My spouse wrote letters, hollered on streets throughout the world, drove a car plastered with political bumper stickers, insisted that everything is political until I would say, “My God, Trella, do you want to get us killed!” Her answer, “Do you want to live a coward?’”
Almost daily I now email Cotton, Womack, and Boozman and call them cowards for not facing us in person at town halls, so no I don’t want to be a coward.
I am an old woman for whom “the war” will always have Roman Numeral II after it, for whom education and hard work always resulted in better lives, for whom Social Security and Medicare softened the later years of life, for whom being an American was as important as helping one’s neighbor and the pride of being able to.
Today I read and hear the workings of my government, and it scares the crap out of me. I hear theories about the why, the what, the who and for the first time in my 90 years, I have come to believe in the reality of evil. Not mixed-up people, not psychologically damaged people, not poor potty training, not unhappy people, not mentally challenged people, but actual evil people whose lives are examples of evil and who have enchanted their followers to place them in positions of power where evil infuses the institutions and leaders. Yes, I am talking about the Trump-Vance-Musk triumvirate and the minions who support them.
James Lee Burke is a fine Louisiana writer who explores human struggles with evils from the past enacted in the present. In Dixie City Jam Burke concludes, “This is what could become… all we had to do was to stop believing in ourselves and let the charlatans and the manipulators convince us they have the answers that we don’t. There is no metaphysical mystery. Evil has the wingspan of moths. Evil functions because we allow it to and give it sanction. Evil stops functioning when that sanction is denied.”
Cutting Head Start, Meals on Wheels, Suicide Hot Lines, arresting judges, deporting American children and seekers of amnesty, defunding colleges and universities, fighting with school districts about what is and is not acceptable curricula, insisting that DEI is wrong rather than basic to the strength of our society, not allowing funding for people in Arkansas whose lives were destroyed by tornados and flooding, calling Social Security and Medicare Ponzi schemes run by fraudsters, refusing aid to the starving, allowing a non-elected and non-vetted billionaire rampage through the lives of the electorate are evil acts that will remain, and grow as long as we sanction them.
We remove that sanction with every foot in the street, every sign expressing outrage, every act of courage, every day of awareness, every letter or postcard, despite the fear that “this time they may be coming for me.” We fight for the America we love and the constitution that outlines our rights and encourages our participation.
Is there fear in this? Some time ago during the PDA part of Diversity Weekends, as we gathered and counted down to 12:00, a thin middle-aged man would step up on a red plastic carton and start to tell us we were headed to hell. We ignored or booed him. He has not been around recently, but today I thought of him with some appreciation. He showed up, said what he had to say, and knew he had the Constitutional right to be there without fear.
With that very Constitution under attack today, there is some fear in every protest we make. We protest anyway. We cannot sanction evil, cannot allow our sweet democracy to be lost to the lies and exaggerations of the minions of evil.
Marie Howard