Nov. 8, 2024
Post Election Thoughts
Craig and Cecil talk about the election results, what to do next and how to move forward. Notes for this episode: Marcela Valdes, "What a Crackdown on Immigration Could Mean for Cheap Milk," NY Times Magazine, October 15,...
Craig and Cecil talk about the election results, what to do next and how to move forward.
Notes for this episode:
Marcela Valdes, "What a Crackdown on Immigration Could Mean for Cheap Milk," NY Times Magazine, October 15, 2024: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/15/magazine/milk-industry-undocumented-immigrants.html?searchResultPosition=1
Harriet Tubman's quote came from Tiya Miles book, Night Flyer, Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People, (New York, Penguin Press, 2024), pp. 234-5.
Transcript
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you
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Welcome to the Lawful Assembly podcast.
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name is Cecil.
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joined by my good friend, Reverend lawyer, Craig Moose.
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And Craig, we had a stunning defeat this week in the presidential race.
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Kamala Harris, our current vice president, lost to a previous president, Donald Trump, in
the presidential election.
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It has essentially been...
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Mostly a red wave.
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We're not sure how the House is going to shake out, but it doesn't look good for the
Democrats right now.
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It looks like there is definitely going to be a majority in the Senate.
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There's probably going to be a majority in the House.
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It looks like a lot of people that came out to vote for Joe Biden didn't show up to the
polls this time around.
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We had a lot of disaffected voters.
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And so this week, we were thinking about recording something that was not
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going to be election related, but really we had a lot going on and we also kind of wanted
to just sort of take a little minute to talk about what happened, to talk about our
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feelings about it and have sort of a short show talking about those things.
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So Craig, I'm going to turn it over to you.
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What are your first impressions and what do you have to say to people after this loss?
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As you suggested, I'm not pleased with the outcome.
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Cecil, the premise of our lawful assembly is that people get together and decide and
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Apparently that's what's happened.
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Apparently more than half the voting public came together and decided on a direction for
our nation that I disagree with.
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And as part of the process at this point, I have to say, take it away and let's see.
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I disagree.
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We've had way too long a campaign period, but let me also give thanks to Kamala Harris and
Tim Walz.
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They jumped in at the very last moment because of other circumstances.
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They tried to introduce themselves and their
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program for the future of our country in a very short time period.
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And I believe they ran an exceptionally efficient campaign.
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They may have made decisions that they'll come to regret, but in the timeframe which they
had and in the complexity of this country, they tried to present a path for this nation.
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The will of the people apparently says that wasn't enough, but isn't that part of our
democracy?
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Now we got to buckle down and go forward.
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again, we should probably also give thanks to
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President Biden and he's done a lot of good things for this nation through his career.
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I haven't agreed with him at all times, but this has been a very difficult time.
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And therefore I just, before we go too far to thank President Biden, Vice President Harris
and the Vice President nominee, Tim Walz for really trying to live that dream of a lawful
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assembly.
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Yeah, it was in an unenviable position to be put into for sure.
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The Tim Walz and Kamala Harris had a
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an uphill road.
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was difficult because they last minute, like you say, and very difficult without a primary
season.
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You normally have a full year and a half worth of campaigning that happens beforehand for
people to get to know you.
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I don't think, well, I think, I think President Biden was good and bad in a lot of
different ways.
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I think they couldn't separate themselves away from Biden and several of the what they
call kitchen table issues are things that are tied to Biden.
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whether it's deserved or not.
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its inflation is one of those big things that is tied to Biden, whether or not he deserves
that or not.
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And so she would have had to separate herself from unpopular funding of wars and unpopular
inflation in a way that might have made it look like she wasn't really part of the current
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administration.
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It was a very difficult road for her.
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a very difficult tightrope to walk and it was hard.
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So she was already had one hand tied behind her back starting the campaign out so late and
with having to also be part of the current administration.
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So it was difficult, the American people chose someone who has been a person, I'm gonna
say this straight out, a person of low character.
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I mean, I think we all agree.
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I think even the people on...
