This is it. Don't forget to be kind.

Sorry I'm a day late with this post. I would have written yesterday, but my brand-new clothes dryer and I had a major disagreement that is not yet resolved. It kept stopping after five minutes and insisting that its lint filter was full. Over and over and over again. Regardless of how many times I told it how wrong it was at the top of my voice. 

The repair guy is coming Friday. 

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But it's almost better this way, right? Because now I can write a last-minute post about the election! 

chipus82 | Deposit Photos

As you might have heard, tomorrow is the last day to vote this year. A lot of folks have already voted -- me included -- but if you haven't yet, now is the time. 

I have been studiously avoiding any and all news stories about polling. They are too anxiety-provoking for me. And anyway we're probably, what, 24 to 48 hours out from knowing the results of the only poll that counts.

So what on earth can I talk about in this post? How about this: Regardless of which way it goes tomorrow, remember to be kind.

I can hear you laughing. But it's not the first time I've been laughed at for this stance. And derisive laughter hasn't changed my opinion one bit since the last time I wrote about kindness in connection with politics: yes, we are polarized as a nation, but compassion can go a long way in bringing our country back together.

In fact, my opinion has solidified. Especially after reading this column by Charles R. Pierce at Esquire a couple of weeks back. Pierce quoted at length from a CNN report about how elderly folks, some with dementia, have been scammed out of their life savings by political fundraising operations. Both parties are guilty, but the GOP's operation has been the most egregious. From the CNN story: "The Republican fundraising machine has been subject to more than 800 complaints to the Federal Trade Commission since 2022 -- nearly seven times more than the number of complaints lodged against the other side."

But wait, there's more: "Donors identified by CNN were often in their 80s and 90s. They included... people who donated more money than they paid for their homes, according to records and interviews.... Donors took out new credit cards and mortgages to pay for the contributions. In some cases, they gave away most of their life savings.... At least one person continued to be charged for contributions after his death.... [I]n all, the long list of Republican candidates and causes took in nearly $4 million."

Call me a softie. Call me a snowflake. But if your grandpa, who was kinda sorta losing it, called you to give him a ride to Walgreens because the IRS wanted him to pay them thousands in back taxes with Visa gift cards, who would you be mad at? Grandpa, who's losing his mind? Or the asshole pretending to be the IRS, who's waiting for those sweet, sweet, untraceable gift cards?

And if you're madder at the asshole than at Grandpa -- who, let's be honest here, can't help it -- then why would your answer be any different if the asshole hitting him up was a Republican politician?

Look. Grifters prey on the innocent and befuddled. Their marks are victims.

And it's not only the elderly who have been taken in by the MAGAts' vicious lies, as we all know by now.

I don't know how many times I have to say this before it sinks in: Drop the hatred, folks. Find it in your hearts to forgive the victims of this maddeningly insane ruse that's been perpetrated on our country.

Feel free to be angry. But be angry at the right people: the ones pushing the lies.

For gods' sake, I'm not even a Christian, and I'm saying we should forgive the MAGAts' victims.

You guys know how I feel about forgiveness: I only give it to those who deserve it. I put victims of crime in that category -- no matter who their abusers were.

You do you, I guess. But do you want to have a functioning democracy again or not? This is the only way I can see to do it. 

After, that is, we vote the abusers out. 

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Gonna put in a link here to my post from last week about media bias, since Facebook decided not to let me promote it. They can't stop me from promoting it on my own blog, dammit, so there.

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I made a prediction more than a year ago about how this presidential race would end. Here it is. Was I right or wrong? We'll know pretty soon! Check back here next week!

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These moments of kindly blogginess in the face of derisive laughter have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. If you haven't voted yet, tomorrow's the day!

In which I admit to being a snowflake.

Or a flake, at least. I had every intention of posting last Sunday night, as is my usual practice, but somehow the day got away from me. When I realized what had happened, I told myself I'd just post the next night. I've sometimes skipped Sunday and posted on Monday night instead. But that didn't happen this past week, either. So I apologize for flaking out on you last week, and I hope not to do it again (too many more times). 

Clker-Free-Vector-Images | Pixabay | CC0

Now about my snowflakery. 

As a retired person, I have the luxury of being able to watch the House January 6th committee hearings -- even the daytime hearings -- in real time. This past Monday, one of the topics was former President Trump's fundraising efforts after he lost the 2021 election to Joe Biden. Here is the scam in a nutshell: First, Trump lied that the election was stolen. That's been dubbed the Big Lie. Then he sent millions of emails to his supporters, asking them to donate to something called the Official Election Defense Fund to help fund the legal fight to "stop the steal." And his supporters did donate -- $250 million total, $100 million of that in the few days after the election. 

