By Butch Freedman
With the mid-term elections only two months away, I’m feeling both hopeful and increasingly nervous. If we were still dealing with a functioning democracy, I would not be worried at all, and would feel certain that a fair election would throw this corrupt and cruel administration out on their ears. But, and this is a massive but, we are no longer living in a fair world. The threats to our constitution and free expression are everywhere, a continual downpour from the poisoned well of trump and his enablers. I do not expect a fair election. It’s abundantly clear that the republican party has decided that the only way they can prevail in these elections is to interfere with them, to insist that there is massive voter fraud, and that the only way to stop it is to make it hard or impossible for Democrats and independents to vote at all.
Of course, every investigation into voter fraud in this country has shown that there is only a miniscule amount of illegal voting—a hundredth of one percentage point, and even those instances more likely due to human error than to deception. There can be no doubt that this upcoming interference in people’s right to cast a ballot is due entirely to a fabrication and entirely illegitimate. But we can’t look away or pretend that it can’t happen here. It already is. A whistleblower in the Post Office has exposed the plan to deny the use of mail-in ballots to millions of people. It’s incredible that the USPS has become a political tool of the psychotic president. But that indeed is the case. Almost every facet of what we once believed was a fair and decent part of government has been corrupted with trump loyalist appointments. I often wonder how these people, so willing to do the bidding of the addled autocrat, live with themselves. Have they lost all sense of decency and honesty? The answer is clear, if disquieting.
The barrage of offenses can cause us to want to hide and find ways to avoid looking at the news. “It’s all too absurd,” we tell each other, and go on to other discussions where we can ignore the constant buzz saw of nonsense coming out of D.C. More and more, I notice my friends unwilling to talk about politics (if you can call it that) or government. Conversations about trump or Iran or orgiastic ballrooms are quickly cut short. We grimace, express disgust and then look away. I understand why. The landscape of horrors is overwhelming—especially the ongoing cruelty to immigrants by todays’ storm troopers— ICE. It is almost unbearable to read and see these abuses of human dignity. Getting angry is understandable. We should be outraged. But now we have to make sure we do everything we possibly can to put the brakes on, to stop this nightmare. This is not the world we worked for, not those who served in the Peace Corp or those who marched for civil rights, or voted for Obama and had hope in progress and in science and in a world where intelligence and honesty mattered and everyone, despite their background, had a chance at a decent life. All of that is in danger of permanently slipping away if trump is not stopped.
I’m imagining a post-trump world, one where these last few years will be seen as an aberration, a world where we return to the work of democracy and freedom, rather than one of oppression and destruction. But to make it happen, there is much work to be done, and, as painful as it is, to not look away.