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Even people who voted for him I think probably would agree in some ways that he's a person
of low character I read a blog yesterday from a conservative Catholic who admitted that
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the candidate he voted for was eccentric and Narcissistic and bungling.
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Yeah, and yet he couldn't bring himself to vote for the party So we and we currently have
a bunch of disaffected voters in the country There's there's a bunch of people who did not
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show up They didn't bother to show up and what I'm seeing on my sort of social media feed
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is a bunch of people who yesterday and today are saying, you know, a lot of they're
talking about a lot of isolationism, essentially not communicating with other people,
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cutting people out of their lives that are part of this, et cetera, et cetera.
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And I will say this.
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I understand it.
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I get it.
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And I understand that feeling.
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I really do.
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But I also recognize that this is a bubble that was just shown to not be big enough
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to win the presidency.
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So if you put up walls today and this is the size of the room that you're gonna be in,
it's never gonna win you the rights and the ethics you hope that our government is gonna
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be able to provide for people who live on the margins and for people who are in minority
groups and those types of things.
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So I think creating a bubble right now with a smaller group of people and not trying to
find out why
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is going to be a bad call for a lot of people that are part of this party, that are part
of the Democratic Party.
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If they don't look for why those people were disaffected and they don't try to change
course, they're going to have a lot of heartbreaks in the future.
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It speaks to both parties, Cecil.
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In one part, the Democratic Party has to figure out how to attract those people that were
disaffected without losing its base.
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But as you're talking, I wasn't sure which party you were talking about because it seems
to me
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Climate change is teaching us right now that the bubble that we think is the United States
is not somehow protected from the world's weather.
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And we bear a disproportionate responsibility for the carbon that is heating up our oceans
and heating up our atmosphere that is causing huge climate changes.
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I read the other day that for every one degree higher in temperature, there's 7 % more
humidity water that's evaporated into humidity.
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and that becomes rain eventually.
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And one of the reasons we see the disaster in Spain is there's more humidity in the air.
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We may live in a bubble, but we send the carbon dioxide around the whole world.
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I believe all of us who live in this prosperous land have to figure the bubble we live in
is not sufficient just to protect our own, but also to protect the world.
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And that's going to be very important over the next four years in having that debate.
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So it is kind of funny as you're telling that story.
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I wasn't sure which bubble you were talking about.
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But I think that we have to realize our responsibility when we export arms and military
weapons.
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Sure.
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And all of a there's refugees.
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It's partly our fault.
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And if you think we can put up a bubble to protect that, obviously I think we're
misguided, but I'm sad that the lives that are going to be ruined, destroyed and forced to
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flee because of our efforts.
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One of the reasons we're doing a short
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show this morning, we really do want the dust to settle.
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The House hasn't even decided as we've been talking today.
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It seems to me that there's been two movies showing simultaneously in this country based
on sort of the same facts.
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And it's made me think it might be like the 1770s.
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There had just been a war that the British army had, in effect, in all its colonial ways,
I'm not defending the war.
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It was called the French and Indian Wars of the 1760s and had sent its armies to protect
the colonies.
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And it was expensive as any army in any war is.
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And we know how costly wars are to people, but that started generating the unrest of who
should pay for that war to defend the colonies.
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that led to a lot of these discussions.
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And we ended up having two sort of major parties, the loyalists or the Tories.
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who saw the solution through their loyalty to the king, to the king's governor and the
different colonies, to the law and order that the British troops would keep.
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And then we had this other group that we called Scragly Patriots that were starting to
say, we, the people have a say and we should have, and that bubbled up and the necessity
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of financing war actually contributed to a greater debate on how we do that.
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And it seems that it,
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that point we actually end up in a revolution and the Tories either lost and went to
Halifax or London or stayed and lost their property.
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And these people that we call the Patriots are now for many the founders and heroes in
many of our classrooms, but they were looking at a lot of the same facts and look at the
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facts we're looking at.
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We have issues, we have problems.
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And do you want an authoritarian leader who makes decisions?
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And then the
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people around him just jump to and do that.
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we want to limit rights and responsibilities to allow those decisions to go forth faster
and again with greater impact on people?
