The War Came To Me
(I wrote this four years ago to someone I know. I’m posting it here and now because the situation grew even more dire in those intervening years. As a courtesy to the original recipient, I’m removing their name and any identifying information, but the message still stands and so do I.)
Why should I believe anything any Republican has to say? The GOP spits on vets and tells 'em it's mana from heaven. They betray the best interests of their constituents, they do not believe in rule of law except when they can use it as a cudgel against those they dislike, they sold out every value they've ever claimed to possess to prop up this toad as long as it keeps them in power one election, one year, one month, one day, one hour, one second longer.
I remember having a conversation with a Republican several years ago when Trump was peddling his schtick about Obama's birth certificate. This Republican sounded almost gleeful over Trump doing this, making Obama respond to an outrageous racist demand, a demand never made on any other president of the United States.
Boy, do I remember that conversation...
And the poison that Trump spewed into the American political system then, the GOP supported it. Oh, the party used all the mealy-mouthed legalisms -- "Well, I don't know, could be interesting to find out" -- but that was a God damned* racist dog whistle and the GOP knew it and the GOP let Trump blow it as hard as he could.
The GOP let Trump climb on the stage in 2008 as a faux candidate so he could promote The Apprentice; okay, fine, maybe they thought he’d at least going to make a real attempt at securing the nomination.
Nope, just hype.
But then the GOP let him on the stage again knowing he was bogus, because he would stir up the white evangelical base the GOP.
I know these white evangelicals, I grew up among them, I understand their thinking, and while all of them may not be hateful bigots, I'm hard pressed to think of one that isn't a white supremacist.
The Nixon and the GOP made their deal with the devil by catering to that crowd, a complete rejection of everything the Republican party used to stand for.
Then the GOP let Trump on the stage a third time, and this time with alt-right money and white evangelical churches openly supporting him and the Russians dropping their turds, he squeaked by a narrow electoral college win, losing the popular vote by the biggest margin of any candidate who won the presidency.
All this might have been endurable if the GOP put a leash on him and kept him from filling the cabinet with corrupt cronies who systematically looted the country.
But they didn't.
Behavior that would see any Democrat impeached or indicted, they turned a blind eye to. We can literally count the number of Republicans who stood by their principles on the fingers of one hand.
I have skin and bone and blood in the game. Soon-ok never used to get hassled by racists...until Trumo. I have Latino and African-American family members who face an increase in white hostility, gay and transgender friends and acquaintances more anxious about their personal safety than three years ago.
My mother-in-law died from covid early in the pandemic. For that, I don't blame Trump directly, because even the best efforts to keep a disease out will eventually fail, and once a disease gets inside a community, some people will catch it and among them some die.
But not 63,000 in under 4 weeks, which is when Soon-ok’s mother died isolated in a hospital. She might have caught covid anyway even under the best testing and isolating conditions ala South Korea, but there wouldn’t been another 63,000 deaths in a month’s time (400,000 for the duration of Trump’s presidency).
That's a screw up of several orders of magnitude.
She died alone and frightened and gasping for air.
I'm not forgetting that.
Ever.
So kindly stop telling me to back away from it. That's not going to happen. The war came to my doorstep; I didn't want it but here it is.
© Buzz Dixon
* God damned here used in its strictest theological context.
