you a list of what I think needs to be done, but the list would be longer than Finnegan’s Wake and even less interesting. So I’ll just posit two things and the person/style through which we might accomplish them. My two things are healthcare and immigration/residency status. Both are currently completely broken, immigration in its current state of fascistic overreach and healthcare in some kind of laissez faire morphine haze like that slowly spinning boat at the end of 1975’s Gene Hackman movie “Night Moves,” which, despite being a great analogy, is a reference pretty much only I and the late Gene Hackman would get.

As a schoolteacher solidly on the side that “we don’t teach kids what to think, only how to think,” and additionally not being that smart in the first place, I’m not going to tell anybody how these two issues should be fixed. Instead, I will just point to NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani as an exemplar of that “how.” Yes, Mayor Mandani is only a mayor and can only focus on NYC issues, but note how the Mayor focuses on fixing things INSTEAD OF JUST RESPONDING TO WHAT SOME DERANGED CORRUPT RACIST TWIT (DCRT) SAYS AND INEPTLY TRIES TO DO ABOUT THINGS.

I’ll pick “congestion pricing” as an example, because it’s both a good one and the only one I know anything about. The DCRT has said many negative things about congestion pricing in NYC and has ineptly tried to pull federal funding from the city and other shenanigans. And the Mayor has just focused on implementing the policy, avoiding middle school bully-level engagement with DCRT to just continue fixing the thing. The Mayor has met with DCRT more than once and from those meetings we don’t get the “you suck, no you suck” inanity. Because that doesn’t fix the thing. It’s a distraction to fixing the thing.

To say I’m an expert on any of this is laughable, and my entry this morning is going into a long, long line of “here’s what you should do Democrats” columns this morning, many written by real experts at real media outlets (although, is there such a thing now as a “real” media outlet?). But it’s my blog. And maybe last Tuesday retaught us that our voice can matter, or at least offered up a delusion that I’m still deleriously subscribing to a week later.

Regardless, it’s absolutely true that many, many issues must be addressed, healthcare and immigration/residency status prime among them. And if are still as horribly broken in January 2029 as they are today, me and a bunch of other folks who voted last week are gonna be perhaps even more pissed than we were going to the voting booth this go round. And man, were we pissed.

And now the non sequitur photo…