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Or do we want the messiness of democracy and let it work through the Congress, let it work
through the state legislatures, let it work through the courts.
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And sometimes it'll go slower and sometimes faster.
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For me, it's a lesson in lawful assembly.
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How do we organize?
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You and I through our last, we're almost at 50 podcasts now, I believe, Cecil.
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have been trying to have this debate, bring in some guests and also ask our listeners to
send us questions about what is the character of our country and what is the direction of
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our country.
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We've lost this time, but why have we not perhaps been more successful in attracting some
of those disaffected voters?
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Why haven't we been more successful in our families and in our communities in talking to
across the Thanksgiving dinner table with that aunt or cousin or uncle that
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feels the opposite of we do.
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so maybe we, you and I have to be doing some hard thinking about how we present these
ideas, but how do we take those two movies and say, in some ways that the facts are the
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same, but we're looking through different lenses.
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Maybe again, we've done this before, invite those who have prevailed in this particular
election to call us, or maybe we can invite some onto our show and explain to me your
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values.
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As Dr.
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Jennifer McCoy told us, what are the values the other side?
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Why would you want this king-like figure to be the person that runs the world's largest,
democracy?
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And let me understand that.
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And maybe if I understand it better, we can find a third path or a fourth path or a fifth
path, but a one that makes Thanksgiving dinner even more enjoyable.
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When we talk about that sort of two different Americas, two different lenses, people
seeing things in two different ways, I see what I look at it.
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I see a side that values empathy, and then I see a side that...
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feels attacked, feels like a victim and values retribution.
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That's what it appears to me.
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That's what it looks like to me, especially when you look at even just campaign signs.
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One side literally has signs that say mass deportation now, and they filled an entire
arena with people that had that.
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That tells me you're a group of people who value retribution, who value this sort of
creating a group of people who are the other.
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those people, maybe those people in that arena, I can never reach those people.
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Maybe that's a possibility.
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And I think that there's a group of people that I'm never going to be able to reach,
right?
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We see America so differently.
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There's no way I'll ever be able to reach them.
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But I do think that there's a group of people in that party that voted on an issue that
isn't that, that isn't something that is such a different contrast from how we see the
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world that they can be reached.
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And I think that there's going to be a bunch of people who did just look at their grocery
bill.
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And like I said earlier, whether it's right or wrong, they blame the current
administration and they think it's time for a change.
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Someone I saw yesterday said something I think that was really poignant.
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They said, what we saw since Obama is a flipping of the switch every single time.
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Every single election, we've seen a flipping of the switch from one party to the next
because people are
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stuck in a system that doesn't seem like it respects them.
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So they keep on flipping that switch and hoping for a different result.
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And the Democrats did not provide in the last four years any kind of relief for those
people who are disaffected and wanting something else to happen.
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We're seeing home prices out of people's range.
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We're seeing people not gathering wealth like other generations have.
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You're seeing
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massive wealth disparity, you're seeing huge big inflation, whether or not that inflation
is coming down now or not doesn't matter to the person who's paying for groceries.
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So all those things need to be addressed.
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And I think people are just turning it on and off again and hoping for a different result.
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And so you've got to reach those people I think that are doing that because those are the
reachable people.
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See, so we've been trying to do that through these podcasts, just to tie two links of what
you just talked about.
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The price of the food on your table and mass deportation the New York Times Sunday
magazine had an article a few weeks ago that One of the reasons milk is relatively cheap
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compared to other Commodities and food prices is the number of undocumented and immigrant
laborers in the workforce and that yes Today's modern dairy when it's running almost a
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24-hour cycle with thousands of cattle in a farms or hundreds of cattle in a farm
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require people that has to do a lot of work at 4 a.m.
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in the morning in a mucked out stall or a barn with cows.
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a farmer who is running a rather large farm in Idaho said that people don't realize if
there's mass deportation, the cost of milk is going to, it's either going to go way off
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the charts or we're not going to have milk because we can't run dairies the way we're
running.
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But that's part of the argument we've been having about the impact of immigrants in our
workforce and for social security.
