~ a column by Colleen O’Brien
We have a political party run by preschoolers; the kind of toddlers who are tyrants and act out at all times unless they get what they want when they want it. It’s impossible to be around them and maintain your own sanity, for they are bratty, hurtful, mean, and they will get even if you impede them in any way. They love the spotlight, which they get too often because of the nature of our news outlets, which are predominately bottom-line private companies directed toward outrageousness.
Right now, the 2-year-olds in the House of Representatives are trying to make a case for impeaching President Biden. They have no evidence against him and therefore no merit for impeachment, but this is a minor point of governing. They simply want to get even with the two impeachments and four indictments against an ex-president for his illegal life. Our elected employees in the House have no time to fix prominent issues of the country – borders. health care, education, voting rights, abortion rights, travel nightmares, climate crises, artificial intelligence, DACA (deferred action for childhood arrivals). . . for starters.
That we are in this predicament is startling. And it comes from the Republican party working for decades to undermine the voting rights of Americans who are not them. The gerrymandering — gerrymandering is a legal corruption of the democratic process, a manipulation of your voting district with the intent to create advantage for only one party within those boundaries. That barely makes sense, right? The result of their gerrymandering is a map of a voting district that looks like their brains—so convoluted there is no there there, but because of it, a candidate can lose the popular vote and become president – voila! # 45, AKA Captain Chaos.
Putin has put in a good word for the ex-prez. You’d think that in America this would be a liability for the liar-liar pants on fire ex-civil servant. But the fans of the MAGAPrez, following him and his galaxy-size ego, praise the Russian autocrat. Don’t these people know what autocrats/dictators/strongmen do to a populace? They think Hitler’s Nazi Germany was a suitable place to live? They think Russia has any freedoms left?
How to open the eyes of people who have been conned, hood-winked, lied to . . . . It is our burden to help the fooled. Yikes. This may be beyond us. It is difficult to gainsay lies that have been repeated so many thousands of times, they take on the color of judicial notice (the sun comes up in the morning is judicial notice; Trumpo saying he won the election is not truth; it is a lie.)
Is it a bigger challenge than we can surmount? To give up is to be doomed to tyranny in all its forms – banned books, banned health care for women, banned subjects such as your born sexuality, selective history (only white male stories). Can we talk to our MAGA friends in a calm, soothing, compassionate voice? Convince them that a democratic government, the one where we must work to make it work, is the only path to take? If we don’t, we can blame laziness and the whine that it’s too burdensome to oppose banning of books, for just one little thing. Who cares when I want to read Dr. Seuss’s If I Ran the Zoo?
To work day after day and year after year for a cooperative existence may just be beyond our idea of a comfortable life. Please, have we begun to think that all we need is a leader to tell us how to be, what to think, what to read, what to talk about, how to treat people who aren’t our color? If we think that’s freedom, well, poor us. We might as well succumb to eat, drink and be merry. Until they take that away from us because they’ll soon enough figure the less we have, they’ll have more.
