Time For Sober Thinking

Today, the state of Georgia will vote and decide who will control the 117th Senate.  Yesterday in the New York Times, 4 former senators plead for the return of 'regular order' to the processes in the Senate.  Regular order is the code for less partisanship, more collegial debate and more bi-partisan cooperation to debate and legislate with the interests of the people ahead of personal aggrandisement and acquisition of power.  What  a novel concept! 

No matter what the result, there will still be a cadre of anti-democratic members of the Senate who now worship seditious acts camouflaged as 'searching for transparency in our elections' rather than democracy and the will of the people.  They have shamelessly stepped forward to support an effort that is designed to overthrow the results of a free and fair election and the resultant will of the electorate.  

What we are witnessing is an attempted coup.  That kind of event has no place in a democracy.  The question now is how to deal with a legislative body that has been corrupted by the virus of autocracy with members sent there by portions of our country's citizens.  More than half the Republicans in the House and over a dozen Republican senators now view democracy as a roadblock to acquiring power.  And the insanity of all this is that 74 million people in our country have endorsed this view.

 

Unfortunately, there is no easy and quick solution to this problem.  The longer term solution is to vote these people out of their positions of power, however this will only result from some fundamental changes in our society .   The key to that kind of planning is to educate the citizens of our country on the premises and fundamentals of democracy and the true history of our republic, and to change the way we think about voting.  Only then can an informed electorate make intelligent choices and send people of character and integrity to represent them.

 

So how do we do that?

 

In an editorial Sunday, the New York Times gave an accounting of the wreckage left by outgoing Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, listing a whole spate of administrative actions she had engineered, including "initiatives that rolled back civil rights protections for minority children as well as actions that turned the department into a subsidiary of predatory for-profit colleges that saddle students with crushing debt while granting them useless degrees; a series of department communiqués that had the effect of letting school districts off the hook for discriminatory disciplinary practices and other potential violations of civil rights law." 

 

Obviously, those actions need to be reversed, but what we must do as a nation is to re-invigorate the Department of Education to start teaching our children about democracy.  Currently there are only 8 or 9 states that require Civics courses or Government courses in their junior and senior high schools.  That needs to change.  We need to be teaching our children about the mechanics of our nation as a democracy starting in kindergarten!  Curricula need to be developed to include lessons on honesty, integrity, and the meaning of ethics.  Those threads of instruction need to be continuous through high school so that graduates exit their secondary educational time with a clear understanding of how our government works and their responsibility as citizens to preserve it.  And perhaps most important, we need to be teaching children how to consume media and information.  Our children need to be taught how to analyze information and be able to recognize falsehood and manipulation.  Media literacy needs to be taught from the very beginning , even in daycare settings.

 

The other fundamental change needed is a reorientation of our citizens to the importance of being active in a participatory democracy--in other words how important it is for them to be engaged and to vote---in EVERY election.  It couldn't be more apparent how critical it is given the recent experience with our 2020 elections.

 

The difficulty with this kind of long-term strategy is that we will not have a crop of 're-educated' young

people for the next 10-25 years.  What do we do in the meantime?  Those of us who still believe in democracy and the American experiment must hold the line against a heretofore unrecognized mass of citizens who do not understand or believe in the will of the people and the rule of law.  They may call themselves Republicans or conservatives, but they are really radical autocrats.  They believe that election results are optional.  They believe that acquisition of power trumps an election.  Elections are fungible with brute force.

 

All one needs to do is watch the news and hear supporters of Trump speak about the issues of the day.  They don't have any understanding of the issues.  They simply parrot talking points or repeat misinformation they get from social media. They have no foundation in understanding how our system works.  That is a tragedy.  It is unlikely that any of these people will ever be convinced that they are being misled,  we can only hope to minimize their influence until the arrival of a better educated populace, by being stalwart in our defense of truth, facts, integrity, honesty and ethical behavior.