No unity without justice

I'm sure you're all happy to know that I'm willing to sacrifice my constant stream of entertainment embodied by The Idiot, President Donald J. Trump, for the sake of the rest of your sanity and ability to feel at least somewhat decent about the concept of America as anything but the profit center I believe it to be. We have come to end of Trumpworld, to a certain degree, and even the QAnon people are giving up. I remain constant in my opinion that the only upside to that moron occupying the Oval Office was that it forced people to pay attention. Every time he exploited the "rules" of tradition and custom that make up our mockery of a government; every time he pushed the limits, knowing that the pearl clutchers wouldn't believe he was telling them exactly what he was going to do; every time he reinforced the farce of an uneducated and often willfully ignorant public putting a con man into the highest office in the land and being supported by other elected officials (Hi, Mitch!) who definitely knew better, he showed just how outdated and inadequate our administrative system actually is for the vast majority of those subject to it. If you are part of the ownership class, the Trump era likely reinforced your status. The rest of you will have to live with actually being awakened to the reality of how the system is designed to exploit you and those with even less than you have.

And, of course, now is not the time to return to sleep. What I was afraid of with Hillary Clinton's election was that the very real systemic problems- the wealth disparity, the police state, the inability to speak outside the traditional norms of discourse without being dismissed as an extremist -would all be dutifully ignored. Trump's election changed some of that and we began to see the emergence of people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar and Katie Porter; people that were committed to asking the questions about the power structure that had regularly been dismissed as not relevant to the goal of wealthy people making even more money. Those representatives are all still present in Congress and one assumes (hopes?) that their attitude has not and will not change. With a functioning adult in the White House, there arises the prospect of actual, positive change. But in his speech today, actual-President Joe Biden spoke of "unity", which has been a buzzword among Republicans in the last two weeks, suddenly confronted with the fact that not only had they lost control of both branches of government but had been directly threatened by the monster that they've nurtured and ridden for the past 30 years. My opinion on that is simple:

I'm not interested in "unity" without justice.

I'm especially not interested in unity with those who actively encouraged the assault on January 6th, such as Ted Cruz (R-TX), Joshua Hawley (R-MO), Mo Brooks (R-AL), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), and Andy Biggs (R-AZ.) (Rumor has it that the latter three went looking for a pardon from the Idiot in the last couple days...) I'm not interested in unity with fascists or unrepentant racists or devoted QAnon cultists. Advocating unity with people like that only encourages their crimes and makes it that much easier for them to be considered acceptable behavior the next time some con man like Trump (and there will be a next time; in Josh Hawley, there basically already is) leads a bunch of fools into declaring him the messiah. The only thing that counts right now is justice. Justice means expelling all five of those people, among others like Lauren Boebert (R-CO), from their respective bodies of the legislature as not suitable for the proper function of government. It means arresting stooges like Louis DeJoy and seizing the assets of his company for directly interfering with the function of a federal agency (in this case, the US Postal Service.) It means cracking down in the most direct and obvious ways to send the message: No more. No more profiting by damaging the function of government. No more attacking the function of that government in the name of some twisted cult based on the second amendment or some other bizarre notion (like trickle-down economics...) For once, the hope is that Democrats run the show like they're aware that they're in the director's chair and not concerned about the studio (i.e. their campaign fundraisers) threatening to pull the plug if they're spending too much money (It's pathetic how symmetrical that analogy is.) For once, they should be assured that the progressive opinions they're hearing put forth are those of the majority of the citizens of this country.

National healthcare is one of them. Climate change is another. Student debt is another. Policing is another. Economic inequality may be the most important one of all. But don't talk to me about unity with what are, in the end, actual criminals. In the modern era, the fox guarding the henhouse is perhaps a bit too quaint to draw the picture, so let's try something timely: If you invite the plaguebearers into the house, all you do is continue to spread the plague. There is no herd immunity to broken government and the widening gap between rich and poor in this nation. There is, instead, a simple dividing line: One can be on the side of facts, truth, and equality or one can be a fascist. I say again that I have no interest in unity with fascists because they have no interest in facts, truth, or equality. I'm still convinced that proper civil war is the only way to truly solve our current national problem, but it may be a case of fighting the fascists long enough for some of them to realize that the real problem is the ownership class and always has been. It's Biden's task at this point to make a statement about which way this society is going to move in the future. To his credit, the line from his speech today: "... not by the example of our power, but by the power of our example." is a good summary of what I'm talking about, since it would be starkly different from much of what the US government has stood for, in matters international and domestic, for most of its existence; from Shays' Rebellion to now.

The casualties of the non-stop rueful, cynical entertainment will probably be half a million strong by the time we reach February, and that's only talking about COVID. Millions more are already casualties of the profit machine and one con man's willingness to exploit every angle of it. Now we have a new executive whose task is to reverse course on much of what has happened over the past four years, but whose real task should be to alter course on much of what has happened over the past forty. Is he willing to do that? As the zen master once said: "We'll see."