A Change in DC
I’ve written newspaper columns and segments like this pretty much regularly for the past 40 years…and I’ve always talked on January 20th every four years about the miracle of American democracy, the peaceful transfer of power that separates this nation from those who frankly want to be us.
I’d say things like losing the election is hard, but it’s time to find common ground where possible, redouble efforts to have ideas win at the ballot box, that sort of thing.
This one just feels strikingly different, and not because of what happened at the Capitol two weeks ago today.
Even after the 2000 election, people accepted the transition for the most part…though plenty on the left had Bush Derangement Syndrome, it was tempered by 9-11.
Now, millions of clear-thinking rational Americans believe the election results cannot be trusted. Can’t prove it, but there are far too many examples of shenanigans to be coincidence.
Washington, D.C. has been turned into a military zone, with the same people who refused to build walls and called to defund police now insisting on record numbers of uniformed people with guns to stand watch at newly erected fences with razor wire.
And you can’t go by party affiliation to determine where someone stands on issues, as both parties are dividing into smaller factions, headed independently toward political civil war.
I still believe that America will come through this…although I’m less certain about what it will look like than before. And we are less the United States than at any time in more than a century.
