Some among my friends and family ignore the insane tweets, the rapid dismantling of rights and protections for our citizens, and all of the other assaults on our country that are currently oozing out of Washington D.C. like an overflowing toilet. Their argument: This too shall pass away.
They invoke the Civil War, the horrors of Reconstruction and the Klan, the McCarthy era. They point out that our nation has, more than once, received terrible body blows from within, and yet has managed to survive.
Yet I have other friends who obsessively read the news, agonizing over every astounding new insult to our system of laws and our national character. They are politically engaged, but stressed.
The first group is less likely to get high blood pressure, but are they really right? After all, any democracy relies on checks and balances. When a major political party goes insane, it’s up to others to pull us back from the madness.
As painful as it is, I think we have a responsibility as citizens to face the discomfort of dealing with a self-serving scoundrel and his cynical enablers. When you look back on those historical examples, one thing they had in common was the courage of at least some citizens to look the agents of hate in the face and say, in effect, “At long last, have you no sense of decency?”
Maybe the real question is : what do you do about it ? if the second group is just facing the discomfort to paradoxally feeling right about themselves morally while letting things as they are, neither proposing / encouraging alternatives aligned with their values of society nor acting up against it, well maybe the first group is then more onto something. Surely that too shall pass, and perhaps more quickly if we restrain from feeding the troll, the bully, of our collective attention more than necessary.