A convicted felon can't be a police officer or vote. But they can be elected as President of United States. Why?
excerpt from Kareem Abdul Jabbar's substack
after the day convicted felon Donald Trump was elected President, Kareem summed up the situation nicely, hitting the important points.
https://substack.com/@kareemabduljabbareditor
America fooled me.
Just when I was optimistic that we had turned a corner against irrationality, hate, and greed,
and were marching forward toward a new age of enlightenment.
We hurtle backward in time to a dark place
where we dance around a pagan fire like the deranged children in Lord of the Flies.
I don’t want this to turn into a bitter diatribe about my disappointment in the American people
who selected a rapist, racist, and cognitively challenged buffoon as their leader.
Who put all marginalized people’s lives and rights at risk.
Who put the security of the country at risk.
Who put our children’s futures at risk.
The next four years will be challenging as we are led by a man in serious mental decline
who has surrounded himself with political dimwits and moralless thugs.
Most of the prominent people he hired last time turned against him during this election to warn us of his ineptitude, pettiness, and greed.
His closest advisors said he was incompetent.
But his supporters thought they knew him better.
So, here we are.
The next four years will be about survival.
If his economic plans are instituted, economists warn that we face dire times.
If his health insurance plans are carried out, many will be without insurance.
If his plans to protect women against their will
(leave it to a sexual predator to phrase it that way) are realized,
women will slip further into second-class citizenry.
Christianity will be shoved down our throats by the most unChristian man in the country.
How do we live with our friends, families, and neighbors who voted for a rapist, racist, and fraudster?
We give them grace.
We assume that, though their minds were clouded by their lack of critical thinking,
in their hearts they still want a compassionate America that embraces all of its people and protects their rights.
They made a mistake, like a child sticking its finger in an electrical socket.
Let it go as that and be the person that maybe influences them to think better next time.
Take a day or week to mourn, those of you who still believe in our Constitution and the country we could be.
Then roll up your sleeves and prepare for four years of battle to save our country from becoming the tyrannic state that Trump and his supporters envision.
They expect us to be humbled and docile.
We won’t be.
We are better than this election.
Let’s prove it.
Kareem’s Daily Quote
If you would be a real seeker after truth,
it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt,
as far as possible, all things.
René Descartes (1596-1650), French scientist and philosopher
Frankk comments
What does it say about the morality of the people who
* nominated Trump to run for the Republicans despite his criminal status
* the more than 74 million Americans who voted and elected convicted felon Donald Trump as President?
If you vote for a rapist, insurrectionist, racist, misogynist, and as Kareem pointed out, the most un-Christian like Christian to represent you as your President,
what does that say about you, and your moral standards?
Kareem's substack article from the following day with astute observations on lying to ourselves
Kareem’s Daily Quote
Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), Russian author of Crime and Punishment
All human philosophy can be boiled down to this one question:
“Do these pants make my ass look fat?”
Because mirrors exist, there are three reasons why someone asks this question:
(1) They think the pants are flattering and they’re looking for a compliment.
(2) They think the pants make their ass look big, but they’re hoping for a lie to make them feel better.
(3) They honestly can’t decide for themselves, which means their perception of reality is seriously on the fritz.
The underlying question, of course, is “Why does it matter if it does or doesn’t?”
Because we are all obsessed with how others perceive us.
This is understandable on a basic level of survival.
We are herd creatures who need others to optimize our chances of surviving long enough to raise our offspring in safety.
Being liked, feared, respected, envied, and/or loved increases our status in the herd and therefore increases our level of comfort.
Plus, we need someone to play pickleball with.
Lying to others is a defense mechanism mostly applied to make us liked and reduce the chances of us being disliked.
But lying to ourselves is trickier.
We are equipped with the mental capacity to know when we are lying to ourselves,
which means we have to build an artifice to convince our minds that we aren’t really lying to ourselves.
We tell ourselves a story and, just like with any work of fiction, we willingly suspend disbelief and enter the artificial world.
The problem is, once we’ve entered, it’s too painful to see ourselves realistically as the person we’ve become so we have to stay in the fake world we’ve created.
