~a column by Colleen O’Brien
One of my favorite quotes is from Winston Churchill – “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
Many times in a long life, I’ve done this, at the time not realizing I was doing anything extraordinary, but only so much later – now, in fact – realizing that I was never giving up, I was not settling for a permanent hell, I was going to keep trudging through it to the other side.
This did not mean that I’d not wind up in a different hell at some later date. But wallowing in any of the hells of our lives is defeat; moving on is not.
I confess to a recent four or five years of wallow, seeing no way out. Any positiveness I had? I worked to find it each day for the entire life of one man’s administration.
In a kind of general hell (populated by millions of my ilk) because of a leader who tweeted a lot to divert attention from his destroying longstanding allied relationships while tearing asunder my government and my democracy, I kept stumbling through a hell of startling oppressive actions against any ideal of goodness at all, hoping to reach the other side sane.
It was a slog.
Then a hard-hitting pandemic spread across the globe, intensifying the words and behaviors of the lying hell-maker.
Then I/we finally got rid of him by voting in a leader who took on the second hell-raiser of a virus and within a month proved that tackling a lethal problem rather than lying about its lethality works wonders.
I thought we had safely reached the far shore of hell….
But found that we were still within range of the angry liar who’s still lying.
And his various mouthpieces, which include Fox News, Q-Anons, Proud Boys, minority whips in both houses of Congress, anti-vaxers and people who think caging immigrant children is okay and admiring Putin of Russia, Kim Jon-Un of North Korea and Erdogan of Turkey doesn’t matter to the rights of humans.
With a legitimate election, we came out of the dark recesses of a hell with hope and the promise of normalcy in our leaders who showed up without having to tweet their way into the day but with a strong work ethic backed by integrity, goodwill and constancy. I read them each morning, relieved that business is being taken care of. This new leadership responds to the people of the country who are not the 1 percent. The new leadership are working on the most important thing in the world right now, the impending disaster of climate change
They are aware of the need for reforming our treatment of and our watchfulness over those who are supposed to
- protect our environment
- move our mail
- insure us that people hired to keep the peace not only keep the peace but do it equably
- handle our financial institutions so we aren’t cheated
- make, import and sell us goods that do not harm us
- educate our children equally, thoroughly and without decades of debt
- fix the pot-holed roads and the dangerous bridges
- invest in universal Wi-Fi across the nation
- catch up to the housing crisis, the necessity of living-wage jobs that do not harm the environment, absolute universal healthcare that is across-the board the same for the 99 percenters as much as for the 1 percent. [And the truth is, for starters, we can afford universal healthcare. Economist Robert Reich asked, “How are you going to tell me we can’t afford universal health care in this country when our proposed defense budget is $753,000,000,000?” That’s 753 billion.]
These people now in charge keep their antenna to the populace and thus know what we worry about; they form solutions, and they have the conviction to carry through. They know that we must tax fairly, something that was rigged against the 99 percent in the 2017 “tax overhaul bill” that gave all the breaks to the wealthy, poor, poor pitiful them.
The current leaders are not trying to divide us, they are trying to get both sides together to fix us, the American people, our lives, our land, our needed hand in the health of our planet.
The majority of us (which means citizens of all parties and no parties) understand intuitively what social justice means. It has to do with equal opportunity and safeguards across the board, not just for the ones on top. In other words, the things I’ve listed above. Our ways of living have been declining for the last quarter century because of a reneging on the ideal of a democracy – the pursuit of justice, liberty and the general welfare. We have been on a downward slope of understanding how it works since these mistaken thoughts were given to former president Ronald Reagan to say out loud to the nation: “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
When his speech writer penned those words for him, and Reagan spoke them in his jocular way, and the words were repeated ad nauseum for the next 30 years, we wound up with a me-first president who did possibly irreparable damage to our country and us; in fact, to the world.
My point is that hellish things happen in our lives, often of our own making but just as often not. If we are fortunate enough to live in a democracy, we have the say in social justice – the things that affect our lives. We can be active in making sure our elected representatives make it better generation by generation – for.all.of.us. – or we can die by the lie.
Lying politicians and their copycat spreaders of falsehoods will be – have been – the undoing of us. The truth is that the validity of the 2020 election has been proven again and again. The truth is that climate change is happening, and we have an obligation to ourselves, our children and each other across the globe to halt it or mitigate it. The truth is that there was an insurrection at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021 and the perpetrators must be prosecuted.
We are being beaten by lies, and I don’t know how we get out of it. I keep looking for goodwill from both sides . . . and I am relieved that we have it at the top, once again, at least for this while. If we can indeed keep going, there may be a no-hell on the other side.
