The dictionary provides two definitions for integrity and both of them are really revealing. The first talks about honesty and strong moral principles. The second is the state of being whole and undivided. I’m sure the second refers to structural integrity such as the structural integrity of a bridge. However, the concept of being whole and undivided is fascinating as it pertains to human integrity.

In 1984, Greg Abbott was paralyzed when a tree struck him. He was jogging through the neighborhood. The event is obviously the most significant event in his life. It is hard to put a price on such things. How does one put a price on their ability to walk, run, or get around? How does one put a price on the happiness they cannot have due to permanent injury?

The facts are that Abbott availed himself of the system to compensate him following his accident. On some level, it is a completely understandable response and one no one would begrudge him. Except, Abbott would. Abbott spent most of his early political career working to limit others from benefitting from the system the way he did.

To date, it is perhaps the most comprehensive example of the fact that Abbott doesn’t have the integrity to lead. There are others. In 2015, a group of idiots became convinced that the military were going to kidnap citizens and stash them away in Wal-Marts in Texas. That was their explanation for military exercises that became known as Jade Helm.

Abbott’s response was telling as it usually is. He could have ignored it. He could have come out and eased tensions and simply told people there was nothing to worry about. He could have called them out as a bunch of paranoid kooks. Instead he asked the Texas State Guard to monitor the military. At the end of the day it didn’t really interfere with the exercises, so what exactly is the harm?

The harm is that it gave credence to the crackpots. It was a signal to them that the governor heard them and was on their side. Abbott knew it was all nuts, but couldn’t bring himself to say so. After all, he needed their vote. He knows the ex-president was full of crap as well. He knew the whole notion of a border wall was a bunch of window dressing. It didn’t stop him from leaning into that whole line of crap.

Finally, we see him threatening transsexual teens and their parents. We see him question green energy and blame it for the debacle last winter. Yet, we know Abbott was okay with the energy companies profiting from disaster. Thus, we finally see the real reason why Abbott is dangerous and a poor fit for the position of dog catcher, much less governor.

He isn’t a danger because he’s a conservative. True conservatives aren’t inherently dangerous. He’s a danger because he isn’t truly conservative. He isn’t truly anything. Greg Abbott’s only true constituency is Greg Abbott. He will do anything, say anything, and believe anything he needs to get ahead. If one believes in nothing they will eventually fall for anything. We’ve already seen it in Abbott’s case.

I don’t have to recount the thousands of times that all but a tiny handful of GOP politicians have praised, looked the other way, made excuses for or lied about the despicable and illegal conduct of TFG.  Goofballs, weirdos and Fox News talking heads called sensible public health policy “tyranny”, comparing wearing masks and getting vaccines to the Nazi run gas chambers during the holocaust.  Said goofballs also did the bidding of TFG  and attacked the US Capitol to stop the lawful certification of the presidential election.  Since the attack, every conservative talking head and politician have twisted themselves into pretzels downplaying the insurrection or trying to justify it because of the tyranny of a free and fair election that their guy lost.

Then comes the guy TFG loves, Vlad Putin.  Doing what TFG only dreams of, Putin completely controls the levers of power in Russia and its zone of influence, having destroyed the constitution that Boris Yeltsin pushed through to make Russia a democracy.  He decided that Ukraine, which has been an independent democracy since 1991 when the Soviet Union finally collapsed, was actually his in his fever dream of rebuilding the Soviet Union.  Violating a whole book full of international laws, Putin launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine last week, expecting the same tepid response of 2014 when he annexed Crimea and succeeded while Europe looked the other way and the US responded with limited sanctions (that Trump undid as one of his first acts in office).  TFG stayed in character this last week lavishing praise on Putin, followed by sycophants at Fox Noise, and the TFG wing of the GOP.

And then, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky stood up, took off his suit, donned olive drab, declared he was not surrendering, and started rallying his people. When offered an evacuation by the US, he declined, saying, “I need ammunition, not a ride.”  Following his lead, thousands of Ukrainians have volunteered to defend their homeland, and even expat Ukrainians are returning to fight.  They’ve built barricades, made Molotov cocktails, taken up arms, and have steadfastly resisted the onslaught.

After witnessing Zelensky’s courage and the response of his people, the international community has responded in a way unseen since 911.  The EU banned Russian aircraft in their airspace; the US, with cooperation of allies, implemented sanctions on Putin and his henchmen, even including denying some Russian banks access to the SWIFT international payments system, which I believe hasn’t been done before and threatens to cripple the Russian economy.  Hundreds of thousands of Russians in large cities around the country, risking arrest and detention, publicly protested against Putin.  The EU offered to finance weapons into Ukraine, and then Fedex and UPS announced that they were halting all shipments into and out of Russia. Shortly after, BP announced that it was exiting its 20%, $14 billion position in Rosneft, the Russian national oil company.  Boom. In less than a week, Putin was isolated and now a pariah in global political and industry circles with few exceptions.  Even Putin ass-kisser Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has announced that he is “neutral” about the attack on Ukraine.

