Two Days Ago My Husband Said "...and He Was Pissed" And I Said "don't Say That Around The Kids!" So He

btw being excessively nonconfrontational is NOT a positive trait. it does not mean u are “too nice” or just too kind to hurt people, it means u have a problem communicating and you need to work on it.

You can tell a lot about the health of a civilization by their warning signs. Places with a lot of dumb folks will have very broad, very dumb warnings in public. "No feeding the birds." "Stop swimming in this drainage pond." That kind of thing.

Advanced civilizations have very precise signs. They've covered the bases of their regular, run-of-the-mill idiots, and now they're working hard to cover that other end of the bell curve: the talented idiot. When I was in Germany last time, there was a big warning sign that consisted of a 76-letter-long word that means "stop bothering this particular goose, Sven." I don't know who Sven was, but the goose looked pretty calm. It worked.

Now, I have a secret to tell you. You can just make your own signs. There's no law against it, except perhaps "littering," and the municipal sign factory doesn't have very good security. If you show up there past close and put in the door code that you shoulder-surfed off one of the employees returning from lunch a week prior, you have all night to fuck around with their sign-printing machine, making the most official-looking placards you can think of.

Is this wrong? I don't think so. It's a public space, and being able to put up an aluminum sign that says wacky crank shit is your right. For instance, just last week, I banned pickup trucks from parking by the playground. The cops figured out something was going on, because they didn't get any calls for toddlers getting backed over for a couple of days and sent a patrol truck to investigate. Took my sign right down.

What I discovered after that is that nobody keeps records of what signs are supposed to be there. Why would anyone put up a sign for no reason? They cost money, after all. The city is now suing the shit out of that officer for stealing the "no trucks" sign, thanks to an anonymous tipster who called in the theft. Guy wearing a reflective vest came by and put like four more of them up after the lawsuit made the news, just out of spite. I'm not entirely sure if he's actually a city worker; we ran into each other at 3am at the sign factory and just grunted. He was working on some really crazy signs about not feeding a particular swan. Probably German.

loudly going "YOU'RE GOOD YOU'RE GOOD" to myself to ward off the memory of every embarrassing thing i've ever done

Actually your society is the freaks for shooting everything that moves and burning half your "nature reserves" every year so that upperclass dandies can eat leaded pheasant. North Americans are the well adjusted ones here, your country has become a desolate suburban lawn in island form

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There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)