Whew! We Made It!
Whew! We got here, and it was by no means certain we would in one piece. We as a democracy dodged a very serious bullet, but it’s hard to feel much more than relief right now.
I’d sure like to wildly celebrate the fact that we kicked a damnable fascist’s arse big time, but it came at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and the suffering of millions of people for too damn long. It’s impossible to feel much joy when so many continue to suffer so much.
A real President like Joe Biden says the right things at the right time, and that’s what he did yesterday. Unity is an interesting concept right now, in light of the fact that all of us includes some pretty high profile criminals, traitors, racists, fascists and pathological liars who still support the MAGA-maniac that just escaped Washington like a fart in the wind. But as I processed what a real President was saying, it struck me that he wasn’t asking us to make Kumbaya with the most miserable unrepentant miscreants. He said that if enough of us come together, we would carry all of us forward, and I can buy that.
I think that is possible, despite the ugly truths that were yet again so shamefully revealed about our country in the last four years. Yes, there needs to be healing, but a body doesn’t heal until its disease and sickness have been successfully treated. We understand now too deeply that our disease remains racism and our virulent sickness is white supremacy. Our health as a nation will be compromised until both are under control. At present, they are metastasizing at an alarming rate.
We also learned that maybe we are slightly less exceptional than we may have thought, meaning certain social illnesses infect us the way they have infected societies around the globe down through history. Racism, fascism, greed, cruelty and criminal deception are sadly part of the human condition, and our politics has tolerated and encouraged an ongoing evolution of these evils in one political party for the better part of the last 50 years. What happened at the Capitol January 6 was on the natural trajectory of this cascading cultural madness. The analogies to Nazi Germany didn’t seem so extreme anymore, did they?
Neither did the “drinking the Kool-Aid” quips with respect to the Republican Party. The Jim Jones Guyana references make perfect sense and give us all pause as to how humans can be so easily duped into acting in ways that betray their self-interest by evilly charismatic, authoritarian leaders. For whatever reason, humans are uncannily susceptible to the Big Lie, and the avalanche of Big Lies propagated by the fascist jerk that became President since he came on the political scene with his “birther” BS so many years ago have been colossal whoppers.
So the Trump mind-controlled zombie cult is no different than any other cult, except that it is so wide-ranging and so deeply infects our Congress. It’s not going away anytime soon, but shrewd Republicans seem to be heading in the direction of expunging the cult’s putrefying moral rot from the Republican Party now that Trump has been weakened. That said, I would take Trump’s parting statement of being back in some form as both a horrifying promise and a heartfelt threat.
So, there is a lot of hard work ahead to stuff this gargantuan festering pack of lies and disinformation back in its Pandora box and seal it tightly. We build unity by focusing on the values and behaviors that distinguish most of us from some of us. You know, those crazy old-fashioned things like decency, honesty, humility, generosity, fair play, expertise, wisdom and relying on factually accurate and verifiable information to make decisions.
And we heal by electing intelligent, compassionate people of integrity to office at all levels of government. We grow together by taking care of each other, embracing our multicultural strengths and supporting an activist government that does things to help reduce the suffering and improve the lives of all our citizens as its prime directive.
With that in mind, there should without question be enough of us to move our nation in a healthier direction. That’s a unity we can all embrace. Because we have been very ill the last four years, and now it is time to get to work so we can get better.
Just take your cue from the breathtakingly brilliant Amanda Gorman. She said it all so perfectly. What a hopeful inspiration she is to all of us!
Now the work begins.
