JaxPolitix

POST 1119

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves.”

• – Abraham Lincoln, 1864
• So, too, ourselves, today, right now

In watching this train wreck election proceed in slow motion I had to admit the foul truth, that half of my fellow citizens voted against democracy. They voted for lawlessness and assault. They voted to let pregnant women bleed out and die. They voted for a huge tax increase on themselves and they voted to condone violence against fellow citizens. They voted for little lies and for massive, gobsmacking lies, for denial of science and the embrace of idiotic conspiracy theories to replace truth. And they voted to end the rule of law and to let a convicted criminal and sexual assaulter get away with his lawlessness. His sentencing for 34 counts of fraud in a couple of weeks should be quite the spectacle.

They voted in favor of gerrymandering and voter suppression, shooting protesters in the legs and for martial law. They voted for minority control of our cities, our states and our nation. They voted for willful ignorance and cruelty and for despotism. They voted for letting Putin do anything he wants to do. They voted for MAGA friend Putin to have his cyber-thugs rain down bomb threats on polling stations in Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. “Hey, Russia, if you’re listening.  .  .” Big help for the cheater. Remember that Trump cheats at golf, too. And real estate and foundations and university. Everything, really.

“Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.”

• – commonly attributed to Winston Churchill, but he never said that.
• Sometimes Israeli Ambassador Abba Eban gets credit for some
• variation of this statement. Had either of them
• said this, he would have been right.
• We are here today, having promoted the strongarming of our democracy out the door and the welcoming of fascism controlled by rich, cruel usurpers and angry citizens who feel their special place in our society is slipping away. They are allowing fascism, in part because it is now cloaked in the flag and carrying a Trump Bible. It seems we forgot to remember.
• We tried slavery and we continue to practice various forms of discrimination and repression. Some will always cling to self-justified anger, grievance and the notion that there are those who are naturally superior to others. It is self-evident that those holding such a view see themselves as the superior ones. When will we once again choose to do the right thing?
• Our main challenges now are to figure out how to live to fight another day and something else equally daunting. It is figuring out how to repair the gaping rifts that caused our national and individual sails to luff instead of to propel us forward, resulting in driving this threat into existence. The repair is made exponentially more difficult by so many loud, hateful voices shrieking fear and hatred into our ears every day. It’s a lot like 1930s Germany and nobody speaks of the elephant in the room.
• No Democrat is threatening violence. No Democrat is in a militia practicing to assault the Capitol Building on January 6, 2025 or is preparing to send Christmas cards with pictures of themselves brandishing an AR-15 and speaking menacingly of the blood of patriots. No Democrat is making death threats to poll workers. No Democrat went to an election rally and cheered hateful and racist slurs or chanted about death to anyone. And no Democratic leader incites anger and hatred.

Doesn’t matter any more. This MAGA leader does.

A dictator just on day one, you say? Millions believe that lie. We have elected ourselves into an open prison controlled by a dictator. Changes will come incrementally and we’ll barely notice what we have done to ourselves until we’re afraid all the time and injustice rules the land. We will no longer be the land of the free and the home of the brave, so we can replace the Star Spangled Banner with something befitting a military parade goose stepping down Pennsylvania Avenue.

“Stand back and stand by.”

And recognize that we are doing this to ourselves. All the dysfunction, the violence, the hatred and the destruction of all we have claimed to hold dear for nearly 250 years are self-inflicted wounds. Be glad that most of the brave ones who fought and many who died to protect this democracy cannot see what we are doing to the country over which they stood guard at enormous personal sacrifice.

• We have a system that is brilliantly designed to self-correct via the ballot box. I don’t see how that self-correction can happen in a dictatorship.
• I still believe in America. Not much has changed substantively – yet. On the other hand, I don’t have much respect for our willfully blind, the ones who refuse to see what is before them, or the willfully hateful, the ones who want to tear it all down.
• The clock has run out. There is no more time. More donations won’t help, nor will post cards to swing states nor canvasing or another post in this space. We are left in awkward impotence.
• The sun will still come up each day – read Simon Rosenberg’s piece – but now we will need some heretofore undiscovered wisdom and strength to find our way through the coming loss of rights and freedom in order to get back to decency and democracy. This is going to take a long time and it’s going to hurt.

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