43 Days

I’ve clutched enough pearls to sink a ship. I’ve also gone so high when others have gone low that I’ve floated on the air stream with the birdies. We created a murmuration, which, for those of you unaware, is a spectacular sight in nature, but entertaining only, not effective. In other words, while us high flyers were busy murmuring, the bad guys were stealing our cheese.

And so it goes now. We, the murmurers, are posting memes about the tragic departure of Ruth Bader Ginsburg while the bad guys are packing up her office so the new gal can move in. They care not that they are doing precisely what they proclaimed four years ago to be an unthinkable, un-democratic action – moving forward with a Supreme Court nomination weeks before an election. And that’s what gets us.

The cheese-stealers don’t give a fuck if we disapprove. They couldn’t care less if we say they are liars, that they are hypocritical and dishonorable, that they are violating their Boy Scout oaths left and right. We, of course, would feel terrible if anyone said such things to us. We would be mortified.

We have to get over it. We have to get over our delicate selves. We have to stop imagining that the Republicans in charge somehow share our ethical framework. (They may but I’ve not seen any evidence lately.) We have to give up on their being impressed with our outrage. They won’t be. They’ve got our cheese and they’re running down the hall with it.

So the choice for us is to run faster, block the exits, trick them into dropping their cheese loads to take a rest. We need to be smart, strong, and relentless or, as one meme put it, now that with are Ruth-less, we need to be ruthless. I agree with that. But we need to be ruthless in the pursuit of fair play and equity. And ruthless in getting every eligible voter to the polls and having their vote count on Election Day. We have to keep up the moral outrage even if we look like a bunch of schoolmarms distressed at the bullies on the playground. No moral outrage = resignation. We can’t have that.

Free, open elections are the great fear of the Republican Party. Voting is the water that will melt the Wicked Witch of the West and Republicans know it. That’s why they’ve pursued a path of voter suppression all across the country. It’s happened a wee stitch at a time and now voter suppression lies like a heavy, wet woolen blanket over every state in the Union. It doesn’t have to be this way.

It’s time to do whatever it was we were waiting to do if we had more nerve or more time or more money. You know what those things are, I don’t have to make a list. Don’t wait is all I’m asking. Start tomorrow morning doing one thing to change what’s happening. Just one, and then another. We have 43 days.

Don’t let these thieves steal our country.

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Photo credit: Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash