My book, Access to Justice On The Outskirts Of Hope, vols. I & II, was published in June 2020. Volume II is still available in print, and both are available through Kindle. If you’re eligible for KindleUnlimited, you could even read it for free! Like any author, I strongly encourage people to read my work.
For those who haven’t (yet!) read my book, it’s a recitation of lived experiences – mine, my associates, and the clients that my agency served. In essence, my book is about the dual system of justice in civil matters as it pertains to our underserved community.
Without getting into the weeds of the book’s content, it reflected my firm conviction that all problems are interconnected and by merely “solving” one problem doesn’t begin to resolve all the other related issues extant. Too often we look at an issue in isolation while we ignore everything else. It is clear that siloed thinking results in siloed responses, which in turn serves only to, at best, maintain the status quo.
On September 3, 2023, I turned…. none of your business. Let’s just agree that I no longer get carded at the liquor store and leave it at that.
But my birthday prompted me to reflect on what has transpired over the past three plus years, looking back at where we were in June of 2020, and how we arrived at where we are in the late summer and early fall of 2023.
When my book was published, we were just at the beginning of a brutal worldwide pandemic. As of the last count, according to the Center for Disease Control, 1,141,882 Americans died of COVID, 6,308,630 people were hospitalized, and between January 20, 2020 and November 11, 2022, nearly ninety-nine million Americans had tested positive for COVID. That last number is now almost a year old and with the cessation of a comprehensive testing regime it’s likely that the United States has topped the one hundred million mark.
Obviously, the worldwide numbers are at least five times the U.S. numbers.
To say that we were unprepared for the most serious public health emergency since the 1918-1919 influenza outbreak would be an obvious understatement. For months its origin was uncertain, a matter much disputed by rightwing fringe groups, and the then sitting president. Because this was a “novel,” a.k.a. new, virus there were no treatment regimes, reliable tests, or vaccines widely available for nearly a year.
To stop the spread and with no better options available, workplaces were disrupted, workers who were unable to work from home became unemployed, resulting in economic distresses that continue to this day. Schools were closed and kids were homeschooled or attended on-line classes which exacerbated in the already extant disparities in our education system.
Adding to the confusion at the start of the pandemic were the voices touting false treatment options, and downplaying the seriousness of COVID, equating it with a “normal” strain of the seasonal flu. These same voices counseled people not to wear masks in public and to ignore any quarantine guidance issued by public health professionals. All in the name of vindicating the public’s “liberties.”
We needn’t discuss the novel creative suggestions for using household bleach or hydrocichloriquene.
Symptomatic of our times, these voices attempted to undermine commonly accepted facts, discredit scientific responses, counseled the violation of public health policies, and took no responsibility for the impact their words had on the gullible and fearful in our communities. And if people died as a result of their “counsel,” then that was just the price we pay for vindicating people’s “rights” and living in a free society.
More recently, schools have become the epicenter for our ongoing culture wars, or as I call it “forced ignorance.” Books have been banned from libraries and classrooms because they might contain information not conforming to the white male heterosexual “ideal.” The subject of race has been discarded as Critical Race Theory. Oklahoma recently mandated that “race” be taken out of lessons about the Tulsa Race Riots. Florida’s Department of (non)Education has mandated that students be taught about the “benefits” that the slaves received prior to their emancipation.
A new group, Mom’s For Liberty (a.k.a. Bigotry) was formed less than three years ago in Florida with a mission to ensure that parents have control over curriculum in public schools. As of this writing, they’ve formed local chapters in most, if not all, states. They’re even thinking about endorsing someone for president. Purportedly organized as an organic grassroots organization, they appear as bought and paid for astroturf.
These voices were abetted by a more robust rightwing, faux libertine, authoritarian ecosphere that has emerged over the past few years. Well supported by shell organizations financed by dark money, this ecosphere has the luxury of spewing nonsense to a fearful, gullible, and unsuspecting public while avoiding any meaningful consequence for the damage it does.
Think of it as if the Mad Hatter came to life and said, “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be.”
Not only has this ecosphere impacted our public health, which in turn impacted our educational and economic institutions, it has severely damaged our politics and the rule of law. It nurtured and sustained the rise of an authoritarian president, whose sole saving grace was that he was too stupid and undisciplined to pull off a coup that he attempted after he lost his 2020 reelection campaign.
