by Lynn Mandaville
President Donald J. Trump is not competent to be president. He lacks the requisite tact, compassion, temperament, experience, education and emotional maturity to hold this office.The Republican Party has morphed into a men’s club of white privilege, dedicated to preserving a male dominated status quo that demeans and excoriates women, minorities and non-traditional sexual orientations.
The Democratic Party has allowed itself to become an impotent gathering of parrots who cannot evolve an effective means of combating the bipartisan political trend of representing themselves rather than their constituents.
Those are MY words. And aren’t they grand?
Just think, I have criticized the president and both political parties, and I can rest assured that I will not be killed for my writings. I will not be spirited away, perhaps tortured, murdered, perhaps dismembered, and my remains carted away for expressing opinions that the government may not like.
I live in a country that enjoys the constitutional protection of the First Amendment. I am free to speak, to write, and to have my opinions published and read in a free press. Right alongside of fellow writing-heads such as Army Bob, Ranger Rick, Basura, and the Subterranean. We sure don’t write in lockstep with each other. We represent the patchwork of ideologies that make up America. And though each of us is different from the other — male and female, conservative and liberal, ex-military and never military, optimist and pessimist — all of us have the commonality of Constitutional protection under law.
So why do we Americans sit idly by and allow this administration to drive a bigger and bigger wedge into the citizenry of the nation, to make us more and more a country of us vs. them, when we share a heritage as noble, idealistic, and humanitarian as the one founded on the Declaration of Independence and a Constitution that took so long to be hammered out and forged in the fire of a baby nation called the UNITED States?
It pains me that we allow the likes of the President and both houses of Congress to divide us, to engage in pissing contests with each other instead of listening to what their electorates want.
We’ve all seen the statistics. Most Americans want some form of gun accountability, yet no one in Congress steps forward to lead the charge. Most Americans favor Roe v. Wade, yet Congress allows the Evangelical right to influence them on overturning that legal decision. Most Americans distrust our current administration and take issue with the corrupt practices that are allowed to continue under our president (violation of the Emoluments Clause, among others), yet no one in Congress attempts to rally a force to contest these violations. Most Americans say that they value education for the children of America, yet they are not alarmed by attempts by our Secretary of Education to undermine public education and institute religious schools funded by our tax dollars.
To say that I despair for the direction our country is taking is an understatement. Of late, I am paralyzed by thoughts that I am witnessing the decline and fall of what was once a beacon to the world of peace-futuring.As I watched this morning’s update on the disappearance and certain assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, and listened to our president’s laughable responses to this horrendous human rights violation, I thanked the Great Beyond that Providence had let me be born here.
As imperfect as our nation is, and as much as our so-called leaders have allowed it to slide further from the ideal, I can still speak my mind freely. I still have some control with my vote, though that’s mostly because I’m white and not challenged at the polls… yet.
This week, following President Trump’s interview with Leslie Stahl, I intuited among friends that a certain malaise has overcome some of us liberals. It’s as if we recognize that Trump has worn us down to the point that we want to give up the fight out of a sense of futility. And that bothers me even more than the continued efforts to divide we, the people.
When we give up, the collective has won. To resist becomes futile. We become just one more life form absorbed by The Borg, one more poor human being consumed by The Blob, one more mind in the clutches of the Body Snatchers.
If you are, in my not-so-humble opinion, an American worth his or her salt, you will get yourself to the polls for the midterm elections on Nov. 6th. You will vote your conscience, be it Republican or Democrat. And, I hope, you will be discerning to look for those who will speak FOR YOU, not for a party line that cares only to preserve the brokenness that exists in Washington, or for a quasi-religious Evangelical movement that claims to be doing God’s work.
For 30 years I attended the United Church of Wayland. Among the role models in that congregation whom I still try to emulate was a woman named Norma Hudson. Every single year that I knew her before her death, she would give one single message to the church’s high school graduates on graduation Sunday. The message was the same every single year. It was one word. VOTE!
After Norma died, on graduation Sunday, someone in the congregation would rise to repeat her loving admonition to the graduates, and to the congregation as a whole. I believe the tradition continues to this day. Now I presume to have the wisdom of Norma Hudson, and admonish those among you readers who need it, but in my own distinct way:
On Nov. 6th, get up off your complacent butts and go out and vote, damn it!
(You know who you are! If the couch fits……)
Our nation’s future depends on it.
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