Tilting At Windmills

Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, "Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless."

"What giants?" asked Sancho Panza.

"Those you see over there," replied his master, "with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length."

"Take care, sir," cried Sancho. "Those over there are not giants but windmills. Those things that seem to be their arms are sails which, when they are whirled around by the wind, turn the millstone."

— Part 1, Chapter VIII. Of the valourous Don Quixote's success in the dreadful and never before imagined Adventure of the Windmills, with other events worthy of happy record.

To be quite honest, I've never been able to sit down and read all of Don Quixote.  It's long, originally written an an older Spanish, then translated into English, so it doesn't flow great.  I've read bits and pieces of it.  I've watched a VHS of the Man of LaMancha, and I remember two wooden figurines that my dad had of Sancho Panza and Don Quixote.  

The interpretation of this scene is interesting.  Don Quixote is clearly mentally ill (maybe a post where I diagnose him would be fun).  But that's not the part that gets highlighted with the phrase "titling at windmills".  

I, and other people with a lot more experience interpreting and reading classical literature than me, see it as an allegory to promote critical, skeptical, or satirical evaluation of a person's motives.  This blog originally started as a way for me to cope and process through being a cancer patient.  That is, for the most part behind me.  But the world I woke up to on November 9th 2016 is one that fills me with more dread than I can put into words.

Yes, the Democrats lost.  I'm fairly certain that they shot themselves in the foot when the elite of the party decided to ignore the working class, writing them off as unimportant and in more than one occasion insulting their intelligence.  We now have President-Elect Donald Trump.  

Just writing that made me uncomfortable.  Here is a man who pandered to the worst of our humanity in order to secure his victory.  Yes, not all, not even a majority of his supporters are racists, or sexists, or xenophobes or ... .  But he couldn't have won without them, and his words matter.

This is a small, rarely used blog that gets read primarily by my friends and family, its a drop in the bucket.  I know that.  But its my drop in the bucket.  I'm angry.  I'm not going to use platitudes like "not my president" because like it or not (and believe me, I don't), DJT is my president.  His values are not mine.  His treatment of women is not mine.  His racist language is not mine.  His derogatory mocking of a physically disabled man is not mine.  His entitled sense of himself is not mine.  

I'm not going to sit down for this one, there's too much at stake.  Not for me, I'm white, a man, well-educated, decently well off (in the grand scheme of things), straight, and cis-gender.  But people I care about, people I love are very afraid.  I won't stay quiet.