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We've not been successful.
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So we have to figure out a way in the next year or two in lawful assembly to try to the
point you're exactly raising those who have been disaffected and are willing to engage.
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Let's figure out if we can get our lenses a little closer and the eyeglasses we're
watching the movie.
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Let's see if we can watch the same movie together.
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That's right.
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And we'll still disagree.
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That's the beauty of lawful assembly.
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We don't need a king to tell us what it is, but we may have these start and stops.
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You and I are fearful that this is a particularly dangerous stop, but that's why we have
to be fully engaged.
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I just had one final thought that I was talking to a young 25 year old woman and she
started singing.
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I'm not a singer.
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She has a much more beautiful voice than I have, but the Annie song of tomorrow, tomorrow,
the sun's supposed to come up tomorrow.
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And she sang it.
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The sun's not going to come up tomorrow.
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I was heartbroken.
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urged her to stay in that, that, and as we talked, she started laughing and said, you know
what, the sun is out and the sun did come up.
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and, and, these times, and I want to, to her and to others who feel discouraged that,
we've not only, we have been struggling, but I'm an older white man and I've had
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relatively easy struggles compared to a lot of folks.
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I, this week I went to a book I just read, Night Flyer.
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Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People by Tia Miles.
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for those who are interested, it's a different take on Harriet Tubman trying to take
through her voice and other women of her generation, what was going on both in slavery and
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then in the early days before the Civil War and then through the Civil War and after the
Civil War and the end of Reconstruction.
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Those were struggles also in this land of ours and we're still facing those.
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just happened open to this page.
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And let me read this quote because I, I felt some reassurance.
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Harry Tubman taught those who followed her into the woods to stay close and keep faith
despite their fear of what lay behind and what lay ahead on the path.
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And I urge all of us to keep the faith that we have to keep this experimented democracy
ongoing.
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And we need all of us engaged in our lawful assembly.
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We've to keep it alive.
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want to end today, Craig, with a short story.
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I'm going to tell this on the other show that I do, but I want to tell it here as well.
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We've had political signs in our yard, and we've had signs stolen and that sort of thing.
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And it's been a of a little bit of a challenge to have political signs in our yard.
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I live in the suburbs of Chicago, and if you're unfamiliar, the farther you get off from
Chicago, the redder it gets.
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So there's a lot of people around me with opposing political signs on their yard.
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and lots of people in my subdivision.
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Yesterday, my wife and I, this is the day after the election, so I'm recording this on
Thursday, but on Wednesday, the day after the election, we had found out in the morning
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when we woke up that Trump had won, and my wife and I, my wife had taken the day off of
work, and I was with her sitting there, and we were sharing just each other's company and
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some tears and that sort of thing, and there was a knock on our door.
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And the neighbor who lives,
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down the street, unprompted, we've never met them.
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There's several houses down, maybe a quarter mile down the road, knocked on our door.
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And she came and she said, I just wanted to thank you for having the Harris Wall sign in
your yard.
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Sometimes I feel so alone in this neighborhood that it's nice to see that someone else has
some of the same values that I do.
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And I was stress baking yesterday and I brought you over some cookies and it was just
such...
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a beautiful moment of someone taking a minute to reach out to another person who they knew
were in some ways grieving and reaching out and just being a person of comfort for them in
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that moment.
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So for all of you listening, if you're like me, you're probably in this moment where you
feel down, you feel a little grief, reach out to other people in this moment that you know
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are in the same position with you and be
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a shoulder they can lean on, be a body they can hug, and be a person for them in this
moment.
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America has survived so many things and so many problems.
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We've had a literal civil war in the past.
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A lot of people have a lot of anxiety and rightfully so, but America has survived worse.
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There may be rough roads ahead, but I hopefully will be here for you listeners, and I hope
that you can be there for someone else too.
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Can you save me one of those cookies?
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I can, Greg.
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I can.
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But I can say, as Harriet suggested, let's keep our faith dreams of a free people alive.
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This podcast is not intended as legal advice.