Better yet, we find others who also have chosen to live the lie and tell each other you’re the ones who see the truth and all others are liars.
And when possible destroy those who tell us the truth.
The irony is that a society’s best literature—whether novels, poetry, plays, movies, or songs—is meant to use fiction as a way to reveal the truth to the audience.
There is always an “opportunity for insight” when characters (and therefore the audience) can see themselves as they really are.
They then have the “insight into action” moment when they can change their lives.
It’s most obvious in rom-coms when the lovers have split up over some nonsense involving their egos and misperceptions of each other.
Suddenly, one or both realize they actually love that other person more than whatever was keeping them apart, so they launch into action by driving to the airport to stop their flight (or any of the other variations of the Big Gesture).
The literature is the mirror, but only we can decide whether those pants make our ass look big—and whether we should care.
Maybe that all sounds too philosophical.
In practical terms, we all struggle with perceiving the world around us and our place in it realistically.
That’s the only way to make informed decisions about our lives.
But so many people prefer the fantasy “reality” they’ve created, whether about the country being a ‘50s sitcom with subservient women, obedient children, and happy-go-lucky minorities or that they are good people when they keep voting for bad people and bad policies.
You know, “Does voting for this rapist make my morality look bad?”
They are lost in the Matrix.
As for the rest of us, we have to keep on choosing our authentic selves, fat asses and all...
What the 2024 Election Taught Me About America
What the 2024 Election Taught Me About America
Trump’s comeback reveals dark truths about the country.
By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
November 8, 2024 at 9:35 AM PST
I’m guessing that a lot of political pundits who thought Kamala Harris was going to win were tempted to start their first post-election article by echoing Gerald Ford’s 1974 inauguration speech after Richard Nixon resigned:
“Our long national nightmare is over …”
Except now it isn’t.
It’s just begun.
Not only because Donald Trump was elected and Republicans now control the Senate, but also because the disturbing truths about America exposed during the tumultuous campaign season are startling and sobering.
For American democracy, this election has been like going to the doctor for a routine annual physical, only to be shown an X-ray revealing a sinister dark mass over the heart.
Whether that mass proves to be inoperable or curable has yet to be determined.
Either way, there’s going to be some suffering.
photo: President Barack Obama awards the Medal of Freedom to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 2016.
I know I’m suffering.
I couldn’t have been more shocked by Trump’s reelection than if we’d voted to bring back slavery.
It has left me staggering with shame and fear.
Shame that my fellow Americans chose to embrace racism, misogyny, greed and, worst of all in terms of our future, blustering irrationality.
Trump was the worst president in the history of our country—and we chose him again.
Stronger than shame is my fear about our immediate future.
Fear that the country will regress into violent unrest as the civil rights of minorities, women and members of the LGBTQ+ community are systematically suppressed.
Fear as our educational system is reduced to a propaganda machine pumping out nonthinking conservative clones.
Fear as our environment, already teetering, is further destroyed by reality deniers.
This election has taught me that our country has made a fundamental shift in its core values.
Americans have always embraced the feel-good populace myth portrayed in the cautionary 1957 movie A Face in the Crowd.
The story is about drifter Larry Rhodes (played by Andy Griffith), who rises to fame and political power through his folksy everyman charm on radio and then TV, but who’s a self-serving monster in real life.
“POWER! He loved it!”
screamed the ad posters for the movie.
“He took it raw in big gulpfuls … he liked the taste, the way it mixed with the bourbon and the sin in his blood!”
(I would have said that’s excessive hyperbole until Trump came along.
Now it seems restrained.
)
When Rhodes’ audience overhears him berating them as idiots over a hot mic, his popularity plummets, leaving him a broken man.
In the final scene, one character comments that Rhodes may have fooled people for a while, but “we get wise to him―that’s our strength.”
Variations of that story have played in our movies and TV shows ever since, with plots that center on getting the truth out to The People, who will then turn on the puffed-up politician or secret agency trying to exploit them.
