Clarity or Fog
I have wondered over the past two years if the typical German citizen in the 1930s recognized what was happening to their country. That is, when you are in the middle of radical and threatening change, do you realize it is happening? Or, is it so masked that many do not recognize it for what it is? When you finally can see through the fog, is it too late and irreparable harm is done?
Seeing Through the Hype
It is clearly the case that many people are willing to give up the principles of democracy to forward what they believe is an important immediate political goal. As such, they are blind to seeing the harm in having the President declare a false emergency. The purpose of the emergency is to get around Congress’s funding limitation on his border wall. Politicizing the act of declaring an emergency, and undermining the power of Congress to authorize Federal spending, are assaults on our democracy.
PUSHING THE LIMITS HAS BECOME COMMON PLACE
In 1984 poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky said during a commencement speech,
"...Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good. You never see it crossing your threshold announcing itself: "Hi, I'm Evil!" nybooks.com
He goes on to warn that,
“To put it mildly, nothing can be turned and worn inside out with greater ease than one’s notion of social justice, public conscience, a better future, etc. One of the surest signs of danger here is the number of those who share your views, not so much because unanimity has a knack of degenerating into uniformity as because of the probability—implicit in great numbers—that noble sentiment is being faked NYbooks.com.”
He argues that the defense against evil is thinking and individualism. This result is similar to the conclusions Hannah Arendt made 20 years early, when in 1962, she wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Eichmann in Jerusalem was her observations on the trial of Adolph Eichmann, a Nazi SS leader and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust. The basic thesis of her book is that ordinary people are capable of doing horrible acts when society is structured to make them common place Guardian.
The reason ordinary people can do unspeakable acts is
“…because it was committed in a daily way, systematically, without being adequately named and opposed. In a sense, by calling a crime against humanity "banal", she was trying to point to the way in which the crime had become for the criminals accepted, routinized , and implemented without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance Guardian.”
ABUSE OF POWER
Donald Trump has repeatedly attached our democratic processes to the point that these assaults are common place. His assaults have included arguing that the Mueller investigation is a witch hunt, Democratic lead investigations are presidential harassment, a sitting President is above the law, and he can pardon himself. His constant pushing to expand his power, and nullify those who oppose him, has become “banal”. So, when he crosses yet another red line and falsely declares a national emergency our level of outrage is tempered. Furthermore, his supporters, many of whom see themselves as patriots, do not see this action as an egregious abuse of power that must be stopped.
This is truly the most concerning action he has taken to date and it must be stopped to preserve our form of government. The GOP could rein him in on this if they felt the people were behind them. Write your Congressman and Senators, now!
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