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If you'd like to email the show, you can send us a message at lawfulpod at gmail.com.
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If you'd like to leave us a voicemail, you can go to lawfulpod.com.
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Click on the microphone and leave us a voice message.
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If you enjoy the show, please rate us on iTunes and Spotify or wherever you get your
podcasts.
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If you're interested in Cecil's other shows, you can check out Cognitive Dissonance and
Citation Needed.
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you
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Welcome to the Lawful Assembly podcast.
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name is Cecil.
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joined by my good friend, Reverend lawyer, Craig Moose.
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And Craig, we had a stunning defeat this week in the presidential race.
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Kamala Harris, our current vice president, lost to a previous president, Donald Trump, in
the presidential election.
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It has essentially been...
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Mostly a red wave.
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We're not sure how the House is going to shake out, but it doesn't look good for the
Democrats right now.
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It looks like there is definitely going to be a majority in the Senate.
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There's probably going to be a majority in the House.
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It looks like a lot of people that came out to vote for Joe Biden didn't show up to the
polls this time around.
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We had a lot of disaffected voters.
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And so this week, we were thinking about recording something that was not
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going to be election related, but really we had a lot going on and we also kind of wanted
to just sort of take a little minute to talk about what happened, to talk about our
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feelings about it and have sort of a short show talking about those things.
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So Craig, I'm going to turn it over to you.
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What are your first impressions and what do you have to say to people after this loss?
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As you suggested, I'm not pleased with the outcome.
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Cecil, the premise of our lawful assembly is that people get together and decide and
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Apparently that's what's happened.
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Apparently more than half the voting public came together and decided on a direction for
our nation that I disagree with.
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And as part of the process at this point, I have to say, take it away and let's see.
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I disagree.
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We've had way too long a campaign period, but let me also give thanks to Kamala Harris and
Tim Walz.
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They jumped in at the very last moment because of other circumstances.
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They tried to introduce themselves and their
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program for the future of our country in a very short time period.
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And I believe they ran an exceptionally efficient campaign.
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They may have made decisions that they'll come to regret, but in the timeframe which they
had and in the complexity of this country, they tried to present a path for this nation.
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The will of the people apparently says that wasn't enough, but isn't that part of our
democracy?
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Now we got to buckle down and go forward.
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again, we should probably also give thanks to
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President Biden and he's done a lot of good things for this nation through his career.
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I haven't agreed with him at all times, but this has been a very difficult time.
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And therefore I just, before we go too far to thank President Biden, Vice President Harris
and the Vice President nominee, Tim Walz for really trying to live that dream of a lawful
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assembly.
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Yeah, it was in an unenviable position to be put into for sure.
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The Tim Walz and Kamala Harris had a
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an uphill road.
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was difficult because they last minute, like you say, and very difficult without a primary
season.
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You normally have a full year and a half worth of campaigning that happens beforehand for
people to get to know you.
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I don't think, well, I think, I think President Biden was good and bad in a lot of
different ways.
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I think they couldn't separate themselves away from Biden and several of the what they
call kitchen table issues are things that are tied to Biden.
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whether it's deserved or not.
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its inflation is one of those big things that is tied to Biden, whether or not he deserves
that or not.
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And so she would have had to separate herself from unpopular funding of wars and unpopular
inflation in a way that might have made it look like she wasn't really part of the current
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administration.
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It was a very difficult road for her.
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a very difficult tightrope to walk and it was hard.
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So she was already had one hand tied behind her back starting the campaign out so late and
with having to also be part of the current administration.
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So it was difficult, the American people chose someone who has been a person, I'm gonna
say this straight out, a person of low character.
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I mean, I think we all agree.
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I think even the people on...
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Even people who voted for him I think probably would agree in some ways that he's a person
of low character I read a blog yesterday from a conservative Catholic who admitted that
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the candidate he voted for was eccentric and Narcissistic and bungling.
