WASHINGTON – Unlike most of you, I am waiting for the armed military to take over my town. It’s a mid-sized city about 50 miles up the road from another mid-sized city that has tanks and armed military personnel in its midst. Sadly, apparently, the unheard of is now the new normal. An accelerating military coup is unfolding, and like the frog in the pot, the heat is increasing, but nobody knows or cares.
We had National Guard folks here during the Freddy Gray unrest, but they weren’t armed. Also, they were the Maryland National Guard, sent by the Governor in consultation with the Mayor. The troops in DC are from the old Dixie states; the South is rising again.
Once, at a street fair near here, there was a National Guard weekend thing happening. Some of the soldiers joined the crowd at lunch, armed. The sight unnerved me. I spoke to their supervisor, and he got them out of there. Back then, ranking officers in the guard recognized how inappropriate that was.
During the Vietnam War, for those of us old enough to remember, armed military killed students at Kent State University in Ohio. Mixing combat-trained soldiers with civilians never goes well. However, we currently have men in charge, here and in other countries, who don’t care about civilians, whether they are sick or homeless or hungry or just walking on the street. They do care about catering to their wealthy donors who don’t walk down the street, can afford a classy restaurant, and live in nice homes and have fancy health care.
All of us are complicit in the end of our former civil and legal rights. Trump won not because he received many more votes, but because people who should have voted didn’t.
Biden bears a lot of this burden. He never should have run. Old white men do not seem to know when it’s time to go home, nor do old white women. Quitting in the middle ensured that a black/asian woman had no chance at all in this racist, misogynistic country.
Trump, for someone who desperately wants a Nobel Peace Prize, might well reconsider the inefficacy of deploying military in the streets of his own country pursuant to that endeavor. For him, it’s all show. Go to Alaska, kiss butt. Have lunch, have butt kissed.
Photo ops are everything for the child who would be king, having no substance himself, he sees no need for it in his constructed reality. Bitter, mean-spirited, and frequently cruel, no one save himself matters. Wounded ego, inconvenient truth-telling, imagined or real slights churn his hatred, and he acts out with no thought save revenge.
Grown-ups who currently govern areas of the world can easily manipulate him, as can whoever he might have spoken to last. So many people have his private line that essentially any conspiracy theorist, self-promoter, or crazy person can fill his ear, and do. The White House shuts out reporters but welcomes whoever is in favor that day, hour, or minute.
“If we can keep it,” opined Franklin. We did not.
M.A. Callahan
- M.A. Callahan#molongui-disabled-link
- M.A. Callahan#molongui-disabled-link
- M.A. Callahan#molongui-disabled-link
- M.A. Callahan#molongui-disabled-link
