First of all, let me preface this piece with a disclosure. I do not identify with either political party, I am not a Democrat and I am not a Republican. I like to do my own thinking and I will be damned before I will let somebody do my thinking for me. I like to do my own research, come to my own understanding, look at all sides, and then make my own analysis and evaluation. Like I said, I would rather be dead than let somebody do my thinking for me. I am not a “team player” in the sense where I will follow the so-called company line. I guess that is why I never was a good organization person either. I could not accept something just because somebody said it was so – nope, I cannot do this and never could.
I wanted to stay away from politics, not because I’m uninterested, but because I find myself increasingly depressed by the state of our politics and nation.
I have looked at what happened after our November, 2020 election and then of course, the attack on the Capitol on January 6th in an attempt to stop the formal counting of electoral votes and the peaceful transfer of power.
It seems about a third of the country, maybe more, are fine with the attack on the Capitol and their only regret is that they were not all there to participate. I will go out on a limb and say that you could identify this group as Trump’s base. Ok, there is something wrong with this right away. If you cannot recognize that January 6th and what led up to January 6th was wrong and what has transpired since January 6th you never will, and you probably are part of the crowd of January 6th or the January 6th crowd wanna bes.
I am going to go a little further with this discussion of the attack on the Capitol and its supporters by saying that it is fairly easy to identify them geographically – look for the so-called red states and you stand a good chance of having found them. Go one step further and look at the states that seceded from the Union in 1861 along with some border states and you have also come close to locating most of the January 6th crowd.
I do not see how we can continue like this. If you support what happened on January 6th because you were there or you support it in principle, then you are supporting a break up of our democracy. I will go one step further and it appears to me that the only real agenda you have is Trump and tearing down the institutions that this country was built on. Folks did just the same thing in 1861 for many of the same reasons that are common to Trump’s base today. And, if you peel away the layers of the onion here, a lot of what is motivating the current Republican Party is an unspoken interest in white surpremacy. And sometimes, this latent racism is not unspoken and out there for all of us to see whether it is the made up outrage over CRT (critical race theory) or the teaching of any history that is not from some “Golden Book” published in the Confederacy.
Now, let’s take this a little further and look at the politicians gaming all of this, and yes, that is what they are doing, gaming the Trump cult for their own self-interest and benefit. I have listened to many of them dance on the head of a pin in the last few months trying to justify their allegiance to our Constitution and the foundation of this country as well as their allegiance to Trump. The two are not consistent, plain and simple. To try and make an argument that they are is buffoonery on steroids.
We need to settle this and settle it clearly and now. We are at risk of losing the country we have. Talk of secession and a shooting civil war came out of Trump’s last rally. It is not a good thing that there are so many of these militia groups around the country. You would have thought we learned this lesson after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. The militia group that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were members of is a direct line to today’s militia groups and the militia groups involved in the attack on the Capitol, i.e., the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers among others. Think about the group that was planning to kidnap and kill the Governor of Michigan earlier this year and also the group that took over Michigan’s state Capitol building. These private militias are more than willing to use force to take this country down. They train and organize in hopes of a civil war.
Ok, back to our politicians – our whole country needs to get to the bottom of January 6th. We need to know who was involved, the plans made to make this insurrection happen, and what support and planning came from the Trump White House. All parties should want this. What we do know already makes it hard to clear Trump of collateral support at the minimum, and maybe much worse, but we need to know and get to the bottom of this. If you love this country and drape yourself in the kind of patriotism so many of the Trump base like to don, then you would want to get to the bottom of this too and hold those responsible accountable.
To try to move on and forget the lead up to January 6th, the insurrection itself, and the denials and verbal camouflage since will be a wound this country will not heal from and grows every day to become an increasingly lethal wound.
We need to make some choices, openly recognize what these choices mean and act now. Letting the country live under the “Big Lie” and Liar will destroy us as a nation, and I increasingly believe this is what is intended. This is the only agenda of the Trump cult, destroy us as a nation, tear down what was built over the last two hundred plus years, and bring about an autocracy (a fancy word that means no democracy).
I wanted to avoid politics, but I see no choice – the bad will not go away because I choose to ignore it. Hiding from the truth does not make the truth non-existent – it is still there. We need to face the truth and fix us before it is too late.
One thing for sure, there are no good outcomes if we continue doing what we are doing. Everybody loses in this mutually destructive game of nuclear political ping pong. The table will blow up on the players and then there is no table anymore, no country that we know remains.
A Vermonter Writes - A Pathfinder 