Its Always Darkest Before the Dawn

Last night I stayed up until 1:00am watching the election returns for a congressional race in Western Pennsylvania.  I sat on the edge of my seat as the returns rolled in, waiting for the indication that Democrat Conor Lamb had squeeked out a victory over the Republican Rick Saccone in what has historically been a solid Republican district.  Whether he won or not was not really significant.  What was significant was that there had been a 20 point change in preference in that district in only 18 months since the general election and what that means for the future. 

Lamb apparently won, and the Republicans nationwide are now officially worried about the prospects for losing the House next year in Congress.   As my mother would say, “Halavai!” Could it be that finally we are seeing the pendulum begin swinging back the other way?  Hopefully and maybe!

The horror of this is that we still must wait another 11 months to see any change in direction as a republic, assuming a positive Democratic result in the midterm elections.

Over the past 16 months we have witnessed the deconstruction of our government and the rise of a kind of collective despair expressed by the majority of our citizens.  (Remember everyone, only 1/3 of the electorate at best, consistently supports the current Republican agenda)  It feels like a generalized, increasing sense of desperation as we watch the mechanisms of our government groan and creak from the strange ways it is being twisted and tangled by a corrupt Republican majority.

The real damage we are suffering, however, is the fading of norms of behavior that we always considered essential to citizenship in the United States: courtesy, honor, truth, good character, integrity. Instead we see the resurgence of less appealing traits like lying, cursing and foul language, character assassination, sexual predation, rudeness, crudeness, cruelty, hypocrisy, misogyny—all exampled in good measure by the President of the United States and his lemming-like sycophants in Congress.  The acceptance of this behavior by evangelicals, all the sheep of the Republican Party who parrot the pronouncements of Trump, McConnell and Ryan without question, and who abdicate their responsibility to protect our children, our citizens, and our Constitution from evil, both foreign and domestic is the real threat.

Our legislators have failed us.  On subjects like preventing further cyber attacks by Russia, gun control, climate change, income equality, and a whole host of other important issues, Republicans have used their positions in Congress to obfuscate, obstruct, stall, stonewall and generally try to enrich themselves at taxpayer’s expense.  They misquote, mislead, and spin everything in ways that are untrue or half true.  The Republicans, as exampled by the House Intelligence Committee majority unilaterally closing down the Russia investigation, would rather protect the President than our country’s security and sovereignty.  Apparently if there is any evidence or proof of collusion or continued attack by the Russians on our democracy, they would just rather not know about it!  How demoralizing!

The youth revolt on gun control is a bellwether for a renaissance of the lost mores and ideals implicit in representative government, democracy and citizenship in the America that we all thought were our solid foundation; only to witness their slow fading away over the past several decades. 

These young citizens give us hope for the change we all yearn for that will bring back the country we feel we have lost.  A cultural change needs to occur and the teens leading this movement are showing us how deeply we are mired in the paralysis of partisanship and division.  They are showing us a way to redeem ourselves.  These are the victims of our national and state legislators inability to act and they will not stand for it anymore.  I can’t wait for them to be eligible to vote.

The recent special elections and interim election replacements are also bellwether events that portend change.  The implicit wave of change hinted at by the results of these special elections gives us optimism that intelligence, compassion, and humanity in government will soon return as the cleansing purge of the midterm elections begins to clean the rot away from the mouldy grip of compromised representative government that holds us in its grip.

It cannot happen fast enough!