In the early morning hours, with the election still undecided, Donald Trump claimed that he had actually won the race for president and stated that the only way he could lose was if “they” stole it. The resonance of his claim was due to him making similar claims six months prior to the casting of the first vote. Employing a circular logic of the Mad Hatter, Trump repeatedly claimed that the only reason he could lose his re-election bid was if it was “stolen,” and when the election was over, he lost, so ipso facto the election was stolen.
After over sixty failed state and federal lawsuits filed on Trump’s behalf, along with multiple audits in numerous states, it was evident that Trump lost a clean and fair election. But that didn’t stop him or the ecosphere that abetted him. In rallies and on social media, he continued to claim massive voter fraud which deprived him, and through him his supporters, the victory they craved and “deserved.” It was all but inevitable that the January 6, 2021, insurrection would occur.
Today, the 45th president and leading contender for the 2024 Republican nomination for president has been charged with 91 felony counts at the state and local levels. In a separate civil action, he was found civilly liable for sexual assault. As it was in the House’s investigation of the 2021 insurrection, all the evidence arrayed against Trump comes from republicans, some being his closest associates.
That basic fact, which is objectively beyond contestation, that Trump lost his re-election bid and then conspired with others to undermine if not overturn a free and fair election is ignored by his supporters. The majority of republicans think that Trump is the victim of democrats using the law and weaponizing the government to persecuting him. As his poll ratings increase, Trump shamelessly wears each indictment as a badge of honor.
The rot in our system has transformed Trump as a Billy Budd-like allegorical Christ figure. Somewhere Herman Melville must be weeping.
This is a brief overview of a few of the events and issues extant over the past three years, and just barely scratching their surface at that. As the mileage accrues on my personal odometer, I can say without hesitation that over time things have gotten worse, not better.
The optimism of my generation for the establishment of a better world where people could cooperate in the advance of the common good and a just society for all has descended into fear and division stoked by those, internally and externally, who seek to benefit from these fears and division.
Walt Kelly in his comic strip Pogo got it right when the title character says “we have met the enemy and it’s us.”
With so many falsehoods and outright lies competing favorably with objectively verifiable truths, it recalls a song riff from over 50 years ago: … “There's battle lines being drawn, Nobody's right if everybody's wrong …”
The past three years have seen an unchecked erosion of the common values and principles that are necessary for this democratic experiment of ours to keep going. Franklin’s admonition regarding a question of what the 1787 Philadelphia Convention gave the people was, “A republic…if you can keep it.” Truly prophetic.
We’ve never been an easy country owing to the fact that, save for the displaced indigenous peoples, we all came from somewhere else. As John Winger in the movie Stripes would put it, “we’re all mutts.” Our diversity, while often challenging, over time became our strength. This was the nation founded on a set of enduring freedoms: self-rule, equity if not equality, opportunity, representation, and subject not to a monarch or some autocratic ruler but to the rule of law.
We are imperfect with too much separation between the ideal and the real. And in our rapidly changing world, too many of us feel left behind, threatened by the seeming loss of social status, and reduced economic and political power. This is not a recent development but is the story of this nation since its inception.
Our current situation didn’t arise over the past three years, nor with Trump, nor over the past four decades. This is the product of an incremental rot inevitable in our system. We forgot the lessons of why we need a governing system working on behalf of all to keep order and ensure opportunity. We have allowed the false logic of unfettered individual “liberty” to evolve into the false promise of a modern-day survival of the fittest.
It might be hyperbole to say that the election in 2024 will be our last democratic election. But even if democracy lives to fight another day, without standing up against those stoking division, and working toward realizing the enduring values that made our country a beacon of light for the rest of the world, democracy’s demise will become foregone conclusion.
The fight we face is not a mere contest between Trump and Biden, rather it is whether a democratic or an authoritarian society will prevail. This is a fight over whether power will reside with a select few or will reside with us all. This is a fight over whether the select few will impose their values, their policies, and their social construct upon the rest of us. This is a fight over whether some have more rights than others. This is a fight over whether each of us will be able to live our lives as who we are and have our rights respected, or whether a select few will determine what “rights” we are permitted to have.
So, we must stand against those who seek to impose their will, by law and by force, on all of us. I worry too much for my grandchildren and for all children to sit idly by. Each of us has the capacity to stand, support and defend those values articulated centuries ago, and to apply these values not as static worn-out truths but as living values relevant and applicable to our current challenges.
For those who believe that any individual’s act can never achieve a positive outcome, let me quote Robert F. Kennedy from 1966:
Comments