The pressure on Putin is now so great that, after putting his nuclear assets on alert, he asked for talks with Ukraine through the president of Belarus.  So far the talks are said to be arranged on the border between Ukraine and Belarus, a Russian satellite state.  There are no real hopes for progress, but with Putin raising the specter of nuclear war, he is clearly on his heels.

This is how you deal with a despot.  When they threaten unlawful actions, you don’t appease.  You kick them in the groin and poke them in the eye.  This is not only how you deal with Putin, you do the same thing with shitbags like TFG, Bolsanaro, Kim Jong Un, and other despots around the world.  They rule with fear; they’re bullies.  When overpowered, they run.

There is a lesson being taught the world by the people of Ukraine.  I’m just hoping that many people, including TFG appeasers, are learning it.

My son – Let’s call him Elliot for privacy’s sake – was born in 2007. For four days the doctor tried to induce labor, to no avail. During what was to be the last exam before they stopped trying to induce labor for a few days, my water broke. Several hours later, as the nurse was checking my progress, my husband made a joke. I laughed and out came Elliot, right into the nurse’s hand, without a single push.

Elliot was a wonderful baby. He was very serious. By 3, he could converse with adults easily. By 4, he could read. At age 7, he read all 7 of the Harry Potter books in 3 months. My husband and I weren’t sure that he would read the last book without having nightmares, but, I’m a librarian by education and I quite simply am never going to tell a child they can’t read a book that they have the ability to read. He was ok. He cried, just as I did, at the ending of book 6. He rode that wave of grief all the way through book 7, and the Battle of Hogwarts. This awoke in him a steadfast advocate of justice. No injustice was too small to ignite righteous outrage in this boy.

When he got to middle school, he was accepted into the National Junior Honor Society (NJHS). He kept his grades up and performed twice the number of required hours of community service. He did everything from picking trash up off the road, cleaning the local Democratic Party office where I volunteered, and collecting peanut butter for a local food bank.

When the invitation came for the NJHS award ceremony, Elliot did not want to go. It was a formal dinner, you see. He really hated wearing dresses. He didn’t understand why he was supposed to wear one. He was a guy, and guys wear suits. The problem was, everyone saw him as a girl.

You see, my son Elliot was assigned the female gender at birth. Throughout his life, he focused on doing all of the things he loved, mostly wearing t-shirts and comfortable pants. He knew, from the time he went to pre-school and got sent to the girls bathroom, that everyone had it all wrong. But he didn’t know the words or have the courage to tell anyone.

Elliot went to that NJHS banquet wearing a suit. Parents and students alike that had known him his entire life agreed: he had never looked happier. He was glowing. He was exuberant and when the kids started to tease him, with twinkles of amusement in their eyes, he laughed deep belly laughs that echoed off the school gym walls. “You look like a Presidential Intern!” one kid said, while another picked up his trumpet and made a decent attempt at playing “Hail to the Chief.”

From that day forward, Elliot changed. He had always had a boyish taste in clothes, but it was not just that. One night, just a few weeks after wearing the suit, he asked us to sit down at the table.

“Here it comes,” I thought. “She is going to come out.”

And he did. “Ok. I’m just going to say this. My – my – my pronouns are he/him and I’m transgender.” His shoulders shook with emotion. A tear sprouted from his eye. “And I’d like to be called Elliot.”

His father and I both reached out. I placed my hand on his, and my husband placed his hand on his shoulder. “Ok,” his dad said.

“Ok, honey,” I said.

We talked for about an hour. We asked questions, he asked questions. We told him we would support him absolutely. We found a doctor that provides gender-affirming care. Many people who call gender-affirming care “child abuse” think that means surgery and hormone treatment. They’re wrong. Mostly it’s just a doctor that treats you like a human if you’re a teenage boy who happens to be going through trouble with his periods. It’s a doctor that swabs your throat for strep without any comment about gender at all. And when the time comes, it’s a doctor that helps the patient when time comes to transition and live the life they’ve always dreamed of.

I’ve lived in Texas long enough to know that half the state has decided they hate my son, and me by extension. Hell, half of my extended family proudly condemns anyone on the LGBTQ spectrum. I have done my best to shield Elliot from this, but there is only so much I can do.

The day I read about Abbott’s order, mandating doctors and teachers report to Child Protective Services the parents of any transgender children, I was full of fear and righteous outrage. The state wants to have the ability to investigate my child’s private parts to make sure that we haven’t altered them. They want to look at their medical records.

