Last Exit Before the Toll.....

In all my years,  I have never felt as anxious about the future of my country as I do today.  After 3 years and 4 months of Donald Trump as President it is certainly remarkable how deeply our country has become riven with despair, confusion and hate.  Trump has fanned the flames of hate and violence while at the same time maliciously, purposefully deconstructing our democracy.  Yesterday he approached the final step toward dictatorship by warning our governors that he will send in federal troops to ‘dominate’ America’s streets which he and his Defense Secretary called the ‘battlespace’.  He wants to use our military on the American citizenry.

If you have been watching the videos of how some police and national guard troops have responded with cruelty and unnecessary force, it is hard not to compare our America with countries like China, Russia, Turkey, Iran or Syria or other autocracies where the objective is to subdue and dominate the citizens.  We have arrived at the brink of something I never thought I would see in the United States of America.  We are on the edge of descending into civil war, brought about over the past many decades by the white majority subjugating the black and brown members of our society.  The grievances of the protestors, who for the most part are demonstrating peacefully, have been ignored and rejected for the past 100 years.   The proverbial pigeons have come home to roost.  The litany of white supremacist behaviors on the part of police has grown too long.  Trump will try to persuade us that Antifa is behind all of it...we know better.  True enough that there are criminals using these protests as a 'screen' for their incitement to violence, but that is only a symptom and result of where Trump's administration has led us up to this point.

When you mix this brew of hateful behavior with economic injustice and inequality, and stir in a pandemic that has left hundreds of thousands of citizens (especially the black, latino and minority communities) sick, dead and unemployed, you have conditions that are ripe for riots, violence and national instability.  This toxic mélange has been fertile ground for the hateful rise of the kind of leadership epitomized by Donald Trump.  But he is not the root cause of all that we are suffering from.

The conscious and willful subjugation of the rule of law and our founding principles of government by the Republican party over the past several decades is perhaps the root cause of where we find ourselves today.  This is actually surprising since the Republican Party used to be associated with conservative government and strict Constitutional adherence.  Somehow, they all lost their way because of their greed and hunger for power.  Now we have a Republican Party that is lost; that remains mute at the bastardization of the system they used to so vocally support.  It’s breathtaking actually!

And Trump marches on…..swinging the bludgeon of our military at the citizens he is supposed to care for.  He is the ‘strongman’ we always said was the antithesis of what we believed in; what we have fought world wars to bring down; what we have left our blood and treasure in the sands of foreign countries to avoid having here in our homeland.  If you think I am an alarmist, how do you reconcile the image of Donald Trump holding up a bible as a prop in front of a church he expropriated for his photo op by scattering peaceful demonstrators with tear gas, armed troops shooting rubber bullets and ‘flash- bangs’ while helicopters, at his direction, hovered at rooftop level over the crowd to frighten and intimidate them so he could walk across LaFayette Park to get his photo.  There is a similar picture of Hitler doing the same thing.

Events are getting away from us, my friends.  There is precious little time remaining before we pass the point of no return.  I am not sure what any of us can do individually, but collectively we must use the only thing remaining in our arsenal: the vote.  Protect it as best you can.  Support all efforts to insure the vote to ALL citizens.  The last exit before the toll is ahead in November….Turn on your blinker!!