to the point

Actions create consequences

My column today is direct and anything but sweet. I cannot avoid it as I have children, grandchildren, and nieces and nephews.

It’s seductive to believe our system, built so meticulously two hundred forty years ago by white men from various occupations worried about power seizure by a radical minority, will control extremism. I no longer am confident the public devotion to national integrity overcomes naked desire for power or for personal revenge.

The Founders expected us—a designation we have enlarged from that select white rich group to a broader mosaic of people of different histories, gender preferences, wealth levels, and interests—to be more involved in our own system to assure it ours. Instead we are pretending our society is a reality show rather than real life. If a serious presidential candidate believes shooting someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight will incur no consequences, that individual certainly will unveil revenge plans as a predicate to the election without fear of repercussions.

The speeches the former president spews on the campaign trail in December 2023 are not jokes but plans. He has never been a detail guy, but his movement now has a huge reservoir of supporters doing the nitty gritty detail for him. He is showing his blueprint for supporters to act.

Even if he were truly joking about hanging generals and Justice Department civil servants, the sickness of such comments disqualifies any candidate in a society with civil values and where people are listening. He is not a joking person. We hear it so often he innures us into ignoring the message.

His belief that government agencies are extensions of the person in the White House rather than civic instruments of the voters will easily translate to sending active duty armed forces to stop protests—peaceful or violent. Threatening to employ the levers of power against his own nation overly mimics behaviour by the CCP or Kim Jung Un where political differences become threats to the ruler, hardly a label average American leaders want to assume. Avowing admiration, if not adoration, for harsh authoritarians abroad is an individual intoxicated with the power to inflict pain in an attempt to gain personal respect.

Impassioned cries about foreigners ‘poisoning the blood of our country’ is bone-chilling reference to speeches predating millions marched to the gas chambers eighty-five years ago. The logical next step of narrowing of ‘acceptable’ action to that of an exceedingly small sliver of society means that even many who today laud (and vote for) the former president’s views would ultimately become inconvenient obstacles to his actions. Differences between human beliefs inevitably appear. Those inconvenient ones gradually morph into unacceptable ones as did William Barr, John Kelly, or so many others we can all recall.

We are no longer in some ‘reality television’ show where the ‘off button’ allows us to revert to the prior norms when the show ends. We confront a danger so much more profound than even the Civil War because its damage would be from top to bottom of everything.

Through a long-running passivity as if watching the reality television show, we opened the door to empower the hate, the violence, the illegality, and the sense of both grievance and associated entitlement. It will take generations to put those back into ‘not acceptable under any circumstances’ behaviour if we survive the next 13 months with a democratic outcome. But that is not a given by any stretch.

At a minimum, we need ask ourselves as citizens every single day whether that horrible hatred is really what we want to leave our children and those following them. If it is not, we better pay a lot more attention by investing considerably more of our daily activity to encouraging the non-authoritarian values so many of us still support. Each of us has a role daily to invest in democracy, by large and small actions, rather than assume someone else will do it.

Twenty plus years ago, I was talking with a psychologist about how to alter my behaviour. I said I would start doing things differently once I got it all straight in my head. She stopped me dead cold by noting that her experience and the literature in her field shows that we change our minds by acting rather than getting our minds fixed first, then acting. I was stunned. Actions really do create consequences.

There isn’t any one else but us. There is no one anywhere else in the world to save us.

Thank goodness for nature.

Be well and be safe. FIN