Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
I know some people who say they “are sitting this one out,” meaning the 2nd Trump Administration. The daily s#*t storm the oaf of office foists on any Americans watching or listening is too much for some folks to stand, so they sit instead.
That’s kinda like trying to sit out a home invasion. Maybe the burglars will just steal all your stuff or maybe they’ll rape and kill you as well. You find out the degree of damage when they finally stop.
I’m over my shock that millions of Americans don’t give a rat’s ass about democracy. And this revelation was true long before I was born.
“The War of Northern Aggression,” as Southerners called it, was a four-year insurrection that took the lives of over 700,000 Americans. The South seceded because they didn’t get their way (a slavery-friendly president) in the 1860 election. Abe Lincoln said the Civil War was about preserving the union. It was only in the middle of it that Lincoln realized that ending the insurrection had to be about freeing the slaves as well.
There is some symmetry between the rebels of the 1860s and the Jan. 6, 2021 attackers of the United States Congress. Both groups were insurrectionists rejecting results of a fair election. Both had avid participants who had no obvious reason to support their uprising. The Confederates endured misery and mayhem for 4 years even tho less than one third of them were members of slave-owning families. And 160 years later, few of Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 Capitol invaders had gained any benefit from Trump’s profiteering presidency. A simpatico similarity of racist sentiment sufficed as the unifying factor that got those recent recalcitrants chanting “USA, USA” as they tried to terrorize the USA.
Luckily, the Jan. 6 crowd was mostly disorganized and didn’t bring their guns or there would have been many murders. But even if they had killed Vice President Mike Pence, the Capitol Police and members of Congress, Trump would still have pardoned all of them as he did the moment he was re-inaugurated.
Besides thousands of unjustified pardons, Trump has put the lunatics in charge of the asylum and the criminals in control of law enforcement. For decades Republicans have claimed that the government was terrible, but it was seldom true. Social Security worked well. Medicare and Medicaid worked well. The Federal Aviation Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and the Environmental Protection Agency worked well. Now Trump has turned terrible management and racist cruelty into the norm.
Like all presidents, Trump took an oath to preserve, protect and defend the constitution. Instead he perverts, attacks and offends it. He is determined to destroy democracy and many of his voters are gleefully going along. He’s decapitating the government’s capacity to enforce our laws and encouraging anarchy in our agencies. That’s what happens when you elect a psychopathic career criminal to the most powerful position in the republic.
But the masses are in mutiny. Sure, some Trumpers will drink the Kool-Aid to their death, but many everyday folks are rallying in resistance. The “No-Kings” protests on June 14 brought over 5 million people into the streets nationwide. It’s heartening that our democracy’s heartbeat is still pumping blood to all our little cells.
We still have some recourse in the courts – even if the Supreme Court has given Trump ridiculous powers that America’s founders never intended the executive branch to have. And many judges have maintained their judicial ethics despite the Supreme Court’s majority abdicating theirs to the avatar of avarice.
Most importantly in our personal lives, let’s bear witness. Let’s peacefully gather in groups to protect our right to resist. Let’s talk the truth to our friends and neighbors. Maybe we’re not used to that. We might need to rehearse – practice in private what we say to people who don’t realize the extreme danger our nation is facing. Heartfelt words from friends can matter more for changing peoples’ minds than a ton of propaganda on TV.
There’s no sugarcoating the crisis in our country. But all is not
lost. Saving our democracy is possible and it’s up to us.
Frank Lingo, based in Lawrence, Kansas, is a former columnist for the Kansas City Star and author of the novel “Earth Vote.”
Email: lingofrank@gmail.com.
See his website: Greenbeat.world