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Yeah, and yet he couldn't bring himself to vote for the party So we and we currently have
a bunch of disaffected voters in the country There's there's a bunch of people who did not
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show up They didn't bother to show up and what I'm seeing on my sort of social media feed
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is a bunch of people who yesterday and today are saying, you know, a lot of they're
talking about a lot of isolationism, essentially not communicating with other people,
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cutting people out of their lives that are part of this, et cetera, et cetera.
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And I will say this.
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I understand it.
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I get it.
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And I understand that feeling.
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I really do.
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But I also recognize that this is a bubble that was just shown to not be big enough
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to win the presidency.
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So if you put up walls today and this is the size of the room that you're gonna be in,
it's never gonna win you the rights and the ethics you hope that our government is gonna
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be able to provide for people who live on the margins and for people who are in minority
groups and those types of things.
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So I think creating a bubble right now with a smaller group of people and not trying to
find out why
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is going to be a bad call for a lot of people that are part of this party, that are part
of the Democratic Party.
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If they don't look for why those people were disaffected and they don't try to change
course, they're going to have a lot of heartbreaks in the future.
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It speaks to both parties, Cecil.
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In one part, the Democratic Party has to figure out how to attract those people that were
disaffected without losing its base.
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But as you're talking, I wasn't sure which party you were talking about because it seems
to me
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Climate change is teaching us right now that the bubble that we think is the United States
is not somehow protected from the world's weather.
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And we bear a disproportionate responsibility for the carbon that is heating up our oceans
and heating up our atmosphere that is causing huge climate changes.
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I read the other day that for every one degree higher in temperature, there's 7 % more
humidity water that's evaporated into humidity.
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and that becomes rain eventually.
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And one of the reasons we see the disaster in Spain is there's more humidity in the air.
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We may live in a bubble, but we send the carbon dioxide around the whole world.
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I believe all of us who live in this prosperous land have to figure the bubble we live in
is not sufficient just to protect our own, but also to protect the world.
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And that's going to be very important over the next four years in having that debate.
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So it is kind of funny as you're telling that story.
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I wasn't sure which bubble you were talking about.
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But I think that we have to realize our responsibility when we export arms and military
weapons.
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Sure.
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And all of a there's refugees.
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It's partly our fault.
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And if you think we can put up a bubble to protect that, obviously I think we're
misguided, but I'm sad that the lives that are going to be ruined, destroyed and forced to
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flee because of our efforts.
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One of the reasons we're doing a short
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show this morning, we really do want the dust to settle.
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The House hasn't even decided as we've been talking today.
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It seems to me that there's been two movies showing simultaneously in this country based
on sort of the same facts.
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And it's made me think it might be like the 1770s.
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There had just been a war that the British army had, in effect, in all its colonial ways,
I'm not defending the war.
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It was called the French and Indian Wars of the 1760s and had sent its armies to protect
the colonies.
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And it was expensive as any army in any war is.
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And we know how costly wars are to people, but that started generating the unrest of who
should pay for that war to defend the colonies.
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that led to a lot of these discussions.
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And we ended up having two sort of major parties, the loyalists or the Tories.
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who saw the solution through their loyalty to the king, to the king's governor and the
different colonies, to the law and order that the British troops would keep.
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And then we had this other group that we called Scragly Patriots that were starting to
say, we, the people have a say and we should have, and that bubbled up and the necessity
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of financing war actually contributed to a greater debate on how we do that.
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And it seems that it,
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that point we actually end up in a revolution and the Tories either lost and went to
Halifax or London or stayed and lost their property.
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And these people that we call the Patriots are now for many the founders and heroes in
many of our classrooms, but they were looking at a lot of the same facts and look at the
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facts we're looking at.
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We have issues, we have problems.
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And do you want an authoritarian leader who makes decisions?
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And then the
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people around him just jump to and do that.
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we want to limit rights and responsibilities to allow those decisions to go forth faster
and again with greater impact on people?
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Or do we want the messiness of democracy and let it work through the Congress, let it work
through the state legislatures, let it work through the courts.
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And sometimes it'll go slower and sometimes faster.
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For me, it's a lesson in lawful assembly.
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How do we organize?
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You and I through our last, we're almost at 50 podcasts now, I believe, Cecil.
