Will We Forget?

 “They will, at last, realize themselves that there cannot be enough freedom and bread for everybody, for they will never, never be able to let everyone have his fair share!” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

This infernal year of plague and death and strife, trapped in the grip of greed and arrogance, careening for the abyss at top speed. It’s hard to decide where to begin. Should I begin with the photographs I took of downtown SB in March, during the first lockdown, when store shelves were bare and the streets were eerily quiet, deserted? When toilet paper was as good as money? Or do I start with the criminal negligence of the Trump Crime Family (TCF)? 

Remember Trump’s statements, day after day, about a few people coming in from China, how Covid would one day go away like a miracle, and that in any case it was no worse than the seasonal flu? 

Will we forget Liberate Michigan?

Human nature being what it is, I fear we will forget what has happened this year, misunderstand its deeper meaning, and how dangerous the game we’re playing with our limited democratic freedoms is. I’m afraid we will forget what an utter disaster Donald Trump has been. That with the passage of only a little time, we will forget the more than 300,000 Americans who have died on Trump’s watch, forget the millions more who lost their economic footing because Trump’s response to the pandemic was so inept, ignorant, incompetent, and indifferent to the reality of the situation. While Trump denied science and commonsense -- and babbled about miracle cures, ingesting bleach and disinfectants, herd immunity, and packed churches on Easter Sunday -- Americans suffered and died. 

Writing in the Nation magazine recently, Elie Mystal noted the following: “And yet, somehow, even all of this -- the bleach, the rallies, the unconscionable disregard for life -- fails to capture the full scope of the harm he’s done to this country. Trump’s anti-science sociopathy has been embraced by many other political actors. His messaging, his attitude, his culture-war mongering have filtered down throughout our country, to our national shame.”

I’m afraid that neither Trump or any of his many, many enablers will be held accountable for the damage they’ve done, or for how casually many of them betrayed their oath of office. Was that taste of power worth it? 

We must never forget the 18 state attorney generals and 126 Republican members of the US House of Representatives who supported the corrupt Attorney General of Texas, Ken Paxton, and the bogus legal claim he mounted in an effort to overturn the results of the election and cancel out the legal votes of millions of Americans. 

Will we forget the ranks of silent Republican senators, who stood by while Trump mounted one laughable legal challenge after another in state and federal courts? Who said nothing when Trump claimed the election was rigged and that he’d never accept the result? Will we forget this wholesale absence of principle and courage? 

William Barr, good riddance doughboy, you sold your soul to Donald Trump, so no mercy will be shown to you. Your trangressions are many, but none more repugnant than reinstating the death penalty for certain federal crimes, and then executing condemned people in record numbers, including Orlando Hall and Brandon Bernard. 

One lesson to be learned from 2020 is that mercy is hard to come by in America, particularly for the poor and marginalized. Perhaps we never had mercy in us to give. Americans have always killed to gain land, territory, minerals, and wealth, or to terrorize people deemed a threat.  

I’m afraid we will forget George Floyd, Breeona Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, just to name a few. 

But Kyle Rittenhouse, a sad, deluded white kid who murdered two people protesting police brutality, will be considered a hero in many quarters. Will we forget hate groups like the Proud Boys, who crawled from the shadows to stand in Trump’s malign spotlight?

Will we forget uniformed but unidentified federal agents plucking people off the streets of Portland, Oregon? Or those federal goons under the direction of William Barr, who drove peaceful protesters out of Lafeyette Square with pepper bombs, rubber bullets, batons and shields, all so Donald Trump could make a triumphant march across the street to the church -- where the idiot held the good book upside down.  

As Donald Trump rants and raves about massive voter fraud, let’s not forget all the efforts by the Republican Party to cripple the US Mail service, reduce the number of polling places and ballot drop boxes. Voter suppression is the real election fraud in America, and it is engineered by a Republican Party that is openly hostile to democracy. 

Will we forget politics by stunt? 

We would be wise to think hard about the divisions, fissures, and fractures the Trump years and this deadly pandemic have revealed about our country, its insidious racism, militarism, and wealth inequality. 

When Donald Trump talked about “American carnage” in his inauguration speech in January 2017, I don’t think many people understood what he meant. Trump made it seem that America was at war with itself. It wasn’t true on that day, but it is true now.