I took last week off from writing, taking a trip with Joy and a good friend to Ely, Minnesota, one of our state’s unique and quaint northern small cities.
We did not watch the news and for the most part I stayed off the internet. It was a refreshing break from Trump’s craziness, and I do mean craziness.
“Let them hit San Diego. Let them hit Los Angeles,” he said during my break, in point of fact inviting Iran to do so. He has repeated twice since the first time he said it.
That an American President would speak of American cities being hit with nuclear missiles by a nation he went to war with is unconscionable. To claim he was joking makes it worse, not better. And the people cheering when he said it is sick and insane. In fact, the whole MAGA movement is sick and insane.
Which brings us to the real issue before us – the November mid-term elections.
There are so many reasons to vote to end Republican control of the Senate and the House that no one reason is sufficient, but all of them point to goal before us as voters, to limit Donald Trump’s power.
We cannot afford to have a Senate and House that will continue to refuse to do its duty to prevent Trump’s grab for power going unchecked as they have done for the past two years.
Republicans have no courage before Trump, no moral principles that would compel them to fight for what is right, no concern for others that would cause them to resist selfishness and greed.
If Republicans keep control of the House and Senate, we won’t just have more of the ugliness and incompetence we have had for two years. We will have worse because Trump is getting more and more insane and out of control.
We, the people, must take power away from them. If we don’t we will prove Liz Cheney right when she said in December of 2023 that she was worried the nation was “sleep walking into dictatorship.”
“He’s told us what he will do,” she said. “It’s very easy to see the steps that he will take,”
And we can again see what he will do without a defiant Congress. It’s late to try and stop Trump, but it’s not too late. The mid-terms are our last best hope, and it will be on all of us if we don’t do it.
This is the second time we have faced the threat of losing our country, of the American experiment in self-government coming to an end.
The first was when my southern ancestors made the decision to dissolve the union. Loyal Americans fought and died to save the country and did.
On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln captured the challenge their sacrifice presented to those still living at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery three months after the Union Army dealt Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia a critical defeat.
He was not the main speaker, renown orator Edward Everett was, and spoke for two hours. Lincoln’s address lasted only about 3 minutes. No one remembers what Everett said. We all remember what Lincoln did.
He urged those gathered to renew their own commitment to the cause to which the soldiers they were honoring “gave the last full measure of devotion.” Only in that way, he said, could the living ensure “that these dead shall not have died in vain.”
And then he explained why the living must do their duty as those who had died did theirs: “…that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
One hundred and sixty-two years later, we today are facing the second great threat to that government of, by, and for the people.
We have a rogue President with an “army” of Americans as foolish as those southerners more than a century ago who convinced themselves they alone should rule America.
The MAGA Republican movement Trump is leading is no different from the Confederacy of southern states determined to bring an end to the American experiment of self-government, the first time in our history.
Thankfully, this time we don’t have to fight for our country with guns, at least not yet. We have to do it by voting! And that act of citizenship is no less urgent or important than Lincoln’s call to uncompromised devotion to fighting those who would divide and destroy the nation.
What stands in our way most of all is complacency, apathy, an attitude that justifies itself for doing nothing by claiming they’re all crooked so there’s nothing we can do.
That way of thinking fails to acknowledge that every politician who holds office today was elected by us.
They didn’t declare themselves a Senator or a member of the House. They are there because we put them there.
We can blame them for not doing their job, but we have to blame ourselves if we allow them to keep their job.
We bear ultimate responsibility for the people who lead our country. The government of, by, and for the people we currently have, and have had before now, is the government we, the people, chose to have. And it is a government we can change.
November 3 is our Gettysburg moment. We are the people who created the government for ourselves we now have, and we must be the ones to keep it. No one can do it for us.
On November 3 we will find out if we are up to the challenge as Lincoln’s generation was.
Leave a Reply