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Election

I've been having flashbacks since the election to November, 2016, when I tried to wrap my head around the disaster that my country brought upon itself by electing Trump president. I wasn't prescient about the details but I knew that Trump had spent his career cheating; running companies into bankruptcy and using his army of lawyers to make sure that he turned a profit; refusing to pay local workers for renovating his Atlantic City casinos before bankrupting them; cultivating an image of someone surrounded by beautiful women who were not the wives he was married to. There was no reason to believe that he knew about the principles of our democracy let alone cared about them.

And this week there was a blue tide. Trump has driven out of the Republican leadership anyone who would not bend the knee to him (LBJ phrased it more scatologically) and the resulting cruelty and corruption seems to have deeply offended the voters nationwide. There were some really good Democrats (Pritzker, Talarico, El-Sayed, Acton, the list is long) running so give credit where credit is due but polling seems to show a deep-seated anger at the Republican leaders for the specific things they've done.

It's been a rough decade for me. A measure of my patriotism is how much it hurt seeing how little the norms of our democracy mattered to those in power. But I am a white male who presents as straight and as such I was never the target of the most vicious abuses of political power.

Loved ones, friends who are not white males who present as straight have lived in more specific fear; folk I do not know have been abused, killed for their demographics. I am not alone in having a deep hunger for justice.

Whatever compassion may be appropriate in individual cases can be dealt with in sentencing but it is essential to establish the rule of law. When the powerful break the law and folks say that we should look the other way, to mend fences, to just keep everything nice we guarantee with the blood of their victims that this horror will recur in the future, always worsening as no consequences seem to occur.

I am very nervous right now about Jeffries and Schumer, about their willingness to talk tough but to work with people who have publicly broken the law. I hope that they prove me wrong but more so I hope that they are replaced with people dedicated to using our legal system to establish there are things that are wrong and why they are wrong. A very simple example:  how could anyone ever reform the paramilitary that ICE has become? Agents who have shot unarmed folk, killed and wounded them must see courtrooms as defendants, and the whole agency must be exposed and shut down.

USAID must be restored immediately; the hundreds of lives that have been lost through our cessation of aid to others is a tragedy that must be made real in the minds of our citizens and not euphemized away.

The very real changes to our environment and their already devastating impact on citizens of our country and others must be faced head on with constructive solutions debated and acted on.

The list is so very long. There is so very much to be done.

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