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There seems to be this sentiment that now that we’ve gotten our wish, and Donald Trump is out of the White House, we should — you know — bring it in for a group hug and sing a chorus of “Kumbaya.”
Let’s shake on it. Let’s let bygones be bygones. We’re too divided now, and we stand on the precipice of civil war. So let’s cool our jets, forget that a month ago an unruly mob stormed the U.S. Capitol building bent on causing injury and destruction. And — as it turned out — death.
Nice try. But no.
I don’t know what possesses people to think this way. Well, I know why Republicans might, especially the ones who aided and abetted the Jan. 6 protest. They want to dodge accountability for it.
And I suppose I can understand why well-meaning people such as Msgr. Paul V. Garrity, who expressed this point of view in Monday’s paper, might have this feeling. Msgr. Garrity is a good, charitable person — and one whom I have admired for many years. I’m sure he’s sincere when he says that with everything at stake in this country, there are bigger fish to fry than impeaching a man who has already been evicted from the White House by 81 million of his fellow citizens.
We have a virus to wrestle. We have enormous economic inequities in this country. And we have a festering racial issue that, unless we come to terms with it, will only make the national reckoning 10 times as difficult as it is now.
We use a term whenever there’s a budgetary situation either in Congress or in the state legislature: kicking the can down the road. And we always hear this pious, sanctimonious bloviating from our elected officials, especially when they shut down the government, about how we cannot kick the can down the road — that all we do when we do that is leave it to the next person to handle.
But if we decide to punt on affixing accountability to the elected officials who perpetrated this lie that Trump had the election stolen from him, isn’t that kicking the can down the road? Someone’s going to have to face this situation sometime. Better now, before it gets a chance to metastasize.
Didn’t we learn anything last summer? We’ve been kicking the can of systemic racism down the road since before the Civil War, and that situation has actually become commensurately worse in all that time.
If we don’t stop kicking all these cans down the road, we’ll eventually reach a point where there’s no road, too many cans, and nowhere to go.
Would it be nice if the United States were unified? Very much so. But I have to ask: when was it ever that way, except in rare instances where extraordinarily bad events occurred to unite us? We were horrified and unified when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and for most of World War II — perhaps the last sustained era in the country’s history where we had singleness of purpose — we stayed that way. But do we want to go through that again?
We were horrified and unified when President Kennedy was assassinated — for about a month. I was only 10, but I remember the mood quite well. It took four guys from Liverpool to snap us out of it, and then we went back to our usual divided ways. We’re never unified unless it’s bad.
We certainly weren’t on the same page when President Nixon resigned. And even though we were for a few weeks after 9/11, that really didn’t last long.
We’ve spent the great majority of our history careening through disharmony. I don’t know why what’s going on now is any worse than it’s ever been. Every person living and breathing in this country has a pulse, a brain (some obviously more complete than others), and an opinion. Unity is a myth.
So forget about these people who claim we shouldn’t try Trump for propagating lies to wave the red flag in front of the collective angry bull. We must. And to all those Republicans who are angry because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told Ted Cruz to go pound sand: you people can do the same.
We may come out of this even more divided, but I don’t see how. And I don’t see how it even matters. We’ve survived this long, falling well short of being the Good Ship Lollipop.
The Link LonkFebruary 02, 2021 at 07:46AM
https://www.itemlive.com/2021/02/01/krause-let-bygones-by-bygones-cmon-forget-it/
Krause: Let bygones by bygones? C'mon. Forget it. - Itemlive - Daily Item
https://news.google.com/search?q=forget&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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