I imagine that this enforcement will lead to, somewhere in Texas, a child pulled out of their family’s home by CPS until the case can go up the appeals court. A private group for parents of transgender children in Texas rallied together to share GoFundMe’s for families that fear for their children and need to flee from the state as soon as possible. Elliot came home and told me that one of his teachers promised to never, ever report him. Imagine a child needing to hear that! At an age where every child is finding their place in the world, Texas Republicans through word and deed tell these kids they don’t have one.

Last month, Children’s Hospital in Dallas closed their Genecis clinic to new patients – the only clinic in the southwest that had a gender-affirming care clinic. Conservative Texas politicians and activists targeted the clinic, going after the hospital system’s board members with protests and accusations of child abuse.

Had they asked, they’d know that the Genecis clinic did not, at any age, provide medicine or procedures that are irreversible. Trans children are often given puberty blockers or hormones that stop being effective if they miss a dose.

There is no abuse going on. Texas doctors are doing their best to give these children the gender-affirming care they need because Transgender children have sky-high suicide rates. Simply seeing them and treating them with kindness is all the physicians need to do to uphold their oath to do no harm.

The decision to close this clinic does clear harm to children. It’s evil, and it’s cruel.  How can Republicans claim to be for small government when they want to investigate a kid’s genitals?

Texans need to put a stop to this obnoxious race to be the most racist, bigoted, mean governor in the country.

My family will be ok. I can work from anywhere in the world, and we have the means to pick up and move somewhere safe. But I don’t want to. I am Texas. Elliot is Texas. We shouldn’t have to leave because the government doesn’t like the way we parent. It’s not abuse to let your kid explore who they are. It’s not abuse to let your child live life the way they were meant to, the way that makes them happy. Trans children harm no one.

I should also mention that there is a huge right-wing movement in North Texas right now to ban books. Any book that involves LGBTQ subject matter, or even just characters that happen to be LGBTQ and also do things like save the world or make a new friend. They’re trying to ban books about Black history. Books like Peaceful Fights for Equal Rights, We the Students, Supreme Court Cases for and About Students, and This Book is Anti-Racism. We can’t have kids reading this kind of liberal nonsense, now, can we!?

I implore each and every Texan that reads this to please contact your state rep, your US Rep, your local school board, city council, literally anyone in power in your local area, and condemn this ridiculous order from Abbott. Throw in opposition to banned books, please. School board meetings are open to the public and you have a right to be heard, even if they won’t let you read the books that tell you what your rights are.

There are moments when I simply have to put a story down and come back to it at another time. It seems in the estimation of our illustrious governor that I and my colleagues are regularly committing crimes against humanity. At least that was the implication of his latest letter.

I have to suspend disbelief for a moment and dedicate mental bandwidth to something that doesn’t deserve it. Essentially, the thought process is that children do not have the mental capacity to determine that they want to become a boy or girl. Therefore, a parent has to consent to any procedures that they may have.

If we further suspend disbelief we would have to come out and say what all of this means. It means that being transgender is a crime. So, what the governor expects us to do is to call Child Protective Services and tell them about the transgender students in our school.

This includes students that have nearly completed their transition and students in the beginning of the transitioning process. It assumes a world view where kids (or parents) wake up one day and just think, “I’d like to be a girl today.” Maybe dad was tired of watching John come in seventh at his track meet every week, so we’ll make John Jennifer and she will win the blue ribbons we’ve been expecting.

It ignores the truth about the transgender experience. It trivializes the transgender experience. I wouldn’t even begin to speak for anyone on this regard, but I can’t imagine it would be easy. It certainly isn’t something you dream up on a Tuesday and then go have the surgery on Thursday. It’s a difficult and painful process.

You spend more than ten years developing an identity of your child in your own mind and experience. You see them as a boy or girl. That identity comes with certain assumed experiences and they tell you they don’t see themselves the way you see them. It ignores the grief that must come when a parent comes to grips with the fact that their child needs to go through this transition to be happy. Your conception of them must die and rise up out of the ashes as something different.

So, what the governor and his cronies want us to do is to tell a government agency that what they’ve just done is a crime. We are supposed to report that student because their parents obviously don’t know what’s best for their child. We are calling another human being a crime. In case that didn’t sink in, it needs to be repeated. We are calling another human being a crime.

I hope I don’t have to spell this out, but I’m not doing that. Even if I for one second believed that being transgender was wrong or even somehow a sin against God, I wouldn’t dream of telling a kid that. Doing so would be absolutely cruel and would be antithetical to everything we should be about as human beings.

Of course, when we stop suspending disbelief we start to understand what this is really about. It’s about scoring cheap political points with a base that doesn’t need it. They don’t need their ego massaged. They don’t need to feel better about their bigotry. These kids deserve the love, respect, and kindness that Abbott is showing to his base. I’m sorry that they feel uncomfortable with the idea of transgender people. I don’t say this lightly, but they can go to hell if they think I’m about rat out a transgender kid just to make them feel better.

