Healing our national wounds will not be easy

 “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”   - Abraham Lincoln

In his second inaugural address, Lincoln attempted to assuage the heated emotions of a nation that had just been ripped apart by a Civil War, fought mainly over ending our national shame with slavery.  Inspiring as it was he still forfeited his life a little over a month later at the hands of a bitter opponent.  Since then, the desires for the South to rise again have echoed among white supremacists groups, emboldened early on with the release of the 1915 racist silent film, “Birth of a Nation”

The founders’ attempt at creating a united nation never really materialized fully following the ratification of our Constitution.  Race was and has been the unsettling issue that keeps us divided.  It was felt that following Obama’s election to the presidency that it would no longer be a contentious problem.  But systemic racism is perhaps as strong now as it has ever been over the last century and a half.  And there is little doubt that many of those Trump supporters chanting “make America great again” were simply anxious to remove a president they saw as an unnatural American of African-Muslim dissent.

I was recently reminded that the virtue of grace is given, not earned.  It was this attempt at promoting grace however that seemed to fall short for Lincoln.  Nonetheless, I believe grace should always be the guiding light be which we confront our adversaries.  This however doesn’t entail ignoring those people with deep-seated hates and who are bent on violence.  The specter of extremist behavior threatens stability in any society and opens the door to repressive authoritarianism.

In his recent article “A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Sociopath” conservative author and former Republican Tom Nichols cogently articulates what most of us have become aware of over the last four years.

“America is now a different country. Nearly half of the voters have seen Trump in all of his splendor—his infantile tirades, his disastrous and lethal policies, his contempt for democracy in all its forms—and they decided that they wanted more of it. His voters can no longer hide behind excuses about the corruption of Hillary Clinton or their willingness to take a chance on an unproven political novice. They cannot feign ignorance about how Trump would rule. They know, and they have embraced him.”

It’s not clear exactly how Trump will behave between now and January 20th when Joe Biden takes over that office but with Trump’s incompetence in handling the pandemic he claimed would disappear after the election, we’ll see it become more widespread and more detrimental to our economy.

Not wanting to be seen as a loser either, Trump will likely go out kicking and screaming much like the spoiled child being removed from the store by his parents because he didn’t get the toy he wanted.

In an interview conducted in 2014 by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Michael D’Antonio, Trump was asked to contemplate the meaning of his life. “I don’t like to analyze myself”, he said “because I might not like what I see.”   

In her tell all book about her uncle, Mary L Trump reveals how this loser demon came to possess Donald at an early age by his father Fred’s insistence that they inherit his killer instincts and a take-no-prisoners attitude.  It was this fear of failing in the eyes of his father that would have a life long impact and lead him to lash out later at John McCain as a loser along with the American WWI dead buried at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris, when he visited France in 2018

Biden will restore sanity and maturity to the oval office but Trumpism is something that will persist for decades and could become more competent.  Mutating this destructive DNA in ways that resemble civil behavior will require a resolve by all of us who plucked democracy from the ashes on November 3rd.  Hopefully through acts of grace but accompanied by a “firmness in the right as God gives us to see right”, the better angels of our nature should prevail.

American aristocrats are stealing your voting privileges

 

"The right of suffrage is certainly one of the fundamental articles of republican Government, and ought not to be left to be regulated by the Legislature. “ - James Madison

The quote above is perhaps more relevant today than when Madison wrote it back in August of 1787 as he and other commonwealth officials met in Philadelphia to form our Constitution.  The colonies had recently won their independence from the British monarchy and wanted to inscribe for posterity the rights of individuals to choose their own representatives in the newly formed republic.

There was the lingering fear back then that aristocratic powers would unduly influence our elected officials to advantage them, often to the detriment of those less powerful people who even then were negated from voting simply because they didn’t own property, were not males and were essentially not descendants of white European immigrants - conditions that wouldn’t change for nearly 150 years all totaled.

It became apparent to Thomas Jefferson as early as 1816 that the “aristocracy of our monied corporations” was already challenging our government to a trial of strength, “and [bidding] defiance to the laws of our country.”  To this day this threat is more prevalent than ever as lobbyists from various corporate interests are appointed by corporate-friendly administrations to head up those agencies that are tasked to oversee and prevent excesses that hurt all Americans, especially the poorest and least powerful amongst us.  The “swamp” that Donald Trump promised to drain is alive and thriving.

In it’s most dangerous form this monied interests has won over in almost its entirety, the Republican Party, aided in large part by a predominant news source that has violated the ethics of a free and objective press.  This arrangement now presents the gravest threat to one of the last vestiges of our representative form of government - the right of free citizens to vote.

In his Rolling Stone article, “How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich”, Tim Dickinson laid out back in 2011 how “the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.” 

It’s not that Democrats haven’t been guilty of pandering to Wall Street but they haven’t even come close to the speed and scope that the modern GOP has.  With the aid of GOP legislators, judicial appointments deliberately skirted basic rules of fairness and laws have been written to circumvent the oversight of state and federal agencies, leaving most low and middle income voters in harms way of polluting industries, paying higher tax rates than the wealthiest amongst us, and rigging elections to favor these corporate-friendly Republicans.

And if the planned chaos during the Georgia Democratic primaries earlier this year is a preview of how the Republican Party intends to steal the 2020 presidential election for Donald Trump, we can anticipate even greater social disruptions from the likes of the QAnon crowd and many white supremacist groups, opening the door for Trump to introduce “presidential emergency action documents,” or PEADs, “which are orders that authorize a broad range of mortal assaults on our civil liberties.”  An act that could find the Executive branch at odds with some military leaders.

Regardless of the outcome on November 3rd, it behooves every American to push for reinstatement of the checks and balances the framers intended for our democratic republic to survive.  If not, the autocratic maneuvers by the Trump administration and the unwilling GOP congressional leadership to stand up to this power play could well put us in line to join the ranks of Russia, China, Turkey, North Korea and Saudi Arabia.