I have been saying this to people for years. This is what I’ve been warning about for years. I’ll say it again and again until all y’all comprehend the irreversible damage the Tangerine Terrorist and his followers have done and are doing to this country.
The fundamental changes TT and his ilk have caused cannot simply be undone by a wave of the magic wand and four years of a competent, thoughtful president, a couple of election cycles of House Reps who know how to legislate in favor of we, the people. A six-year term for Senators who know how to advise and consent when confirming sober, competent nominees to offices across the federal government.
Everything that has been happening to this country since TT came down his golden escalator was the end result of all the work that began under Reagan. Shrinking the federal government so’s it could be drowned in the bathtub, for example. The consistent underfunding of our educational system is another. Scapegoating the most vulnerable in our society, blaming them for their poverty or their lack of education or whatever other thing Republicans blamed them for because they didn’t conform to the Republicans’ idea of socially normative behavior.
The Democratic party leadership failed us when they did not educate us, the general public, about the importance of sustaining their ability to effectively govern. They failed us when they allowed us to think, ‘We won! Great! Now, we don’t have to think about anything anymore.’ And, we failed them by allowing the Republicans to control the messaging, to hamstring the government, and to convince the majority of Americans that voting is useless.
Blame all around. Now, what are we going to do about it? We are in a hole, so we should probably stop digging.
A huge opportunity to heal this country was lost when we did not properly clean the wound the 1/6 insurrection caused. Yes, the medicine would have been painful, but not as painful as the gangrenous, festering wound we have now. If we had enforced the third section of the 14th Amendment promptly to stanch the bloodletting inflicted upon us by TT, his Congressional lackies, his SCOTUS co-conspirators, and his violent rioters, we could have saved ourselves a lot of pain now.
Instead of dealing with all of them, we allowed our leadership to ignore all the lawlessness in our government. We allowed our leadership to ignore how seriously, how mortally, our body politic was injured. The very fact that they just rolled over when SCOTUS failed to uphold the Constitutional provision that would have blocked any insurrectionist anywhere from being elected ever again, they gave our country over to the insurrectionists. The leadership didn’t even fight to pass legislation to counter the insurrectionists. That is when we lost our country.
Fighting now for what the US could have been is important. But, until we quash the insurrectionists at every level of our government, in every sector of our society, until we reckon with how ugly parts of our country’s history is and acknowledge the mistakes we, as a country, have made, we cannot truly work towards a more perfect union. The insurrectionists will always stop us.
The South lost the battle during the Civil War, but it has won the war itself. The 14th Amendment, Section 3 has never been enforced in any significant way to allow us, as a country, to heal from that insurrection. The slavers figured out how to legalize slavery by keeping us in poverty, by tying health benefits to holding jobs, by taking away community gathering places like public swimming pools, and by convincing us that we need to fear anyone who is different from ourselves.
In order to pick up the pieces of our country, we need to stand together and in one voice tell the insurrectionists that this is our country, too. We need to stand with our neighbors and tell them that while we may disagree, we do not need to be disagreeable. And, we need to turn TT’s violence aside with nonviolent tactics.
Make no mistake: what TT and his apartheidist, emotional support billionaire have done in the last 3 weeks is every bit as violent and what the 1/6/2020 rioters did to our Capitol. The coup is happening now. They are claiming victory. Are we ready to show up and show out?
Are we willing to do the long-term work? It took just a moment to break our democracy. It will take decades to repair that damage.
I am not hopeful that we will have the long-term attention span to do all that needs to be done. It took the Southern insurrectionists 160 years to finish their war. What will the next days and weeks look like as we struggle to get our feet under us to stand up to fight back? What will the next 160 years of struggle look like? Will we ever be able to repair the tatters of our country?
Do not obey in advance.
Illegitimi non carborundum.