Violence. There’s plenty of it around these days, in the streets, in the prisons, in private homes, in the damn weather. The visible, tangible, bruised and bloody public face of violence is nearly anywhere you care to look. That’s the violence we all read about, watch, follow in the papers, whatever your personal media highball. The right has become adept at portraying that in ways that effectively make people afraid for their lives, and they have used it to slowly chip away at Americans’ personal liberty.
However, when I think about the actual real world effects of Donald Trump’s shredding via executive order of regulatory agencies, the “wall” that keeps predatory corporations partially at bay, I have to ask myself: Is this not also violence? If you take away the Meals on Wheels program, you commit violence against our elderly and infirm. If you take away after school programs for kids, you not only commit violence against them, you increase the violence in their communities. Jeff Sessions wants to possibly nullify policing agreements with a number of cities around the country, agreements which are intended to reduce violent encounters between law enforcement and the public. And then, you know, TrumpDon’tCare’s proposed marooning of 24-26 million Americans without viable access to healthcare over the next decade, Americans who will collectively be sicker and die younger than those of us who have it. That’s violence, if it should come to pass; violence being committed by a government against its own people.
What should we make of that? And I mean ALL of us. Americans, regardless of political party, ethnicity, religion: everybody who’s here. What should we make of a president who promises coal miners their industry back then destroys the government programs that would help sustain or retrain them until the pipe dream came true? Violence.
What it boils down to for me is this: We have somehow been convinced that government occupies some kind of other, upper dimension separate from us, the governed. This works to the advantage of charlatans, particularly in the legislature. Their only job is to represent our interests. That is the one and only thing we elected them to do. By maintaining this kind of royal-corporate-dimensional “we are not thee” they are relieved of doing their only job and are free to experiment with their whims. What they forget, what we forget, is that there is no separation between the people of the United States and the government of the United States. They are one and the same.
In trying to destroy the regulatory structures that protect all Americans, what is this administration attacking, exactly? The government. The people of the United States. The people of the United goddamn States. The Republican party has been waging guerrilla warfare on the government for decades. They have now released the Kraken.