A question was raised recently in my social circle:
Why is the FDA going to take 15 days to hold the first hearing for the Coronavirus vaccines? What about thousands of people who may die due to that delay?
On the face of it that is a reasonable question. Until we consider that content is great but context rules. This question was raised by someone who voted for Trump. Twice!
So I answered that while I am not a virologist, I imagine that the time was set aside for due diligence prior to the anticipated quick approval of the vaccines. And then I pressed on, “You are concerned about the death toll on account of the FDA but you say nothing about the months of mismanagement of pandemic by Donald Trump?” This led to some hand wringing and a trailing response of “well…”. A response as I have come to expect from all the Trump supporters in my circle. They all want to talk democratic bungling but the moment you point out a factual problem with Trump they suddenly don’t want to talk politics any more.
Although Joe Biden won the election, and that result has been certified even by the lagging controversial states, what is tragic is the divisive rhetoric that preceded this outcome and that Trump has sown and nurtured since his first anti-American volley of creating the birtherism scandal out of thin air.
Many people want to believe that people who support Trump are gullible. But that is not what I have seen. Educated, well-to-do citizens of our nation have chosen to congregate in the Trump camp, not because they like Donald Trump but because many of them are one agenda voters, generally Republican, around abortion, or taxes, or preserving the white majority of America. It is even observable that many of these folks who stand under the same tent don’t actualy hang out in the same circles or condone each other. But in order to get their pet issue addressed they are working hard to look the other way on all of Trump’s and Republican party’s generally destructive and inhumane policies of late.
The US may be a religious nation but it is not a Christian nation. The Republicans who also claim to be big fans of the original interpretation of the constitution just happen to fail to acknowledge that neither God nor Christ specifically are mentioned in the constitutional text. It actually took the first amendment to bring the word ‘religion’ into the discussion. And then too it does not favor a religion, only that the govt. will not restrict the freedom of ANY religion. The US constitution and the creation of a '“more perfect Union” were intended to be secular. Even Christ himself said, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's.” Mark 12:17. There is nothing stopping anyone from practicing a given a religion, or to even preach to the public through social discourse. But when the religious right became the tail that wags the dog that is the Republican party, this insidious drive to push the Christian agenda on the nation became one of the greatest betrayal of our freedom, and the constitution itself. And it continues.
Marco Rubio, the junior senator from Florida, recently tweeted, “Biden’s cabinet picks went to Ivy League schools, have strong resumes, attend all the right conferences & will be polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline,” he tweeted. “I support American greatness. And I have no interest in returning to the ‘normal’ that left us dependent on China.” This is the kind of misdirection, lying, and blatantly insulting stance that has become the norm for nearly half the nation. When did Americans become anti-education? When did it become ok to blatantly hope for and plan for explicit failure of a newly elected American president by the opposition party, even before he takes his oath? This is a replay of when President Obama was elected, and the players, from McConnell to Rubio, are many of the same ones.
To those who are itching to do a “what about…” pushback, yes the Democrats have done bad things. Harry Reid did no one any favors with his nuclear option fiasco. Having lost the 2016 election against expectations, the Democrats spent much of the last four years fighting the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency. It is true that foreign powers have tried to interfere with our elections probably for a long time, just as the US has meddled on other countries. But this was the first time that most of US intelligence came down pretty hard, and with evidence, that Russia was behind the online agitations, not to mention the whole Facebook scandal with Cambridge Analytica, which was an unprecedented attempted to introduce misinformation in an election cycle. But as luck would have it the democrats could never get enough cause and evidence together to prove wrongdoing. For reasons known only to him, Robert Mueller left the country hamstrung with his half-hearted public presentations of the illness he found in the system. All the evidence is there, and scattered, and Trump’s impeachment became a reality TV bit.
But back to where we started. The public. There are people who will make a deal with Satan himself if they can get a tax break, or overturn Roe v Wade (and put their own imprint on the lives of countless women). While some of these folks may think they are God fearing and following the scriptures, the Bible is a big book with many lessons and open interpretations. Where, for example, is the heeding of Christ’s warning to those who would cast the first stone? Where is the kindness one is to extend to his fellow man?
What this group of Trump supporters can’t see or doesn’t want to see is that by taking the right of appropriate taxation away from the legislature, and by insisting on keeping the govt. out of family planning they are in effect creating a manufactured oppression meant to keep the poor and middle class people down. It is the plantation mentality surviving off the plantation.
So all the Republicans who wanted the country to come together under Trump should want to do the same now. If their argument for the nation to unite changes because a Republican is no longer President then it would seem that they were presented a bad faith argument in the first place.
And the Democrats need to keep themselves in check, focusing on rebuilding instead of gloating. To the people who see FDA as slow, or the impending democratic presidency as a concerning, stop pretending that your stance is “for the people” when it may instead be for personal gain on whichever agenda you have found relatable. One can only hope that we will take a hard look in the mirror and decide that we will discard our hypocrisy along with the petulant man who lost an election and is still blatantly trying to create an autocratic America. Please don’t help him succeed.
Instead it behooves each one of us to revisit our conscience and to accept that we are all, Republicans and Democrats, US citizens with the same rights. And we won’t get ahead by tearing each other down, or using our biases as crutches to overcome factual outcomes that we don’t like. Let’s rise to a higher level and stop the cognitive dissonance of ignoring 8 months of neglect because it suited us over 15 days of delay. Let’s focus on the beauty and the strength of the idea that is America, a country with a checkered past but with determination to improve, to be on the righteous arc as time passes us by.