Take Cover Where There’s Shelter
Hermione Luck
Well, here we go again …
a third season of The Lemonade Stand.
Always good to read kRIS for a laugh, but as a liberal political columnist, I must say the future in general doesn’t look like a walk in the park. A politically charged/morally arrogant Supreme Court has finally taken us down the rabbit hole with a snowball’s chance in Hell we’ll come out anytime soon.
Even if master hypocrites like McConnell and Graham repudiate Donald Trump and the narcissistic chaos and violence he represents, the damage is done. It’s not that the MAGA group is new to the landscape, the group has always been poised to strike from the bushes. It’s more that Trump has given these sociological malcontents the hope that homophobia, racism, and ethnocentrism will once again come to rule the day.
The way I see it, it will be the hindsight of history that Trump was always a grifter, no more no less. Unfortunately, January 6th and Roe vs. Wade are only the beginning of where this grift has led us.
On the election front, it’s bittersweet to see Ron DeSantis as a clear and present danger for Trump because in spite of our desperate need to have The Donald permanently out of the picture, in many ways DeSantis is far more dangerous. He’s actually intelligent, and let’s face it, he didn’t exactly major in healing at Harvard.
But there is hope it seems … with the recent Kansas abortion vote leading the way, the circular firing squad also known as
the Democratic Party at long last has put a few wins on the scoreboard. Biden seems like he’s woken up from his nap, Manchin took the coal out of his stocking, and Sinema simply played politics to her advantage. We’ll see.
When I was younger and raised in a Republican family, I was taught to have faith in what our family perceived to be the vital cornerstones of Democracy – like the accuracy of the media, the wisdom of the Supreme Court, and the bi-partisan peaceful transfer of power. They were givens and made us feel safe. Yet in my lifetime, I’ve watched the trust and fabric of all three security blankets be shredded.
So what can we do? To begin with, the concept of Federalism and a functional Federal Union is broken, and in some ways, we almost have to start over. For instance, we have to decide if we are truly a country that is able to separate church from state. Wasn’t that one of the main points of creating America?
We need to educate voters that necessary institutions such as an effective military and an ever-ready National Guard, like inter-connecting highways, timely natural disaster relief, universal healthcare, and a host of other components of modern life are all (hate to say this) socialistic. Maybe we can call socialism something else, like Human Enhancement. Everyone must be informed that Human Enhancement is not communism, and there’s a need to invest in both the common good as well as in the individual good.
For non-Republicans, broken Federalism means we have to make the best of the ‘states rights’ reality because like it or not, that is the path we are on. From the time this country declared its independence, there’s been a deep schism between the Federalists and the states rights people, between the religious and the not so religious, between the haves and the have-nots … on those fronts, little has truly changed in more than two centuries.
So for all of you depressed liberals out there, even though it would be great if everyone could just ‘get along’, the reality is sobering – the world won’t soon be free of religious zealots and assault weapons for the depressed, which means at least for now, we must learn how to negotiate and survive in the rabbit hole. As I wrote months ago – individuals and families in America must begin to choose their gang color, red or blue, and be sure they live in a state that reflects their values.
For the truth is, my friends, in spite of most Americans (62%) disapproving the Supreme Court’s Roe Wade ruling, as long as this current group of judiciary zealots hovers self-righteously above us feeling free to leave skid marks on precedent, as long as we remain mired in an environment where absurdly easy access to AR-15’s and criminalizing ‘the right to choose’ are becoming part of the norm, what other solution is there? It’s not rocket science – take cover where there’s shelter … Hermione
Hermione Luck is editor-in-chief of The Lemonade Stand