But the Official Election Defense Fund never existed, and none of the donations ever went to pay lawyers to challenge the election. Instead, the donations went to a political action committee Trump had just created, a charity begun by former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, a conservative organization, Trump's hotel company, and the outfit that organized the January 6th rally that preceded the insurrection at the Capitol. In short, Trump raised a quarter of a billion dollars on a lie, and then lied about where the money went. During the hearing, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) called it the Big Ripoff.

Moreover, more than half of the small-dollar donors to this scam -- that is, people who donated $100 or less -- listed their occupation as "retired". When this came out during the committee hearing, I got a little choked up. I felt sorry for the folks who got conned into giving money they probably didn't have to such a shyster. And I said so in a Facebook post.

I got pushback. 

A whole lot of people I know have zero sympathy for anyone who has gone along with any of Trump's lies. They believe it's his fans' own fault that they got taken in, and they deserve to lose their money.

But here's the thing: If you've been scammed, you've been victimized. It doesn't matter if the scammer is a guy claiming to be Nigerian prince, or someone who tells you to pay a bogus bill by sending them gift cards, or Donald Trump. It's still a crime, and crimes have victims. Making fun of a victim, or telling them they should have known better, doesn't solve anything. And it sure as hell doesn't help the victim.

Did Trump's victims have ample opportunity to wake up from the lie? Maybe, maybe not. Depends how deep into the rightwing media ecosphere they've been. Sure, they could have stepped away from Fox News and QAnon videos like their family members pleaded with them to do -- but keep in mind that Fox News has been in operation since October 1996. Trump's hardcore followers have been marinating in this stuff for more than 25 years. It's been said that if it hadn't been Trump who captured their slavish devotion, it would have been someone else (and we should count our blessings because that person might have actually been competent).

My friends think what Trump and his true believers have done to the country is so damaging that they should never be forgiven. I've written about my view of forgiveness before, and I've gotten pushback on that, too. I don't believe in forgiving someone who has done nothing to deserve it. However, when it comes to gaslighting, it takes a lot to wake someone up to what's going on. Seeing the violence at the Capitol on January 6th woke up some of them. Maybe the hearings will wake up others. And it seems to me that the realization they've been had is the first step toward remorse -- and feeling remorseful is the first step toward earning forgiveness. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying the originators and perpetrators of the Big Lie should be forgiven; on the contrary, I hope they all rot in prison. But for folks like small-dollar donors who got sucked in? If they realize their mistake now, and take steps to undo the damage they've done, we shouldn't turn our backs on them. In my view, they deserve not ostracism, but compassion.

If we ever hope to bring this country together again, we need to find ways to breach the divide. Seems to me that compassion is a decent place to start.

And if that makes me a snowflake, so be it.

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These moments of flaky blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. The pandemic isn't over yet -- get vaxxed and boosted!

Thoughts on giving, and on getting taken.

Pixabay | CC0

"Bitch," the man said. I turned and flashed him a smile, because I didn't know what else to do.

This was a few weeks ago, before I left on vacation. I was on my way to a meeting in Old Town Alexandria, and had just enough time to stop and get a sandwich for dinner. I parked on the street near the restaurant and went to pay for parking. Old Town has converted to a centralized metering system; there's a station in each block where you pay for your parking and receive a slip of paper to put on your dashboard. The meter takes only coins and cards; it took me a minute to figure out there was no slot for the dollar bill I had in my hand. I shoved the dollar back in my wallet, used my magic plastic to pay, put the receipt on my dash, and headed for the restaurant.

That's when I passed the guy. He asked me for money -- I can't remember what he said, maybe that he hadn't eaten all day -- and I said in a rush, "I'm sorry, but I don't have any cash to give you!" It wasn't a lie, exactly; just because I had a dollar in my wallet, it didn't mean I had the wherewithal to give it to some guy on the street. But I'm sure he saw that I had that dollar. Hence his comment.

I always come away uneasy from these sorts of interactions. Not this one, necessarily; once he called me a bitch, I was even less inclined to help him, even if I could see his point. But in general. I work in a big city, and in the block between my office and the Metro station are a few regular panhandlers: the guy who plays the trumpet every morning; the woman who frequents the corner by the Metro, child in tow; the guy who sits in the middle of the block in the evening, chanting change change change like a mantra. Then there are the folks who sell Street Sense, the newspaper produced by the homeless. I pass all of them every day, and I feel terrible about it, like I ought to hand in my "progressive" card (if I had one) because I never give any of them any money.

