We cannot hide by Roger Delmar

I share Roger’s deep awareness of the importance of, at the very least, bearing witness to what is going on in our country.

In earlier call, Trump pressured Georgia elections investigator to find evidence of fraud—NBC News

‘A mass fatality event’: California struggles with backlog of bodies of COVID-19 victims—Los Angeles Times

At a Yemen hospital wracked by U.S. funding cuts, children are dying of hunger—WaPo

January 9, 2021

We cannot hide
by Roger Delmar, Port Townsend, Washington

I’ve been wanting to write something since the breaching of the Capitol on January 6^th, but the magnitude of the events and the facts behind what went on change so fast that whatever I would write would be obsolete before it was posted. It is just mind boggling! We were warned, but obviously far too few took Trump seriously. It appears the security was deliberately downplayed and held back. American democracy was raped while far too many in Congress—representatives and senators—were complicit in encouraging and backing those who stormed the Capitol.

All I can really say is that I am deeply saddened, fiercely angry, and really apprehensive for our future. Trump has his private army, and whether he is kicked out of the White House immediately or only on January 20^th, his army will follow him. He, and the fiercely loyal who listen and obey, are a continuing danger to our democracy, fact-based truth, and justice under the law. They are fervently locked into an alternate reality, and how to bring them back into democratic norms will be an enormous challenge in the coming months and years.

We cannot hide from this truly scary scenario because paying attention is “too disturbing to our sensibilities.” Joe and Kamala need all the support they can get. If we have learned anything it is that our democracy is fragile, that American democratic exceptionalism is a myth, that we are as capable of going down the road to fascism as the Germans and Italians were in the 1930s.

Being a good citizen demands that we pay attention, that we stay informed, that we speak out and participate in government. Silence makes us complicate enablers. Senator Tim Kaine sent out a letter to his followers today in which he said, “An awful lot of smart, educated people chose to be bystanders in the last years and that allowed a pathetic and insecure leader to do things that most of us thought unimaginable in this great nation.”  We simply can’t be those people in the coming days!