Let’s all keep in mind that Putin killed a new democracy in its crib back in 2000 when he took over Russia after Boris Yeltsin.  Using the KGB skills he honed in Communist East Germany in the early 80s, Putin then created a Russia that is now more dangerous and rich than the previously known Soviet Union.  Putin was ashamed that the Soviet Union collapsed after the Berlin wall fell, and he wants it rebuilt, but not as the Soviet Union, but as an imperialist Russian Empire.  He doesn’t want to be president, he wants to be Czar.

He can do that now that Russia is one of the largest oil and gas producers and controls energy supplies into Europe.  He has rebuilt the Russian military, now has a warm water port after taking Crimea from Ukraine, quashed all opposition, changed the constitution so he can stay in power for life and has made elections there a joke.  Billionaire oligarchs support and protect him, and his drive to build a new Russian Empire is relentless.
And who’s happy about it?  TFG himself and his supporters. Last night Putin brazenly invaded Ukraine, even shelling facilities near Kyiv, and millions of Ukrainians, in disbelief that he actually attacked, are fleeing to the west.  On Tuesday, TFG call Putin a genius and said how smart he was to go in as a “peacekeeper”.  Last night, right before Putin launched attacks in to Kyiv and other cities, TFG did it again, praising Putin at a fund raiser at Mar a Lago, saying how smart Putin is, walking in “for two dollars worth of sanctions”, then ironically claiming that if he were in office,

“This would never have happened, ever in a million years, it would have never happened.  And I know him very well. I know him probably almost as well as I know anybody in this room other than Doc Ronny [Jackson].”

So, let’s be clear – TFG is characteristically praising, as he has for years, then tried to push blame onto Biden for Putin doing what he himself supports.  Of course, his sycophants fell in line, praising Putin and TFG, bashing Biden.

If anyone doubts what the US would look like during a second TFG term, just look at Russia today and listen to TFG’s actual words.  He dreams of being a dictator and almost accomplished that in 2020.  With the Republican Party in tatters and now virtually 100% aligned with TFG and Russia, the only thing standing in his way is the rest of us making sure he never gets close to the Oval Office ever again.

TFG and his supporters are using Putin to undermine Biden and the US government to his own advantage, and Putin is so long term focused and patient that I don’t have any doubt that another TFG victory in 2024 figures into his calculus in going after Ukraine today.  Even if he doesn’t succeed this time, he’ll just come back in 2025 as Trump holds the door open for him by lifting all sanctions (like he did in 2017) and undermining NATO while fantasizing doing the same thing to Mexico.

If one ever needed another justification for abolishing the Electoral College, TFG is it.

We naturally assume we would know when evil exists amongst us. We’ve spent an entire lifetime watching crime drama and law procedurals on television. We watch as master criminals and intuitive investigators battle it out in 42 minutes (not counting the commercials).

We pride ourselves in figuring it out before the actors reciting a script. Occasionally even we are fooled and we chalk it up as another great show and another lesson learned. The clown is never the guilty party. The red herring is exactly that. It can’t be the red herring. That would be too easy.

Except someone has spent their entire life as the red herring. He struck again and told you just enough to land himself in hot water. He disqualified himself again. He openly admitted to crimes in his business and crimes against humanity. He couldn’t be guilty. We’re missing something. It can’t be that easy. It doesn’t follow the right story arc.

In many ways, Mitch McConnell represents the evil we readily relate to. He makes you work a little harder. You have to go back into the recesses of your memory to prove it. In this case, McConnell used the reflexive “blame Biden” approach. It was his fault we left Afghanistan. Except it really wasn’t. We all know that, but we have to work a little harder to get there.

Unfortunately, not all of us know it. Some have the memory of a gold fish. They just keep swimming. There is always a subset that never will remember these things. Trump made the deal that Biden executed. He even openly bragged at the time that Biden wasn’t going to be able to get out of the deal. Just keep swimming.

Maybe these things are just too easy to track. Maybe our minds are just too trained to follow the 42 minute story arc. Maybe we are just too used to working at finding evil that we just ignore it when it is standing in front of us. Maybe we are just trained not to trust the words of our leaders.

It is more likely that it is the story of the frog in a boiling pot. The idea is fairly simple. Throw a frog into a boiling pot and it immediately jumps out. Slowly turn up the heat and it will comfortably cook. While some debate the analogy, there is some thought that humans are no better than the common frog. It goes back to the theory of sunken costs. If I bail now then I somehow have to explain to everyone and myself that all of the stuff before was apparently okay.

So, either I am somewhat deplorable or I’m all in. I have a pair of fours in my hand, but I’ve already thrown twenty bucks into the pot, so what the hell? When you are all in you never have to admit the obvious. You can claim it was all fake news anyway. So, when the evil that tempts all mankind announces himself again you just keep whistling by the graveyard.