No, I am not Dave Wasserman, calling another election.
What will ensue in this posting is my cumulative reaction to events of the past few days.
It will also be shaped by observing and hearing the reaction of others, including the students I teach — I postponed tests scheduled for class meetings on Thursday/Friday to instead have discussions of what had happened Wednesday and since.
I have watched far too much TV, spent far too much time and energy reading.
So let me explain by starting with this: in those discussions with students, after giving themn a chance to express their reactions, and ask questions, I told them thatover the past quarter century the primary course I have taught is US Government, and that as I watched television on Wednesday I thought I was seeing the United States coming to an end.
My first political activity was in 1956, where as the ten year old child of two moderate Republicans I put leaflets on cars at the Larchmont NY train station supporting Dwight Eisenhower. By 1960 my parents were supporting JFK, not because they were upset at the Eisenhower Presidency, but because both had been in the Office of Price Administration with a lawyer like my mother, one Richard M. Nixon. My father never left the Republican party officially, but by the time he died in his mid-80sin 1995, he had become increasingly alienated from them.
As a resident of Virginia I am officially an independent. Now heading toward my 75th birthday in May, I can think of only two Republicans for whom I have ever voted John Lindsay for Mayor of New York and Dave Foster for Arlington County School Board. I have been active in Democratic politics in Media PA and in Arlington VA since the late 1970s, but have long maintained at least cordial relationships with people who were active Republicans.
I now find that impossible to do for anyone who places their loyalty to what is now clearly the party of Trump and to that odious man than it is to the Constitution and the liberal democracy that — for all of its acknowledged flaws — has been the place where I, a grandchild of immigrant Jews who is an outspoken liberal, a supporter of civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights, could be an active participant in the civic, economic, and political life of my community and my nation.
I was aware of the chatter online about possible violence this week, and have a hard time believing that those responsible for the safety of our government were unaware.
I have watched as the rhetoric in opposition to the results of the Presidential election have escalated. I was not surprised at Trump’s failure to acknowledge his loss: he had made it clear more than four years ago that he would treat any loss as his being cheated, and yet in 2016 it seemed as if he was more concerned with building a movement by which he could enrich himself that in destroying our democracy as a means of acquiring and retaining power not merely to enrich and aggrandize himself, but to protect himself and those who enable him from criminal prosecution.
There are those who enable him who clearly do not believe in democracy.
There are those who know better who seek power for themselves.
There are those who have sought to use him and his supporters as a means of enriching themselves, some of whom are already rich beyond any possible reasonable standard.
There are those who support Trumpand his movement for reasons that clearly mark them as “deplorables” — they are racists, homophobes, religiously intolerant, unwilling to accept any vision or belief that might imply they were not superior creatures.
I not only teach government, but I have also taught history, religion, and economics. I am too aware of the past both of this nation and of the world to turn a blind eye to dangerous trends, things that should serve as warnings of where we are headed.
Let me correct that last sentence — warnings flashing red of where we have already arrived.
It is clear that we were very lucky on Wednesday. We well could have seen major figures in our government at a minimum taken hostage, and worse, killed by extremists among those who broke in.
We are not out of the woods on that, with credible threats against state and local governments, against tech companies especially as they crack down on the dangerous rhetoric appearing on their companies, and the very real threat of further actions in our nation’s capital as the forthcoming inauguration approaches.
We need a reckoning.
I acknowledge the importance of freedom of speech and assembly, but there are limits — there have always been limits.
It cannot be acceptable that flat out lying in the halls of Congress goes on repeatedly without sanction, as occurred clearly on Wednesday going into the wee hours on Thursday in the objections to the acceptance of the electoral votes.
There are standards about prosecuting incitement to riot and insurrection. But the context in which the inflammatory remarks by Giuliani and both Donald Trumps on Wednesday clearly warrant at least a serious investigation of possible criminality and not the apparent dismissal by the acting US Attorney for the District of Columbia.
There is more than enough evidence from public statements and social media to bring charges of seditious conspiracy and of insurrection — all who participated in discussions of clearly illegal acts are in jeopardy if ANY participant did an overt act in furtherance of that conspiracy.
We are perilously close to yet another time of civil disorder and violence. In the 1960s we saw some of that from the political left, to be sure, but we saw far more violence in the attempts to suppress civil rights and civil liberties, then to be sure but earlier through too much of our history, and unfortunately far too often in more recent years. Think back to Oklahoma City, for example. Think of a man dragged behind a trck in Jaspar Texas or a young gay man brutalized, tied to a fence and left to die outside Laramie Wyoming. Think about the police brutality, killings by mercenaries in a square in Iraq (now pardoned by Trump), racial murders and brutality.
Tuesday Georgia elected a Jew to the US Senate, in the state where Leo Frank had been lynched. The capital of that state had a synagogue bombed because it had allowed Martin Luther King Jr to speak there. It also elected a black man, who holds the pulpit previously occupied by King, and whose gubernatorial mansion was not so long ago occupied by a man who came to fame by handing out axe handles for his customers to use to prevent Blacks from coming in. This was notable progress of which this country should be proud, but that achievement has been overshadowed by the violence both of rhetoric and action the following day in our nation’s Capitol.
There is so much I could write now, but that is insufficient.
But I cannot remain silent.
In theory sometime in the next week or so I — as a school teacher who lives in Virginia — will be able to be vaccinated against Covid. But in the past 3 days something around 12,000 Americans have died from the virus, and my wife — who has a compromised immune system — still cannot be vaccinated, so our lives are still restricted — in part because of the actions or lack of actions of this administration, and of its enablers in Congress (and among some governors around the country, because what happens in one state does not stay there — look at the disastrous results of the motorcycle rally in Sturgis SD).
There needs to be public shaming and rejection of many. Perhaps it will be insufficient, but we must start to draw clear lines and impose clear consequences. There are many names I could list — Cruz, Hawley, Mo Brooks, Kevin McCarthy, Peter Navarro, the Trumps, Giuliani, Sydney Powell, Lin Wood, … the list goes on and on.
We cannot simply move on, look forward. History tells us clearly that doing so only emboldens to further action. We saw that in Germany in the last century, where relative leniency after the Beer Hall Putsch lead in about a decade to the beginning of the Nazi era with the tragic consequences that ensued. We have seen it in the failure to properly hold Nixon to account, even as many around him saw their lives destroyed. We saw it in being willing to go lightly on Reagan and his enablers with respect to Iran Contra and with the pardons for some affected by William Barr in his first stint as AG. We cannot go down that path again.
I am a Quaker. I try to avoid violence in either words or actions. I believe in forgiveness, although I am of a mind that any pardon should be preceded by an acknowledgment of the wrong being forgiven.
I do not own a firearm, and even now I am not inclined to purchase one, even though I was highly trained in their usage during my time in the Marines. We have far too many firearms in the hands of too many who are prone to violence, and it does not matter whether they perpetuate that violence because of bigotry or because of emotional/mental disorders — people die as a result.
This country needs to address our firearms issues lest we see small scale civil war breaking out across the country.
Those in law enforcement who selectively enforced the law — harshly against those they view as “other” and not at all against those they view as like them — should be removed from any positions of authority. If policemen they should be fired. If elected sheriffs they can still be prosecuted for civil rights and other violations.
We may have very little time left to address these issues before we devolve so far that we cannot recover.
I am sad that I must write words like this.
I teach government to adolescents. I am close to the point that I can no longer do that, because we are that close to not having meaningful government, not when those who are ostensibly running the government are distorting and destroying it.
I have no sense of peace.
I have seen enough.