Brave New World

In response to me posting last night on Facebook that I feel I’m watching the end of my country, watching Mitch McConnell and the complicit Republican-controlled Senate refuse to allow witnesses and documents in the impeachment trial, several friends said we need to focus on November. Focus on the 2020 presidential election, they encourage and urge. I started to write a response to them on Facebook, but it turned into this blog entry instead:

By November, long before November, nothing will matter, attempting-to-save-America-wise, if 45 isn’t removed from office by the Senate in the impeachment trial. It breaks my heart to write that, but it is true. Oh, you can be d*mn sure I’ll lovingly cast my primary vote in March for my hero, Bernie Sanders. And you can be (fairly) sure that I will also cast my vote in the November general election, as I have done in every single election since I came of age in 1980. But for the first time, I will agree with people who have always previously infuriated me by saying: “It doesn’t matter”. They always previously infuriated me by saying that because it always previously DID matter. It mattered very, very, very much. Anyone who doesn’t see that now, never will. But by November, it likely actually won’t matter anymore. Because, if 45 is not removed by the Senate, if the senate impeachment trial is just a complicit, rigged exercise in suppression of evidence, our constitution will have been crushed, and we will have no rule of law in this country. A terrible precedent will have been set, that we can never unset: we will go from being a representative democracy to being a dictatorship, in which an American President does not have to follow the constitution or any laws. He or she can do whatever he or she wants. That is called a dictatorship. Let that sink in.

I was lying in bed, in the dead of night last night, realizing that, very soon, by the end of the Senate impeachment trial, we will know if we still have a country, a recognizable America. And, if we don’t, if our country as we know it is about to be gone, that “future” is coming up, as I said, very soon. It hit me: in just days, I could be living in a dictatorship. Right now, it’s still a possibility that might happen “in the future”, yet that future is now just days away! I could, and it is looking like I likely will, wake up one morning very soon and find myself not in my beloved America, but in a dictatorship.

This is similar to Germany in the 1930’s, which was a modern, western country in which, for example, the German Jewish population was very, very, very well integrated. They, rightly, absolutely considered themselves to be Germans. They (and the “they” here is very personal for me, as it includes my Mom’s side of my own family—we are directly descended from German Jews…my Grandma grew up speaking English and German) went back many, many generations in Germany. But suddenly they were “other” and they were the scapegoats, along with political dissidents, homosexuals, artists and other minorities (but Hitler’s main target was Jews). How safe will any of us be in our “new” America, the day after the Senate acquits Donald J. Trump?

I’m scared of waking up the day after. I’m scared of the new America and I’m already heartbroken for my beautiful country. I’m already starting to mourn the America I recognize and cherish with all my heart and soul, which is taking its dying breaths right now, as we speak. The dying breaths are Adam Schiff, heroically arguing on the Senate floor, and the other Democratic impeachment managers doing the same. The dying breaths are us, we, the people, calling our Senators and begging for a fair trial, with witnesses and documents. The dying breathes are us, daring to hope for the 2020 election, when the reality is, it will all be OVER at that point if there is not a fair Senate impeachment trial right now, and if 45 is not removed from office.

Over. No “war”. No battlefield. Just a useful idiot with a dangerous psychiatric makeup, a foreign enemy with very sophisticated methods to pull said idiot’s--and all of our--strings, a decimated government, now populated with a few brave patriots trying to save it but being overpowered by a lot of complicit stooges, placed in key roles, who are now poised on the brink of laying waste to our constitution, our rule of law, our separation of powers, our free press, and the power of we, the people, to resist. And those things I just listed that are being laid to waste as we speak? Those are the whole enchilada, people: those ARE America, those are what make our country our country.

I lay there last night and all of this really hit me. This is happening. Now. America is dying, being murdered in front of my very eyes. We are all witnessing the murder of a loved one. And, we will likely wake up one morning very soon, and our loved one will be gone. Just like that. And we will be left here, in a Brave New World.