One Way Out

More people I know seem to be losing hope right now with respect to our country and its direction. I totally get that. The daily drumbeat of social and political chaos we see in the news is daunting.

I listed out what came to mind in about five minutes and showed it to my wife. “It’s a lot,” she said. “Overwhelming. Depressing,” she said.

I remember clearly my first nightmare as a kid. I think I was about four or five. I was in bed and felt the crushing presence of several faceless bodies lying on top of me, holding me down, making it hard to breathe. I felt like the air was being pressed out of my lungs. Several years later, I had a similar real life experience at the bottom of a peewee football pile up. Panic set in, as I felt trapped and smothered beneath the pile of sweaty youngsters. It was terrifying.

That’s how I feel now with each day’s freshest news cataclysm or insult to humanity piling on our all too fragile emotional states.

The Trump years were horrible enough, but I think we all felt marginally relieved after we exercised our right to vote in a desperately needed change. We had a reasonable expectation that things would chill out a little.

But voting out Beelzebub wasn’t nearly good enough, was it? Zombies claimed without evidence that the vote was tainted, and mind-controlled lemmings now cling to that big lie as orthodoxy. The Republican led decent into fascism was momentarily stalled, but it’s hardly gone away.

Just recently we add fanatic misogyny in Texas abortion law to…are you ready? Gun violence, police brutality, a Trump led insurrection January 6, right wing apoplexy over teaching factually based Critical Race Theory in schools and a billionaire space race that throws salt into the deep wound of income and wealth inequality in this country.

Don’t go anywhere, okay? I’m just getting started here.

Texas is just one example of red state craziness. How about Florida? That’s another reactionary right hellhole, and things aren’t a whole lot better here in Ohio. Red state lunatics oppose just about anything that constitutes a social safety net that would help average people, including infrastructure spending, Covid vaccine and mask protocols, voting rights and doing anything about the climate crisis that is causing freakishly severe weather disasters pretty much everywhere now.

We live in two distinct Americas. One that believes in pursuit of a collective good for all our citizens that minimizes human suffering, and one that espouses unbridled individualism and social Darwinism, championing the prosperity and power of the ugly, angry, unrestrained capitalist bully.

Maybe 70% of the country is on the compassionate side. But the festering, feckless and fiendish 30% is running the damn show, and that’s freaking evil. What happened to our democracy?

Over the last 50 years it’s been systematically and methodically dismantled by the greedy, the selfish and the cruel: the COVID and Climate Crisis deniers, the wild-eyed greedy capitalist oligarchs, the angry white supremacists and the fundamentalist xenophobes. The brutal 30% on the extreme fascist right has taken control, emboldened by the apparently clueless 40% in the middle and the ineffectiveness of the progressive 30% at the opposite end of the political spectrum.

But wait, there’s more.

Mass shootings, people going hungry, increased depression and suicide, children lost in zoom schooling the last year and a half, voter apathy, totalitarian movements to restrict the rights of women, people of color, indigenous people and the elderly, a greatly stressed healthcare system, poverty, racism, domestic terrorists, stupidly expensive higher education, crumbling infrastructure and urban neighborhoods, lions, tigers and bears, oh my.

So this is our national trajectory of doom headed into Congressional midterms in 2022 as the press and his own party giddily lambaste our President for a predictably messy pullout of Afghanistan. With his popularity now plummeting, Republicans see a good opportunity to take back the House and Senate in 2022. Then what? Can this horror show get any worse?

It can and appears right now that it may. That really should scare the stuffing out of you. I know it does me.

So if there is reason to be optimistic right now, I’m struggling to find it. The Dark Side is winning, and the weirdos have most of the guns, while the great mass of American humanity is just happy to sit back and wait for what they define as “normal” and hit the tavern on Friday night after the high school football game to gear up for a weekend of college and professional gridiron idiocy.

My shtick is usually to try to tell you right here how we can all pull together to get this cluster fixed. But first let me ask you a pretty obvious question to which you will likely know the answer.

Why are they trying so hard to make it harder for everyone to vote?

You got it. The 70% is waking up and it scares them. We CAN get control of this mess, but we have to do it in overwhelming numbers at the ballot box. And that means putting a whole lot more compassionate people in office that are not in the pockets of corporations and oligarchs. We’ve seen what a few demonic Democrats like Joe Manchin can do to mess up a good thing, and Democrats also need to stop crapping on each other and assert the power they do have to stop the maniacal minority from controlling the agenda.

There are bright spots actually. The Trump rallies are increasingly unimportant and radical to the point now of being marginalized. More prominent Republicans are acknowledging that Trumpism long term is a loser. In California the stupidly expensive recall initiative by neo-Fascists was handily defeated. Progressive candidates in places like Boston and Cleveland are making a solid run for mayor.

But the 2022 midterms loom large. And Democratic performance since the election has not helped a whole lot. We have about a year left before that midterm election, and it seems like a solid way to head into that time would be for Democrats to step up right now and act like the majority party in charge. They could start by scrapping the racist filibuster, passing the infrastructure bill they want, expanding the Supreme Court and getting moving fast on the Climate Crisis in a big, big, way.

And a whole lot more. But Stuff like that. Just do it. We have nothing to lose, and the clock is ticking.

(Photo by J.E. Hargate)