Every election for the last two-plus decades has been touted to be, if not the most important election of all time, at least the most important of your or my lifetime. I’ve heard it so often I’m beginning to think that it must be true, especially the upcoming midterms.
While this is not a presidential election the outcome could determine the direction Trump will be allowed to take the country in for the next two years. If he is repudiated at the ballot box and an overwhelming majority of Democrats are sent to Washington, the damage Trump is currently doing to the nation can be, if not entirely stopped, at least drastically slowed down.
Therefore this is far and away the most important election since Abraham Lincoln won the presidency for the newly-formed Republican Party. Now some might argue that both of Obama’s elections were more important, but they would be sentimentally wrong. Even if Obama had lost, the Republic would not have been in the kind of jeopardy we find ourselves in at this juncture of our history. Neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney were madmen and both would have steered the Ship of State away from the rocky shoals of partisan disaster and disunity we are currently about to become shipwrecked on.
The upcoming midterm elections will determine if the country has had enough of the foolishness that has been parading as diplomacy under the current administration, or if the electorate wants to continue on the current path, that many progressives view as a highway straight to hell.
The question, of course, is, how many voters want change? Are there enough Americans out there who haven’t taken large gulps of the poisoned Kool-Aid Trump has been serving up and thus haven’t had their brains turned into mush due to their fear and hatred of “the other?”
But the real fear should be over what Jefferson once said: “The government you elect is the government you deserve.” Is Trump really what we deserve as a country?
Have the chickens of our centuries of scurrilously corrupt and immoral national behavior finally come home to roost? Is America at last, in the personage of Donald Trump, reaping the bitter fruits of what it has sown? Should our national bird be changed from an eagle to a vulture?
Has the immorality of the robbing and subjugating of the Native population (that had been residing on this land peacefully and in harmony with nature for eons) and Columbus’ attempt to turn them into slaves; the importation of Africans when such efforts failed (and the subsequent dehumanization by treating the stolen peoples as chattel); and the forcing of said Native Americans onto reservations on land stolen from our neighbors to the South under the lie of Manifest Destiny finally caught up to us?
If, what Unitarian Pastor Theodore Parker (who was often paraphrased by Martin Luther King, Jr. and others) said is true, that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” we could be in very deep shit. The visiting of a demagogue like Trump on the American body politic could simply be retribution, a balancing of the scales of justice, the big payback for all of the dirt we have done as a nation over the hundreds of years of our existence — all under the guise of a false morality.
Indeed, we have told ourselves such huge lies about our behavior, we may very well deserve a liar like Donald Trump. He may be the personification of who we really are as a people.
The answer will be self-proving. If enough progressives go to the polls and soundly beat Trump’s candidates, the message will be sent out loud and clear that we want our country back. If the voices of reason are not heard at the ballot box then heaven help us, we’re about to continue down the path of self-destruction.
Forget North Korea, Iran, and even Russia or China; they won’t have to lift a finger towards us. Like most societies throughout history, we’ll die by our own hands by crumbling from within due to the new civil war that awaits us if we’re not indeed careful. We quite simply have to vote this time.
Editor’s note: You can register to vote online by visiting the Secretary of State’s site here: https://olvr.sos.state.oh.us
From CoolCleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.