Happy Mother’s Day to all the courageous mothers on the front line fighting the pandemic at great risk to themselves and untold anxiety for their families.

I’m going to write more about this so suffice to say that the fight over the composition and size of the next stimulus bill is the main terrain of struggle by far in the near term. If organizations and activists are creative, lots of ways can be found to involve lots of people in this struggle.

Given my political history, when I see people in the “movement” endlessly ranting about the flaws of Joe Biden in the face of the real prospect of Trump consolidating his version of right wing, white nationalist authoritarian rule in the November elections, I can’t help but think, even if I don’t say it aloud: Left Wing Radicalism: An infantile Disorder

Few institutions exist that don’t show the markings of the long ascendancy of right wing extremism. I doubt if the architects of this noxious political bloc/coalition were familiar with Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci, and others of similar mind on the left, but their “long march” through the institutional life of the country to the apex of political power — war of position to a war of movement — would almost make you think that they did.

What makes it worse is that much of the left during this time was trapped in the disabling intellectual grip of the notion that the two parties were essentially the same … tweedledee, tweedledum. Thankfully, in recent years this has begun to change, albeit unevenly and inconsistently.

Here I am retired and doing my daily exercises in the middle of a pandemic, while singing “I can’t help myself” by the Four Tops to my dog sprawled out on the top of the couch. Oh well! Beats a date with the sadness of the moment.