January 1, 2021
Now that the Biblically disastrous year 2020 is in the rear view mirror, and with it, less than three weeks remaining in the disastrous Trump administration, the temptation for all of us will be to return to “normal” as quickly as possible. After a year of death, isolation and massive economic disruption, we crave the ability to return to the rituals and pastimes of our recent past, to bury any recollection of this traumatic year.
As understandable as that urge is, we must resist it. If we fail to examine the underlying reasons that our country was brought low by a racist, amoral sociopath and the out of control spread of a pathogen, we risk prolonging our current crisis or precipitating another one. We may want to believe that once Joe Biden is sworn in as President in less than three weeks that we can go back to paying cursory attention to politics, confident in the knowledge that our federal government is once again helmed by competent people who believe in the Rule of Law and who don’t wake up every day looking for ways to use their power to persecute the marginalized.
Yet, as exhausting as this last year (and the last four years) has been, we cannot succumb to that temptation. We ignore the 74 million people who voted for a continuation of the chaos and cruelty at our peril. Not only is Trump fanning the flames of division in defeat, but several sitting Senators are eagerly auditioning for the role of the next Trump.
Kelly Loeffler, the appointed Georgia senator locked in a tight election battle with Reverend Raphael Warnock, attracts former Klansmen to her rallies and co-hosted a New Year’s Eve concert featuring country singer, Riley Green whose song “Bury Me in Dixie” features the lyric, “I wish Robert E. Lee could come and take a bow.” Texas Senator Ted Cruz offered to litigate the baseless Texas challenge to the election results and has been raising money for his own campaign committee off of the Georgia runoffs, (Source: “Ted Cruz’s Runoff Fundraising Is Actually Going to His Campaign. He’s Not Alone,” by Lachlan Markay, The Daily Beast, 12/30/20).
The most dangerous aspirant is Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who began last week by echoing Trump’s populist call for $2000 stimulus checks and ended this one by announcing that he would object to certification of the Electoral College vote. Unlike Trump, a short-fingered vulgarian who has never read The Constitution, Cruz and Hawley are products of Harvard and Yale Law schools, respectively, who understand precisely what they are doing— making a naked bid to be the leader of an authoritarian, white supremacist movement.
Around the country, the horrifying persistence of police brutality shows that there are plenty of adherents for such a movement. On December 22nd, a Columbus, Ohio police officer responding to a call about an idling car (!), shot and killed Andre Hill in cold blood. Hill was in the midst of delivering Christmas money when he was gunned down in a neighbor’s garage. Two Columbus police officers watched Hill “struggling for his life for 5 minutes and 11 seconds” without rendering aid, (Source: “Andre Hill’s friend told police he was just dropping off ‘Christmas money’ when he was shot, new body camera footage shows,” by Kristina Sgueglia, Taylor Romaine, Sonia Moghe, and Amir Vera, CNN.com, 12/31/20).
In Minneapolis, residents are protesting another police killing of a Black man, Dolal Idd, on December 30th. Police have deemed it a “probable cause weapons investigation,” and have reacted to peaceful, if hostile, protests by repeatedly asking for authorization to use 40mm launchers and pepper spray against nonviolent protestors, (Source: “Fatal shooting by police sets off protest in Minneapolis, the city’s first police-involved death since George Floyd,” by Holly Bailey, The Washington Post, 12/31/20).
Contrast these police responses to the treatment that the Nashville suicide bomber received when his girlfriend reported that he was making bombs in his RV, (Source: “Nashville Police Were Warned Last Year That Suicide Bomber Was Building Explosives in His R.V., But Didn’t Search It,” by Ishena Robinson, TheRoot.com, 12/31/20). By now it should be clear that undue deference to those who consider Black votes fraudulent per se is killing democracy and undue deference to white lives at the expense of Black lives will kill us all. So don’t sleep, because it may be a New Year, but it’s the same country.