Since cheap Republicans robbed school districts of civics classes and replaced them with “social studies” in the 1970s and 80s, generations of Americans have grown up with little to no understanding of how government works. And when you don’t understand how something works, after a while you start to think it’s working against you.
Perhaps that was the goal all along of Republican and right-wing Christian Nationalist groups who started organizing letter-writing campaigns in the 70s — to truly leave Americans wholly ignorant of how their own democracy works. If so, mission accomplished.
Sadly, with zero idea about how our government works, most Americans don’t even realize how easily they can become engaged and involved in their own communities and beyond, if they chose to.
But if you’re really selfish, you may even come to think a Nazi-saluting South African billionaire is doing you a favor when he and his little band of tech terrorists eradicate our federal state, which took decades to build, in the middle of the night. Smash and grab in the name of rooting out an imaginary “deep state” that Republican conspiracy lunatics insist is there, somewhere, among all the quietly capable civil servants who took an oath to uphold the laws of the United States and work on things like making sure mid-air collisions don’t happen.
These inspectors and civil servants, with decades of institutional knowledge and experience, should be treated like royalty, not bullied into a humiliating retirement after a lifetime of service on behalf of you and your neighbors.
Government is a mirror. It’s us. Hold it up at any time, and the health of what you see in that mirror is the health of our nation. Government is only as good as those who we elect to run it. And when you elect a criminal president, you get a criminal, retribution-driven administration that holds American states hostage and enacts a coup d’etat in our own capitol — something once unimaginable in our nation, at least until Jan. 6th.
With Trump 2.0, the insurrectionists are picking up right where they left off. But this time, instead of rubbing shit on the walls of our nation’s Capitol, they’re driving Teslas with stock options.
When you lose components of democracy, as we are at this very moment, you never get them back. And when the billionaire megalomaniacs, seditionists, and whites-only fundamentalist Christian weirdos that Trump hand-picked to infest the White House finally come to take away your right to vote, they’ll tell you they’re doing you a favor then too. You may even thank them.
The Founding Fathers are astonished at how you’ve let Trump peel away your liberty, and make you hate your own nation’s ideals. Our nihilistic national disgrace continues.
Photo © 2010 Tommy Hough, all rights reserved.