A year later.
I have had such a visceral response to the events in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 and the continuing pandemic that I have had to wait to write about how both have affected me.
I’ll start with Jan. 6. I feel awful. I feel disheartened, defeated and disgusted. How could we generate such obtuse hatred when we, as a nation, have so many ways to express our dissatisfaction with government? How could this body politic grow people who see our Constitutional rights reflected, distorted, in their mirrors as only theirs? What authority has unleashed such a motley collection of “me, myself and I” and those who are like me … onto what is, by the world’s reckoning, the gold standard of elections? Our democratic processes aren’t perfect, many times frustratingly imperfect, but with the continuing cycle of elections and those that protect the election process, they work. What combination of chicanery, lying and deceit has shaped the need to overthrow the mechanisms that have served us well for so long? Who profits from this?
Aiding and abetting the insurrectionist cause is this elephant in the room and no, I’m not describing a Republican, rather the outmoded, awkward piece of antiquated constitutional requirement: the Electoral College. Designed during a time when most of the citizens couldn’t read or write, when distances were difficult, when senators were appointed by state legislatures, this second level of voting was supposed to be a combination of state and national votes, preserving the rights of all, allowing each state to vote for their own ends (some of which were less than good.)
Well, it hasn’t worked out that way. Now elections are won and lost by concentrating on those states with enough electoral votes to reach the magic number of 270. Attempts to change the results of the ballot box, bullying calls from the White House, spurious and costly legal charges of election malfeasance, ridiculous charges of mystical changes to ballots filled the days after the election. Failing these attempts, a violent, illegal attempt to attack the duly ordered process of certifying the votes from each states occurred. Calls for the death of the Vice President, the Speaker of the House and other members of Congress under the flags heralding the name of the losing candidate for president were witnessed by the nation as they occurred on television. We watched in horror as the outnumbered Capital Police fought to secure the safety of Congress while the White House also watched and made no move to help.
Do you hear the drum beat of them against us? “Us” is whomever you feel like allying yourself with. There are the groups seeking to weed out those who don’t look like them or who don’t pray like them. And within those groups are the subgroups who eschew admitting those whose ancestors came from specific countries and areas. We are talking people who find melanin a pass or fail factor in who should vote. And we are also talking about people who have suffered some economic losses that they put at the feet of government because they don’t know where else to lay the blame. And there is social change, so rapid that it makes your head and heart spin. Who is allowing this to happen? Who can we blame? Who can we set apart? What issues can rally the troops? Who profits from this? Local, national or international?
In every election, there are those who voted for the winner and those who voted for the loser. None of those who voted for the Democrat candidate in 2016, 2.8 million more than those who voted for the Republican candidate, rose up and threatened the winner who only won in the Electoral College. In the 2020 election, Biden won both the popular and the electoral vote. The bruhaha over the legitimacy of the 2020 election was manufactured long before anyone registered a vote. “If I don’t win, the election is rigged” …. ridiculous. Even the Attorney General of the U.S., appointed by and supporter of the former President, declared that there were no irregularities that would have nullified the results. How many times, for instance, did Georgia, hand count the ballots? And, logically, how would only one line on millions of ballot s be manipulated while others were not?
As a nation, we share a common belief in the constitutional defined process that allows all of us to promote our agendas with the caveat that the majority rules, with the minority(ies) retaining a loud and effective voice in that process. There are those whose goals in this quagmire of discontent are seeking to dismantle the administrative state this creates, to move toward autocracy by keeping the dividing fires burning. I ask again, who profits from this?”
I watched the craven, criminal way that the losing team tried to intimidate, bully and cajole others into undoing what we, as a people, did, leading to the invasion of the Capital by armed insurrectionists enthralled by the lies and demagoguery of those who would profit from their actions.
The divisions that have erupted around the election and the pandemic fall into the same pattern. Tyranny is not being asked to wear a mask, to take a vaccine that will protect the recipient and save the health care system for everyone … no, it is the poisoning of minds with the minutia of personal pique. It is the promotion of freedom under the guise of the license of “my rights.” It is the careful inculcation of the idea that our system doesn’t work, that my vote and yours are equally not valid, that professionals charged with protecting public health, once heroes, are now suspect, that bizarre conspiracies eclipse evidence-based facts.
It’s time to analyze why we have politicized everything and who profits from it. Most people want the same things but differ in the methodology for achieving those goals. Beyond getting rid of social media-generated conspiracies and requiring “news” to be without partiality, I offer these “kickstarter” words to an already packaged answer: In order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity….do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. It’s time to relearn what it offers, what it means, how it works.
Or you could listen to the voice of the snake in the apple tree …urging you to eat the forbidden fruit.
