“May you live in
interesting times” is a familiar Chinese curse. I’m not sure who put the hex on
us, but it seems to be working, and not in a good way.
On 9/11/2001 President Bush addressed a stunned nation: “Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.” Twenty years later we see a nation’s resolve bent and twisted, most divided since the Civil War and political power struggles threaten our very democracy. Interesting is not the same as good.
Interesting, isn’t it that in a perverse way armed insurrectionists can attack the nation’s capitol and then be described as typical vacationing tourists? It is interesting that members of Congress at the highest levels of leadership threaten companies and organizations that comply with Congressional Committee demands for evidence about the insurrection.
It is interesting that nearly half of the House and Senate opposed the formation of a committee to investigate the seditious acts of January 6th. Only in interesting times would partisan political leaders consider staging a demonstration at the capitol in support of those who tried to take America down. The hex is working!
Nobody can rationally believe that the 2020 election was stolen, was rigged, or the result of technological tampering from dead dictators from South America. And yet members of state legislatures are enacting voter suppression laws that they hope will discourage people from voting in future elections. Across the country, other states are planning to copycat the new suppression laws of Texas. Rather than encouraging people to vote, they want the opposite. The hex is working!
The nation spent a year and a half trying to quell the spread of a vicious virus that infected millions of people and killed over 600,000 people. The virus mutated into the Delta variant, then the Lambda variant, and now to the Mu variant. New covid cases are again at all-time highs, hospital ICUs are at capacity, school children are being infected by the hundreds of thousands, and a large swath of the population chooses to ignore proven public health practices and enact laws that forbid those practices. The hex is working!
State leaders, thirsty for power, drink from the fountain of lies and extremism flowing from ultra-right-wing cable programs and out-or-control social media. They forbid schools from demanding that students wear masks in the classroom, that adults be required to mask up in stores and restaurants, or even discourage people from getting vaccinated against the virus. These people, mostly state governors, are willing to play roulette with the lives of school children, too young to be vaccinated, in order to satiate their political base.
Governors do these dastardly acts knowing full well that the majority of Americans do not support their demagoguery. They know that we could have beaten this virus if people had been encouraged to mask up, social distance and get the vaccines when they became available. But they listened, instead, to the talking heads on cable news that spewed false information across the airways and the internet. The hex is working!
Over fifty percent of Americans are in favor of vaccine mandates and mask mandates, but if you look at the answers to the surveys it is apparent that one’s viewpoint is very much along political party lines; about 80% of Democrat-leaning folks favor the mandates and about 70+% of Republican-leaning folks are against them. And that is the problem, isn’t it? Healthcare is now political.
So it is fair to ask if we are any longer one nation. In 2001 the nation held hands and joined the fight against foreign terrorists. Today the homegrown terrorists seem to want to bring the country to its knees. A functioning nation would have arrested the people who invaded the capitol on the spot. A functioning nation would have governors that joined arms and proclaimed a call for using well-tested public health strategies to combat the covid-19 Alpha strain. A functioning nation would have a Congress that united to overcome the threat of internal terrorist activities rather than laud those who tried to thwart the will of the people.
A united nation would be aghast at state attempts to suppress the very thing that distinguishes us from despotic countries, every adult citizen’s right to vote easily. At what point are we no longer a nation with common beliefs and core values? When do we say that voting, so fundamental to whom we are, that those who oppose it should be replaced?
We know two things for sure: when a person or group of people, or a party, wants to take over a country for themselves, they first attack the press, suppress voting in free elections and take over the school curriculum. Too many, in the name of increased freedom, are doing everything in their power to decrease our freedom.
We live in interesting times, times of opportunity, and danger. We can take the opportunity to bring the country together, make us a united nation, or we can simply watch the activities that divide us tear us further apart and live with the danger of losing our democratic republic. Where is the steel of our American resolve to be a free people? Why have we let extremist ideology shake the foundations of our nation?
