In the best of times, the world is a challenging place. This blog was originally intended to call out local restaurants for healthcode violations. Some of my pet peeves are waitstaff delivering beverages with their hands all over the rims of the glasses or cashiers handling the filthy lucre of cash and credit cards and then preparing your food with those same unwashed, ungloved hands.
But now it’s the worst of times. The daily dumpster fire of lies, obfuscation and claims of unfettered executive power emanating from the Trump White House is shaking the very foundations of everything Americans value. At our most idealistic, we’ve called that “truth, justice and the American Way.”
But Superman is nowhere to be found. Authoritarian Vladimir Putin and his useful idiot/agent Donald J. Trump need us to reach a state of utter confusion about truth and ultimately cave to their self-serving demands. They need us to mistrust a free press, retreat further into our tribal bunkers and find less and less common ground in nationally shared values.
This is the not-so-slow death of democracy in action. Don’t forget, post-Soviet Russia was a democracy. Now Russia’s elections are a sham in which Putin, Trump’s BFF, arrests and poisons his political opponents and routinely “wins” 97% of the vote. Russia is an illiberal democracy, not San Francisco as our mentally-impaired president believes.
Nancy Pelosi just told Trump that “with you, all roads lead to Putin.” Preach it because it is the undeniable truth. I never thought I’d live in an America where half the country (erm…Republicans) would surrender freedom and democratic values for Russian oppression and kleptocracy. But here we are. And I’ve had it.