The choice is up to us ...

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Ronnie, the poster child for the repugs, the super salesman who gutted America by colluding with big business to offshore manufacturing via deregualtion in order to gin profits for stock holders, was the Great Communicator in bringing out homilies comparing America to "a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”while at the same time selling the meme of government being the problem, something needing to be replaced with private enterprise as unfettered capitalism is the right way to go in all things related to governance, right?

Back in 1981, when Ronald Reagan was sworn in and implicitly promised to destroy our government because it was “the problem,” many of us who strongly opposed him wondered what the final stage of Reaganism would look like.

Now we know. We’re there.

Violence toward women and minorities has exploded. Armed militias tried to assassinate the Vice President and Speaker of the House in an attempted coup directed by the Republican President of the United States. They tried to kidnap and murder the governor of Michigan. They’re blowing up power substations from Oregon to the Carolinas. They’ve embedded themselves in DHS, police departments, and our military. They’re coordinating with fascists overseas.

Leading up to this moment was a 41-year political war that splattered the American Dream like gut-shot blood across a dystopian Republican hellscape mural.

Reaganism brought us:

— the collapse of the middle class; 

— student and medical debt that’s impossible to climb out of; 

— an explosion of predation from health insurance companies and for-profit hospitals; 

— political manipulation by corporations and billionaires; 

— an explosion of homelessness and untreated mental illness; 

— and turned our elementary schools into killing fields.

The question today is whether we as a nation and a people will recover from it, or if it will, as Reagan promised on January 20, 1981, end the American experiment of pluralistic liberal democracy.

The choice is up to us ...