It’s been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Right now, I’d say that it’s stepping into a new day and expecting Republicans not to do something horrible.
It happens to all of us.
We wake up in the morning, eventually check our phones or turn on the news, and are greeted by some new abomination: an unprecedented legislative assault on a central pillar of our Republic, the dismantling of long-established civil rights, a heartbreaking act of violence against the most vulnerable among us.
We encounter a legion of novel nightmares authored by the same people whose brutality from the previous day we’ve not yet recovered from, and we are somehow surprised.
Despite a decade of their daily atrocities, despite their prolific portfolio of inhumanity, despite their seemingly inexhaustible disregard for legal and moral law, their malevolence never fails to rattle our nervous systems and boggle our minds anew.
Each day, a sickening sense of deja vu sets in as we find ourselves freshly outraged, as if these moral abominations are out of character for these people, as if they might have reached their capacity for cruelty overnight, as if they’d suddenly had their sociopathy satiated and will magically relent.
Good people, we need to stop doing this.
This is who they have been; it is who they are. There is no moment of clarity coming, no soul awakening, no tearful repentance. They’ve long passed that possibility. To still be tethered to something as monstrous as this man and his movement is to have permanently abandoned the fundamental humanity required to feel empathy or possess self-awareness. We need to stop wasting time hoping his supporters will suddenly call upon their better angels, as they killed those off long ago.
Yesterday, a distraught member of our online community said over Zoom, “No matter what we do, no matter how much we fight, it seems like nothing gets better. Every day, things are worse.” I think she was hoping I would disagree with her.
I assured her that this wasn’t going to change anytime soon, because the people in power have no current external or internal obstacles in their path. They are not ethically bound by the Constitution and possess no regard for the rule of Law. They have commandeered the highest court in our nation and hold zero compunctions about violating the inalienable rights of other human beings.
They also realize that their time is incredibly short, despite appearances to the contrary. They’ve been paying attention to the elections over the last 16 months, and they know the public sentiment against them is rising swiftly. They live with the Sword of Damocles hovering overhead: the unforced errors of a sexual scandal that will not go away, a costly, unwinnable war, and an economy they have singlehandedly driven to life support.
There is no way back; there is only the way down. All they have left is destruction.
Right now, Americans need to make peace with the fact that the news is going to continue to be bad. We are going to witness an ever more desperate and violent descent into the depths of the malevolence human beings are capable of. These people are going to wake up every day, as in this one, singularly driven to damage as many people as possible as quickly as they can, and we should prepare ourselves by not being pulled into disbelief as they do.
We cannot waste a single second being shocked by their depravity, or hoping they will tire of violence, or expecting them to be anything other than who they have shown us they are.
Instead, our energy should be better spent keeping our heads down and getting on with the work before us, of building a broad coalition of resistance, of taking our stands where we can, of leveraging our economic power, of caring for those being targeted, and creating a compassionate community that curates decency and love for neighbor.
We need to stop being surprised by Republicans’ inhumanity and to go about the work of being human.
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“This is clearly amateur hour at the Pentagon and in the White House. And again, the price is being paid by all of us. You can also just tell from the administration’s attitude toward this war, the fact that they’re putting out videos treating this like a video game. It’s not a video game for the families of the fallen. And then, just this week, we saw campaign fundraising materials being put out, emails where the president’s committee, the president’s political operation, was raising money off of images of him at a dignified transfer. Any politician who does that has no business leading American troops in the war. If the president is willing to raise campaign funds over the bodies of America’s war dead, he is unfit to be the commander-in-chief.” ~ Pete Buttigieg, former Secretary of Transportation and future President of the United States
