Thursday, December 3, 2020

A Battle On Our Hands

 45's madness is growing, and now Flynn, newly pardoned, joins the chorus of dingbats called for martial law and a redo on the election; one flingdip declaring, "I've seen the real election results, and Trump won every state, including California."

It's one thing to spout nonsense, but it's a particularly vile form, and it shreds the tendons of our Democracy.
To make matters all the worse, this insanity (for what else is it?) has a ready audience - millions of evangelicals who have been taught for several generations now to fear the government, despise public education, hate liberals, and see Democracy as an enemy of their faith, a faith that gladly excludes most of humanity from the realm of God's love, a faith that denies science, and faith clamoring for heroes, men of small minds and bulging biceps and the women who service them. And another group clamoring for more of this deadly noise: social conservatives, the Ayn Rand crowd, gun-lovers and wannabe guerrilla-fighters, white supremacists and misogynists. And, of course, the hedonistic rich, for whom money is everything, and "their" money is all that counts. To these unhinged groups Trump has made promises, and for them, he's kept them. He is their man, their savior, their god incarnate, to save the nation, church, home, and our women folk. It's a sick gathering of the deranged, lionizing a man of limited intelligence and abundant hate. Surrounded by a group of henchmen and gun molls ready to take "their" nation back again.
We're gonna be in this mess for a long time to come ... no sense pretending otherwise. We can be hopeful, of course, but let's not be pollyannish ... ever since our founding mothers and fathers winked at slavery in order to create the union, the seeds of failure were sown. We fought a Civil War to protect the Union, but we were unable to remove the cancer.
There is plenty of good in this land, millions who are of the light, and are willing to stand up and stand firm for what is right. But the plates are full, and the challenges are real. We have a first-rate battle on our hands.