In a last minute surprise, Trump's untraditional campaign team upset the over-confident Falcons last night to win the 51st Super Bowl held in Trump-friendly Texas.

Neglecting to revisit key strategic border sections of the field more amenable to their game play, the Falcons relied on an over-cautious strategy from their early lead going into halftime, giving the Patriots the opportunity to microtarget an unnoticed but increasingly receptive field of key white receivers. The Nation's Team relied on the more exceptional game play of true stolid conservative players steeped deep in the field's vast, largely empty heartland rather than the Falcs' preferred focus around the crowded edges of the sidelines, often resting on slick and fancy footwork rather than core fundamentals.

While the final score seemed close and tenuous, Trump noted he could have won by much more but the line refs and scorekeepers had rigged the contest, costing his team at least 20 points, and especially faulted the Falcons for relying on undependable non-white players, and the media for reporting pre-game events.

The myth of American Exceptionalism starts with the Christian belief that God chose to bless this land and “our” forefathers more than the rest of creation. This myth asks us to believe that a loving God smiled down on the massacre of indigenous peoples, the brutal enslavement and murder of Africans, and the subjugation of women. History is full of dissent against this belief and the systems that dehumanized people for the sake of our “Manifest Destiny”.

Once I was taking a bus tour in China, and the tour guide kept pointing out a bunch of boring obvious stuff, "China grows a lot of rice. We have a lot of rice in China..."

After a while, I noticed that when he said, "look out on your right", there was something unsightly and run-down on the left, and vice-versa.

As we get all hot & bothered by what's going on, stop a bit and consider what else is happening that might not bother us, might have escaped our notice.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

-- Frederick Douglass

This is my favorite quote from Frederick Douglass. It’s a divine truth; its wisdom is applicable to any epoch. Every person will have to deal with questions of justice, poverty, ignorance, and class. Douglass knew firsthand that Justice, in the form of basic freedom, ranked higher than issues connected to poverty, ignorance, or class. I struggle trying to find new ways to explain this to some of our allies on the left. The election of Donald Trump has caused some to question whether the Democratic party should continue to advocate for people who have “identities” that are problematic to electoral success. If the Democratic party is willing to eschew Justice for the sake of victory in 2018 and 2020 it will end up more fractured than it is now, and I promise, there will be no victories to show for the effort.