Moving in Two Directions

I’ve often heard politics described as a pendulum, one side is in, then the other side rises, and back and forth it goes. It doesn’t feel like that today, and I mean literally today, not today in the sense of these days. It feels more like an ever widening chasm, growing bigger from the inside out.
On the good side, on the left side (which is the right side if right is used in the sense of “That’s right,” i.e. correct) a woman named India Walton won the Democratic primary and thus is almost guaranteed to be the next mayor of Buffalo, New York, the first socialist mayor of a major city since Bernie Sanders, and Buffalo is about 5 times the size of Burlington. She does not back away from the socialist label, not even a little bit. In her ideas and a bit in her attitude (O.K., I’d never heard of her before today, but I do get this impression) she reminds me a lot of AOC. AOC was a bartender. India Walton was a nurse, and an officer in the nurse’s union, before she turned to politics. Both ran against entrenched, complacent candidates who underestimated them. And both are very clear on where they stand. I’m very excited about this.
On the bad side, The Intercept has revealed that a U.S. Navy training manual identifies ‘socialists’ as a terrorist group. Seriously. That’s how much they hate us.