February 21, 2018
Less than a week after watching their classmates and teachers gunned down, the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have galvanized the nation with their heartbroken eloquence and mobilized the nationwide March For Our Lives on March 24th. Many adults have been inspired by their courage, with George and Amal Clooney, Oprah, and Steven Spielberg each donating $500,000 to underwrite the costs of the march. Unfortunately, we also saw the emergence of depraved trolls who attacked the teen leaders as puppets of “left wing” forces or paid actors. The willingness of people to attack the teen victims of horrific gun violence is the grimmest evidence to date of the lengths to which the adherents of this nihilistic death cult will go to cling to their metal phalluses. Naturally, they are taking their lead from the narcissistic reprobate in The White House, who tried to use the deaths at MSD as a shield to deflect attention from revelations in the latest round of Mueller indictments.
We should steel ourselves for the inevitability that more awfulness is yet to come, because the truth is, those of us who stand for justice, integrity and humanity are winning, and our opponents know it. On Monday, in the Pennsylvania gerrymandering case, the state Supreme Court issued its own legislative map, having struck down the original maps as violative of the state constitution. Republicans, in their arrogant intransigence, submitted “new” maps that were still impermissibly gerrymandered in their favor, (Source: “Pennsylvania’s New Map Helps Democrats. But It’s Not a Democratic Gerrymander,” by Aaron Bycoffe, fivethirtyeight.com, 2/20/18). The new maps are likely to result in one to two additional Democratic Congressional seats.
Last night a Democratic woman candidate, Linda Belcher, won a Kentucky state senate seat by a 68-32 margin in a district that Trump won by a 72-23 margin (Source: “Last night, Democrats flipped a Kentucky state legislature seat in a district Trump won by 49 points,” by Matthew Yglesias, Vox.com, 2/21/18). This marks the 37th seat that has flipped from Red to Blue since Trump’s election (Source: “Have Democrats gained 50 seats formerly held by Republicans since Trump was elected?” by Allison Graves, Politifact.com, 2/15/18).
This news is not cause for complacency, but fuel to fortify us in the pitched battle ahead. We have seen the determination of corrupt oligarchs and their brainwashed foot soldiers to prop up an illegitimate, anti-democratic regime. There is no depth to which they will not sink, no law they will not break and no ideal they will not gleefully toss in the ash heap of history to maintain power. In the last five days alone, we have seen proof that they will sell out our sovereignty and attack our children. Anyone who does not forcefully and actively reject and resist them is complicit and not to be trusted (I’m looking at you, Mitt Romney). Remember the wise words of Frederick Douglass, “Those who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground….Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will.”