But see, I've been taken. Once, on a Metro platform, I was approached by a woman who claimed to be a lawyer. Her purse had been forgotten/lost/stolen, and could I help her out with cab fare? I opened my wallet to give her a $5 bill, and she insisted I give her the $10 bill in there, too. At that point, I should have told her to call her secretary and have her call the taxi for her -- but it happened so fast that I didn't think of the rejoinder until much later.

And I always wonder what these folks are going to do with the money they collect. Will they use it to get food? Booze? Drugs? The easy answer is to give to charities, and I do. But even then you have to be careful. We've all heard the stories about so-called charities that are in business mainly to line the pockets of the people running them.

The homeless and the down-and-out hear those stories, too, and so maybe they'd rather not ask for charity. Or maybe what the charity is giving isn't what they need. There's a van from a local charity that stops at the park in front of our office building every evening. They hand out sandwiches on white bread to the homeless folks who line up for them. Seagulls follow the van -- they know some of the people who get sandwiches won't want them, or won't be able to eat them, and the gulls will have their own dinner from the scraps. It's not that the poor folks are ungrateful. But what if they can't eat the sandwich for health reasons? It's like if you offered a peanut butter sandwich to a hungry kid with a peanut allergy. Should he give it back and risk being called ungrateful? Or should he eat it and risk suffering anaphylactic shock?

I guess the fact that all of this bothers me is proof that I'm not a jerk -- but that seems too glib. So does, "I gave at the office."

I wish I had a better answer.

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These moments of unsettled blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

How much would you pay for a verified page?

An odd thing happened to me this week. All of a sudden, out of the blue, I started getting a ton of likes on my Facebook page.

I'm not the sort of writer (yet!) whose fans are racing to sign up for my Facebook page. Oh, I get a few new fans every now and then -- and I love each and every one of you! Have I mentioned that recently?

Anyway, the point is that my page typically doesn't attract likes in droves. The only time I get a lot of action is when I participate in a like-fest, either at Indies Unlimited (where we run them pretty regularly) or some other group where participants agree to like each other's pages. When that happens, I can tell where the likes are coming from, because I recognize the names.

But this week, I got a whole bunch of new likes -- all from India and Pakistan, as near as I could tell, and none of them were names I recognized. I wondered what was going on. I know I haven't sold enough books there to account for that much attention.

Then I started getting messages from people I'd never heard of: "Hey i am ur fan...plz help me...I Want To Be A Editor on yr Page...I will xchange for thousands of likes!!!" Stuff like that.

At that point, it all came clear. These people weren't fans at all. They'd likely never heard of me. What they wanted was my verified page.

See, Facebook doesn't give that little blue checkmark out to everybody -- only to people with pages whose identities they have verified. And even then, you have to be an American. And even then, not everybody gets one. (Frankly, I have no idea why they gave me one. I suspect they looked at my LinkedIn profile and saw I'd worked at CNN and Mutual/NBC Radio News once upon a time.)

So my guess is that some folks on the other side of the world have hit on a brilliant (to them) idea: Contact the admins of verified pages and pester them for access to the back end. Everybody wants likes, right? So offer hundreds of fake likes in exchange for that access. No, thousands! A million!

One guy claimed he was trying to set up a verified page for Kristen Stewart -- who, as an American and an honest-to-goodness celebrity, wouldn't need to hire some guy in Pakistan to do it for her. Another guy asked me to apply for a verified page for him. I tried to explain why that wouldn't work -- Facebook would need to verify his identity, not mine, and I'm not going to submit a fake ID with a US address on his behalf. I think that's when he offered me the million likes.

As entertaining as all of this is -- and it is -- it's also kind of...hmm. Worse than surprising, but not quite all the way to horrifying. Let's call it "causes concern." Because if someone asks you to break the rules to get into the back end of your page, it's pretty much guaranteed that they're not going to play nice with it once they have access. Here's what an editor can do on a Facebook page:

Can edit the Page, send messages and publish as the Page, create ads, see which admin created a post or comment, and view insights.

In other words, if I'd let that guy in, he could have changed stuff on my page, spammed it with his crap, created spammy ads and had Facebook charge me for them, and on and on. And who would Facebook come after? Not Editor Boy, that's for sure.

So far, "Go away or I'll report you to Facebook" has been working pretty well as a deterrent. I hope I don't have to get to the point of blocking whole countries from liking my page. Some day I might have actual fans there.

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These moments of bloggy concern have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.