Fear and Hope
Friday, October 11th, 2024“I’m confident it’ll be free and fair,” the President said. “I don’t know whether it’ll be peaceful.”
If anything could shake you up 26 days before a close national election, that sure shook me up. If the President senses it, we know not only that the political atmosphere is real, but we’d best make sure we’ve pulled out all the stops and done everything we could in our own little corner of the world. We want to make sure people know the truth, so they can act confidently and safely, come Election Day, November 5th.
First of all, voting in the United States is about as fair as a nation of 336,673,595 persons should expect. The people who run your local elections are local citizens, they’re your neighbors, who work for your city, county or town, and they don’t cheat, no matter what some outside state or national candidate - who doesn’t know your neighbors or your local government - says to weaken your trust. And to those people (mostly Republicans, unfortunately) in elected office who say, “It’s rigged!” — if that’s true, how did they manage to win? They’re on the same ballot as the president, the governor, the state legislators, congressmen and senators. How can you claim “it’s rigged!” If you got elected?
Remember when Trump told a militia group to “stand by”? It was in his debate with our now-President Joe Biden, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” said the man then occupying the White House. Imagine Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, or Ronald Reagan calling out a militia, ever, let alone on national television, before any votes had been cast ahead of their elections.
Because, less than 14 weeks after his exhortation, on January 6th, the Proud Boys did just as the then-president had asked, and led the charge of a violent throng of tens of thousands for its attack of the Capitol of the United States of America. They helped lead an insurrection, an actual attempted coup meant to stop the official, constitutionally prescribed, counting of electoral votes, as a means to keep Donald Trump in office, despite his defeat in November. “We fight like hell,” he roared January 6th to his crowd on the Ellipse. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
The Capitol, guarded by its valiant police force, soon saw an overwhelming attack for only the second time in our Nation’s history; the first was by a foreign power, the British. This time, the extremely violent assault was perpetrated by a citizen army of our own people, claiming to represent all of us with their murderous frenzy. Smashing statues and defecating in hallways, destroying equipment, the roaring frenzy of our fellow citizens prowled in search of elected members of Congress to kill or maim. It was havoc in the U.S. Capitol on that terrible day. Their goal was to keep in office a man who did not have the approval of the voters, because here, the voting majority bestow our grant of leadership in a nationwide election.
Today, in October 2024, he’s spouting outlandish, horrible lies about immigrants, “they’re poisoning the blood of our country.”
In the 1930s Adolph Hitler, as he sought total power, similarly attacked Jews for “poisoning” German blood, and even got his legislature to pass The Law for the Protection of the Blood to restrict the marriage rights of Jews, who numbered only 505,000, or less than 0.75 percent, in a nation of 67 million. That’s how authoritarians gain power: You pick an enemy, preferably small and relatively defenseless, and make them your scapegoat, as a way to consolidate power. That’s how they act to get the job done.
Trump’s wild and hysterical assertion, that immigrants in an Ohio city are eating pets, is a knowingly despicable lie, which he continues to spread in his speeches, even as reporters inform him that such claims are untrue, and have been debunked by the Ohio woman who began the lie. She said it started when she wrote an online post about a rumor - which she had heard from a neighbor, who’d heard it from a friend - and the originator now regrets ever writing that false pet-eating claim.
Trump consistently uses these over-the-top lies, including the “stolen” 2020 election, in speeches that rage against immigrants. Such “Big Lies” are said to be big, because they’re told by an important person who we don’t expect would lie, in a claim that’s beyond what we could imagine. But this famous person keeps repeating the lie, over and over; such that, over time, many will come to believe that the lie must be true.
He has said the main focus of his campaign is to compel “retribution” for his self-claimed persecution. The campaign uses violent rhetoric against immigrants and Black people and Jews. Words matter, and when a person or a race is blamed by Trump for committing any of his lies, that individual or person of color or member of an ethnic group begins to receive frightening death threats. The future will be dark and dangerous, if this man is elected again.
A man whose campaign speeches are full of hatred and threats of violence should not regain our presidency. He incited the worst attack on our center of government in U.S. history. It was a hand-to-hand mass war on those defending our nation’s citadel - the U.S. Capitol - and the Congress members inside. It was a violent scene, which Trump found pleasure watching take place on television, instead of doing something to stop it. He’s a man fuming, boiling with hatred; when what we need is calm and kindness to bind our nation’s wounds.
Please emphasize the truth, be calm when confronting lies, so we’ll have peace among us these final weeks. And make sure you vote, and that those in your family and all around you vote.