Now that we have a new administration running the country that isn’t taking its orders from a dark Kremlin basement radio transmission originating from the SVR, we’re now presented with the opportunity to learn if, courtesy of the republican party and 74 million of its supporters and the neoconfederate cultists, seditionists and nazis who enthusiastically shilled for this past 4 years of dysfunctional madness, are capable of crawling back into their caves for a few moments and let the rest of us take stock of what is left of our country.
What can be said of the legacy laid bare before our feet from the leadership of Donald John Trump and Addison Mitchell McConnell, Jr.? The numbers are staggering: almost a half million of us dead from a pandemic disease that most objective, thinking people would agree was almost certainly deliberately mismanaged for someone’s eventual profit; the most explosive national unemployment in America since the Great Depression; the biggest trade war deficit since the enactment of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act; the worst soured relationships between our allies since the Vietnam era; the most antagonized racial tensions since the late 1860s; the most disparate corporation - to - worker earnings ratio since the Gilded Age of the 1890s; a Supreme Court packed with originists, evangelicals and boofers that harkens back to the Whig Party of the 1830s; police departments that handle complaints in black communities like Reconstructionist carpetbaggers, and people who storm state and Federal capital buildings with drawn weapons getting arrested and thereafter receiving a small fine and a slap on the wrist by a sympathetic, republican-appointed judge and a promise extracted not to do that again with a wink and a nod… and on and on and on… the conservative republican Trump version of America has made the lawlessness of the Chicago crime syndicate turf wars of the 20s and 30s look like a Sunday school picnic.
And so, as grange halls throughout America’s heartland rig out in song with resounding choruses of “Yes, Jesus Loves Me” while another hundred thousand of their brothers and sisters die of Covid 19 because choked-up, mismanaged vaccine supply chains are delayed by political red tape; more children and their parents go hungry for another night because unemployment funds are stalled another week as neocon misanthopists suddenly find themselves concerned about the budget deficit - AGAIN - the one they created with the tax cuts for their wealthy donors; as international hatred, tensions and resentment build from years of Washington cockiness and belligerence when our vulnerability begins to be more and more apparent as we become divided and disorganized as a nation… dare we ask ourselves if we are better off now than we were 4 years ago before Trump took office? Several among us — specifically in southern states — are actually batshit insane enough to say “Yes!”, which should actually scare the hell out of you.
As the principled, kind-hearted, reasoned ones among us who think of themselves as “the adults in the room” sue for “UNITY” along with their republican conservative friends, I only offer this: since I’ve been politically active starting in 1970, I’ve learned to accept the finer points of human nature for what they are from a realistic perspective and discard the idealism that often clouds the kind of judgement that always results in repeatedly dangerous conclusions. At this point in my life the most useful thing I’ve learned in trying to reason with any republican (or for that matter any conservative of any stripe, evangelical- religious or otherwise) is that I may as well be trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. Unity will never come about unless and until conservative-minded people are made to understand that liberty and the rule of law belongs to and applies to EVERYBODY in all walks of life, of every color, orientation and persuasion - not simply those who believe exactly as they believe. That includes rogue police, militias, gang members, mercenaries, ex-border cops, or anybody else who decided to take the law into their own hands. It will take courage and conviction to apply equal standards of justice to both republicans and democrats in and out of government who violate the exact letter of the law, resulting in arrests, serious, objective trials, sentencing, punishments, prison sentences and very public exposure of misdeeds by prominent political, evangelical, religious and corporate luminaries to get the public’s attention.
For the sake of the preservation of civilization and democracy - as painful and expensive as it might be - this has to be done… or deviant fascist infections like Trump and McConnell will happen again.