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have been trying to have this debate, bring in some guests and also ask our listeners to
send us questions about what is the character of our country and what is the direction of
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our country.
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We've lost this time, but why have we not perhaps been more successful in attracting some
of those disaffected voters?
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Why haven't we been more successful in our families and in our communities in talking to
across the Thanksgiving dinner table with that aunt or cousin or uncle that
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feels the opposite of we do.
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so maybe we, you and I have to be doing some hard thinking about how we present these
ideas, but how do we take those two movies and say, in some ways that the facts are the
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same, but we're looking through different lenses.
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Maybe again, we've done this before, invite those who have prevailed in this particular
election to call us, or maybe we can invite some onto our show and explain to me your
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values.
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As Dr.
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Jennifer McCoy told us, what are the values the other side?
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Why would you want this king-like figure to be the person that runs the world's largest,
democracy?
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And let me understand that.
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And maybe if I understand it better, we can find a third path or a fourth path or a fifth
path, but a one that makes Thanksgiving dinner even more enjoyable.
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When we talk about that sort of two different Americas, two different lenses, people
seeing things in two different ways, I see what I look at it.
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I see a side that values empathy, and then I see a side that...
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feels attacked, feels like a victim and values retribution.
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That's what it appears to me.
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That's what it looks like to me, especially when you look at even just campaign signs.
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One side literally has signs that say mass deportation now, and they filled an entire
arena with people that had that.
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That tells me you're a group of people who value retribution, who value this sort of
creating a group of people who are the other.
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those people, maybe those people in that arena, I can never reach those people.
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Maybe that's a possibility.
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And I think that there's a group of people that I'm never going to be able to reach,
right?
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We see America so differently.
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There's no way I'll ever be able to reach them.
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But I do think that there's a group of people in that party that voted on an issue that
isn't that, that isn't something that is such a different contrast from how we see the
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world that they can be reached.
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And I think that there's going to be a bunch of people who did just look at their grocery
bill.
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And like I said earlier, whether it's right or wrong, they blame the current
administration and they think it's time for a change.
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Someone I saw yesterday said something I think that was really poignant.
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They said, what we saw since Obama is a flipping of the switch every single time.
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Every single election, we've seen a flipping of the switch from one party to the next
because people are
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stuck in a system that doesn't seem like it respects them.
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So they keep on flipping that switch and hoping for a different result.
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And the Democrats did not provide in the last four years any kind of relief for those
people who are disaffected and wanting something else to happen.
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We're seeing home prices out of people's range.
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We're seeing people not gathering wealth like other generations have.
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You're seeing
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massive wealth disparity, you're seeing huge big inflation, whether or not that inflation
is coming down now or not doesn't matter to the person who's paying for groceries.
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So all those things need to be addressed.
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And I think people are just turning it on and off again and hoping for a different result.
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And so you've got to reach those people I think that are doing that because those are the
reachable people.
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See, so we've been trying to do that through these podcasts, just to tie two links of what
you just talked about.
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The price of the food on your table and mass deportation the New York Times Sunday
magazine had an article a few weeks ago that One of the reasons milk is relatively cheap
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compared to other Commodities and food prices is the number of undocumented and immigrant
laborers in the workforce and that yes Today's modern dairy when it's running almost a
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24-hour cycle with thousands of cattle in a farms or hundreds of cattle in a farm
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require people that has to do a lot of work at 4 a.m.
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in the morning in a mucked out stall or a barn with cows.
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a farmer who is running a rather large farm in Idaho said that people don't realize if
there's mass deportation, the cost of milk is going to, it's either going to go way off
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the charts or we're not going to have milk because we can't run dairies the way we're
running.
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But that's part of the argument we've been having about the impact of immigrants in our
workforce and for social security.
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We've not been successful.
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So we have to figure out a way in the next year or two in lawful assembly to try to the
point you're exactly raising those who have been disaffected and are willing to engage.
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Let's figure out if we can get our lenses a little closer and the eyeglasses we're
watching the movie.
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Let's see if we can watch the same movie together.
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That's right.
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And we'll still disagree.