The stories always conclude with the truth being told and the people ejecting the pretender.
Stephen King’s Firestarter ends with the truth about a secret government agency being brought to Rolling Stone to expose to the people.
The spy movie Three Days of the Condor ends with the hero turning in his story about a rogue CIA group to the New York Times.
News platforms used to represent the national conscience.
They need only awaken our innate morality for us to rise up to do the right thing.
As a society we’ve clung proudly to the belief that, eventually, Americans always “get wise to him—that’s our strength.”
I’ve believed it all my life.
Now I know it’s no longer true.
That premise rests on the conviction that Americans actually want the truth.
That they want the facts.
That they want expert opinions.
Based on the evidence of this election season, however, I no longer believe this to be true about the majority of Americans.
Despite most Americans’ carrying in their pockets the most powerful educational tool in the history of humankind, so many people lack the curiosity, willpower or patriotic responsibility to fact-check.
The mobile phone is like a cross to a vampire, revealing facts that send them cowering back to their mental coffins.
But apparently most people, rather than look up facts, would prefer to have their blood drained and become one of the undead.
This past election has produced a new and very disturbing trend in the face of facts:
doubling down on a lie.
Even after Trump’s and JD Vance’s accusations of Haitians in Ohio eating people’s pets were proved to be a lie, both men continued to make the same claims in their speeches.
The story was refuted by the Republican governor, local law enforcement, even the woman who first made the accusation (who found her missing cat in the basement).
None of that mattered to Trump and Vance, or to the people who cheered them on when they repeated these lies.
So many fail to follow their political hero Ronald Reagan’s most famous advice:
“Trust, but verify.”
Their updated motto:
“Verify schmerify.”
A few years ago, this doubling-down phenomenon would never have worked.
A bold truth would come out, and people would, at the very least, demand an apology and act of contrition.
Now more people prefer to be gaslighted.
They’d rather blame the media for reporting the news than hold the lying politicians accountable.
Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene accused Democrats of manipulating hurricanes to strike heavily Republican areas to suppress their voting.
That’s not even the craziest thing she’s said.
Yet, instead of her constituents demanding her resignation, her power in Congress continues to grow.
The issue isn’t just that we have liars and dunces in office but also that we keep reelecting them after they’ve been proved to be liars and dunces.
Oops, we did it again.
Yes, that’s still democracy—but it’s a wounded, ailing democracy.
Truth no longer matters.
During this past electionpalooza, a 2020 quote from NBA coach Doc Rivers kept coming back to me:
“We keep loving this country, and this country does not love us back.”
Originally this statement was a reaction to the deaths of so many unarmed Black people at the hands of police, but for me it’s come to represent many marginalized people who were made targets during this election.
In my naivete, I expected mass defections from Trump every time he or one of his cronies uttered another racist or misogynist statement.
It didn’t happen.
Yet, I still keep loving this country—like so many other people who have reason to be skeptical—because this is a country that may suffer social setbacks and moral lapses but that, at its core, wants to better.
This election has revealed a populace who was severely abused, broke free and now has run back to its abuser for more of the same mistreatment.
Now that he’s emboldened, and surrounded by other enablers, the abuse will be worse.
When I look upon the faces of my neighbors and friends who voted for Trump, I choose to see people temporarily misled who, despite a huge lapse in logical thinking, truly want a country that’s inclusive and compassionate rather than a frat house run rampant.
America has a history of fighting back against bullies and despots.
The country was born out of protest, and every social and political advancement we’ve made—from civil rights to women’s rights to labor rights—has been the result of Americans taking to the ballot box and, when provoked, to the streets.
The next four years will try our conviction.
There will be setbacks;
there will be pushback from people who think they’re patriots but who are the opposite.
All we can do is remind ourselves of the America envisioned by our founders and Constitution.
An America that resists tyranny.
In the end, I still keep loving this country because I believe that it wants to love me back.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a six-time NBA champion and six-time MVP who held the NBA career scoring record for almost 40 years.
You can follow his biweekly columns at kareemabduljabbar.com or kareem.substack.com .
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