It’s wake up time folks. Put down your smartphones, take out the ear buds, remove the sludge of our compulsions, and the destructive culture of the internet. Go outside and walk around. Read an actual newspaper or a book. Smell the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la, if and when they bloom. Acknowledge people. Fall in love with life.

Be punk. A Times article on Sunday hit the nail on the head. Turn things upside down so we can see right side up. Coming out of the Seventies and commune living, the richness of that experience had dulled itself in its own conformities in the late ’70s. Along came punk. How antithetical it might have seemed to our collective instincts, but there I was, slowly slipping into this new energy despite the familial world I inhabited.

The Ramones, The Slits, The Stranglers, Nine Nine Nine, Elvis Costello, early Police, Johnathan Richmond, especially The Clash (New England Coliseum), and The Buzzcocks mostly played The Rusty Nail and Rahars. I’m missing a few. Look how Bruce Springsteen just stood up and gave Trump the finger. Point being we need these groups now when the culture of Trump and Co. and right-wing parties threaten Europe and America with their dulled down, anti-imagination, constricted view of what humanity really should be embracing. I just want to shout! Put down the smartphone!! Stop watching screens!!!

Addiction is everywhere. No need for drugs anymore. Rap is the only significant cultural force influencing people. Even that suffers from its own indulgences. Revolutionary impulse is at an all time low. That’s revolutionary in the best sense — reclaiming our own identities and self-expression. That requires realizing that you are better off than succumbing to groupthink. The world today is littered with paradox. That means everything has the potential to be liberating or being conformist-restrictive in our adhesion to orthodoxy. Something is made to appear one way while actually effecting something completely opposite or different.

Everyone’s screaming at the Democrats to get off their butts and make a real movement. Trump and Co. meanwhile continues his constitutional destruction. He’s upset at how many big stars have condemned his behaviors. He imagines things should be one way, his way, and not something else. He should be given grace or some such gift for any action he takes. Transactional they call it. The big questions is: Will congressional Republicans turn on their brains for five minutes? That’s all it would take to realize they’ve all been raped of their individualities. Zomboids they should be called. Their band screaming for the numbed down mind to wake up. Five minutes, that’s all it would take. But no, “we wouldn’t have any idea of where we are or where we should go. Perhaps we won’t exist at all. We’re not writers and artists, we’re apparatchiks.”

Apparatchiks do a lot of damage. Blind to their own conformities, they infect the countryside inventing attacks on the rule of law on as many levels as possible to deconstruct the administrative state. Throw out 100 decrees and see what lands. An aerial barrage too big to escape. Every statute that guarantees freedom should be annulled. Harvard, that pillar of independence, will be the ultimate symbol of success in destroying the freedom to learn. Remember New College in Sarasota? Small potatoes. How can even a president directly interfere with how independent organizations govern themselves in what is supposed to be a free society? Why do they let them even on the grounds?

If everybody understands what the Constitution reads, it should be against all constitutional grounds to abjectly attack or obstruct the functioning of a free entity. But that’s what’s happening. And because Republicans control the House, Senate, and Supreme Court, Trump is unfettered, and Democrats flutter their wings. The people in the streets, and we need everybody there, must reclaim as aggressively as possible the spotlight. The “Big Beautiful Bill” is the boondoggle that robs the poor to fat the rich.

This will take everyone connecting on the same page: The issues the populace cares about that will suffer the blind axe of budget extremism. It’s a very simple war being fought. Power over our sovereign rights, separation of powers, and human rights. Without those we descend into oligarchy and worse, authoritarianism, happening as we speak. That’s what’s installing itself here in every illegal and underhanded way possible. Liz Warren is out there always on target, Bernie and AOC, and others. Be we need everyone. Less talk, more action. Get the message to the young and those numbed by social media. The elections coming up are critical. Signed: Alan Harris, Radical Cooks on the Range.

Alan Harris lives with wife Jane and cat Kiko in Shelburne Falls. He enjoys singing, writing, theater, art, and novels, and his current one is working its way through publication. Stay tuned.