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That's the beauty of lawful assembly.
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We don't need a king to tell us what it is, but we may have these start and stops.
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You and I are fearful that this is a particularly dangerous stop, but that's why we have
to be fully engaged.
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I just had one final thought that I was talking to a young 25 year old woman and she
started singing.
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I'm not a singer.
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She has a much more beautiful voice than I have, but the Annie song of tomorrow, tomorrow,
the sun's supposed to come up tomorrow.
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And she sang it.
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The sun's not going to come up tomorrow.
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I was heartbroken.
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urged her to stay in that, that, and as we talked, she started laughing and said, you know
what, the sun is out and the sun did come up.
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and, and, these times, and I want to, to her and to others who feel discouraged that,
we've not only, we have been struggling, but I'm an older white man and I've had
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relatively easy struggles compared to a lot of folks.
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I, this week I went to a book I just read, Night Flyer.
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Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People by Tia Miles.
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for those who are interested, it's a different take on Harriet Tubman trying to take
through her voice and other women of her generation, what was going on both in slavery and
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then in the early days before the Civil War and then through the Civil War and after the
Civil War and the end of Reconstruction.
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Those were struggles also in this land of ours and we're still facing those.
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just happened open to this page.
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And let me read this quote because I, I felt some reassurance.
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Harry Tubman taught those who followed her into the woods to stay close and keep faith
despite their fear of what lay behind and what lay ahead on the path.
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And I urge all of us to keep the faith that we have to keep this experimented democracy
ongoing.
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And we need all of us engaged in our lawful assembly.
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We've to keep it alive.
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want to end today, Craig, with a short story.
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I'm going to tell this on the other show that I do, but I want to tell it here as well.
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We've had political signs in our yard, and we've had signs stolen and that sort of thing.
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And it's been a of a little bit of a challenge to have political signs in our yard.
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I live in the suburbs of Chicago, and if you're unfamiliar, the farther you get off from
Chicago, the redder it gets.
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So there's a lot of people around me with opposing political signs on their yard.
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and lots of people in my subdivision.
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Yesterday, my wife and I, this is the day after the election, so I'm recording this on
Thursday, but on Wednesday, the day after the election, we had found out in the morning
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when we woke up that Trump had won, and my wife and I, my wife had taken the day off of
work, and I was with her sitting there, and we were sharing just each other's company and
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some tears and that sort of thing, and there was a knock on our door.
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And the neighbor who lives,
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down the street, unprompted, we've never met them.
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There's several houses down, maybe a quarter mile down the road, knocked on our door.
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And she came and she said, I just wanted to thank you for having the Harris Wall sign in
your yard.
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Sometimes I feel so alone in this neighborhood that it's nice to see that someone else has
some of the same values that I do.
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And I was stress baking yesterday and I brought you over some cookies and it was just
such...
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a beautiful moment of someone taking a minute to reach out to another person who they knew
were in some ways grieving and reaching out and just being a person of comfort for them in
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that moment.
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So for all of you listening, if you're like me, you're probably in this moment where you
feel down, you feel a little grief, reach out to other people in this moment that you know
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are in the same position with you and be
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a shoulder they can lean on, be a body they can hug, and be a person for them in this
moment.
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America has survived so many things and so many problems.
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We've had a literal civil war in the past.
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A lot of people have a lot of anxiety and rightfully so, but America has survived worse.
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There may be rough roads ahead, but I hopefully will be here for you listeners, and I hope
that you can be there for someone else too.
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Can you save me one of those cookies?
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I can, Greg.
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I can.
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But I can say, as Harriet suggested, let's keep our faith dreams of a free people alive.
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This podcast is not intended as legal advice.
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If you'd like to email the show, you can send us a message at lawfulpod at gmail.com.
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If you'd like to leave us a voicemail, you can go to lawfulpod.com.
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Click on the microphone and leave us a voice message.
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If you enjoy the show, please rate us on iTunes and Spotify or wherever you get your
podcasts.
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If you're interested in Cecil's other shows, you can check out Cognitive Dissonance and
Citation Needed.
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