It's Making Me Numb!

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It’s all so tiring, isn’t it?  Just turn on the television and all you see and hear is impeachment, obstruction, vitriol, division, blah blah blah!  I don’t know about you, but I am exhausted by this.  Remember the days when watching the news was actually enjoyable?  You could sit there sipping a scotch or drinking a beer and be entertained by stuff going on in the world that was interesting and far removed from whatever your life was doing at the time.

Now we are constantly subjected to the foul-mouthed sewage that emanates from Trump at every occasion he uses to speak. 

I am tired of seeing the empty brained people positioned behind him at his rallies who moan their agreement with every insult he hurls at the press, the Democrats, war heroes and patriots.  Isn’t it sickening to see the tripe coming from his press secretary who lauds every word of our ‘genius’ President?  I am sick of all the Republican congressmen who somehow can’t even agree that what this man has been doing is worth a positive vote to try to understand what he is doing.  Rules and practices that the Republicans have created and supported when they were in power are suddenly a sham, a witchhunt, Soviet style procedures….their sanctimonious  proclamations make me want to vomit.

Honestly, if this creep is re-elected, I might just have to move.  My country will have lost its mind.  If you look at how in just three years our foreign policy, our institutions, our very way of life has been degraded, it is a tragedy.  The people he has appointed, the judges he and his henchman Mitch McConnell have confirmed to the courts, the standard of civility and  speech that our children are exposed to every day, the turn towards racism, white supremacy, disengagement with the rest of the world that used to depend on the integrity of our ideals is numbing!  I would never have thought that we could be so depleted in such a short period of time.

My perspective on the stability and foundational solidity of our American experiment is shaken.  If you had a chance to read Tom Friedman’s editorial in the Washington Post this past week, it should make you afraid.  In all the years I have been reading Tom’s posts, he has never been so demoralized by the condition and direction of our democracy.  He is warning us that there are people who are ‘breaking America’.  Unless we have a groundswell of patriotism and a real understanding of the jeopardy we are in as a nation, we will shortly find ourselves beyond help.

Review what Trump’s administration has done to our entire regulatory structure.  Measures that our governmental system has implemented over the past 70 years to protect our environment, to protect our monetary and economic system, to protect us against corruption have systematically been altered or removed.  But beyond all that, look at the people who are representing us in the halls of Congress.  Half of them do not believe in the Constitution which they took an oath to defend.  If you support the obstruction of legitimate Congressional efforts to procure documents, or subpoenaed testimony, you do not believe in the Constitution.  Trump and his sycophants reject the separation of powers doctrine and the rule of law.  If you believe Trump can do anything he wants and not be held accountable, you do not believe in the separation of powers and the Constitution.  You therefore do not believe in the foundation of our democracy.  

Look at the Republican party in Congress.  Do all of them support the obstruction of justice and the legitimate oversight responsibility of the people’s representatives?  Apparently so.  They can’t have it both ways.  History will judge them harshly.  Those who rejected lawful, Constitutional actions will be seen as the cause of America’s decline.

And what about us?  What about those of us who wring our hands every day and find it hard to believe what we are witnessing?  What do we do?  The end game of what is happening has two possible outcomes.  Either our country will devolve into a corrupt system where those who support gerrymandering and deny citizens the right to vote will be in control of our government and you can expect more graft, more corruption, illegality and the metamorphosis of the United States of America into the equivalent of a banana republic , or there will somehow be a groundswell of patriotism that will evolve into a cleansing moment for our country where we are able to rid ourselves of the cancerous presence of people who are only concerned with maintaining their power and money at all costs. 

There needs to be a ‘renaissance’ of the American idea.  We need to experience the same ‘revolution’ our founders went through when they conceived of our republic.  Having finally extricated themselves from a monarchy, they knew what the potential dangers were, and brilliantly created a document and a set of behaviors that would guide us through moments like this.  If we reject and forget what they went through in the creation of this country, we are lost.

The Democrats are not maniacal, crazed, unhinged politicians.  They are patriots trying to save our nation from descent into chaos and autocracy.  They want to preserve the Constitution and preserve our democracy.  That is not a political statement, it is simply the truth.  Those who believe otherwise will ultimately be judged harshly by history.