Opinion/Your Turn: Don't just sit idly by and watch the destruction of democracy
Published Dec. 25, 2022 Updated Dec. 29, 2022
EDITOR'S NOTE: A change to this story was made on Dec. 29, 2022, to clarify the emphasis on a quote from Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
On June 12, 2016, in his commencement speech to graduates of Stanford University, historical documentary filmmaker Ken Burns made history himself. After nearly 40 years of “diligently practice[ing] and rigorously maintain[ing] a conscious neutrality,” Burns said the time had come when he could “no longer remain neutral, silent.”
He then warned his audience about a presidential candidate who was “glaringly not qualified” for the job. He pleaded with those listening: “You must do everything you can to defeat the retrograde forces that have invaded our democratic process, divided our house, to fight against, no matter your political persuasion, the dictatorial tendencies” of a candidate of “terrifying Orwellian statements; a person who easily lies, creating an environment where the truth doesn’t seem to matter.”
Modestly calling himself a “student of history,” Burns continued: “I recognize this type. He emerges everywhere and in all eras. We see nurtured in his campaign an incipient proto-fascism, a nativist anti-immigrant Know Nothing-ism, a disrespect for the judiciary, the prospect of women losing authority over their own bodies, African Americans again asked to go to the back of the line, voter suppression gleefully promoted, jingoistic saber rattling, a total lack of historical awareness, a political paranoia that, predictably, points fingers, always making the other wrong.”
Do I need to tell you who Burns was talking about?
Burns continued: “This is not a liberal or conservative issue, a red state, blue state divide. This is an American issue.”
Even back in 2016, Burns warned of how that man’s non-stop ranting and tweeting had given him “the abundant airtime he so desperately craves, so much so that it has actually worn down our natural human revulsion to this kind of behavior.”
And that was more than six years ago. How many tweets, how many rants since then? I think this quote says it best: “The man is utterly amoral. Morality does not exist for him.”
Except Ken Burns didn’t say this. Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz said it.
“If this man were to become president, think about the next five years," Cruz continued. "The boasting. The pathological lying. The bullying. Think about your kids coming back and emulating this.”
These predictions have come true and then some. And then some. And then some more.
Yet through it all there are people on both sides of the aisle who keep mouthing ridiculous platitudes about how we should all just eat together or golf together or have a group Kumbaya.
Someone with a rather different take on the current state of affairs, American pastor John Pavlovitz, wrote recently: “Dear Good Americans, Whatever you wish more good Germans were doing in Germany in 1933 — you need to be doing that now.”
So when you hear that candidate’s supporters say “White Lives Matter,” remember not only how abhorrent it is to say something like that in a country whose “peculiar institution” led to the enslavement of nearly 10 million people over the course of almost 250 years. (And in a country where that former president of the United States and current candidate for the job recently broke bread with an avowed white supremacist, racist, antisemite, and holocaust denier. If you don’t already know what I’m referring to, Google it.)
But also remember what doesn’t matter to them anymore. Truth doesn’t matter. Facts don’t matter. Common sense doesn’t matter. Common decency and civility don’t matter. Logic doesn’t matter. What they said last year or last week or even five minutes ago doesn’t matter. History doesn’t matter. Democracy doesn’t matter.
Nothing matters except white lives and the vast conspiracy. These people know in their hearts that the election was stolen or that moon landings were faked or that the Earth is flat or that they’re jabbing us with microchips. And that the Illuminati really, really do exist and are bringing the New World Order and ancient astronauts have visited our planet and Democrats are pedophiles or reptiles or … does it even matter what I’m writing at this point?
If you are one of those who have drunk the Kool-Aid, then God help you. But if you’re not, if you’re still a human being with an intact rational function and a conscience, then be as aware as you can of what is happening around us all right now, how it is truly the case that a mass of unhinged and malevolent “MAGA Republicans” (as they are still euphemistically referred to in the “mainstream media”) are literally living next door to you, sitting next to you in the pew or the ballpark, probably even living under your roof, and they are dangerously close to ending the American experiment that they have spent so much time extolling, and proving once and for all that American exceptionalism was a myth.
They don’t believe in democracy; they are waiting to crown an Emperor, to hail a Fuhrer. Don’t just sit by and watch them do it.
Gregory Baird, South Dennis
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