In 1865, after the collapse of the Confederacy, Confederate General Joseph O.Shelby, aka “the Undefeated” and his “Iron Brigade,” a band of about 600 soldiers, rode south to Mexico. There, after a grueling three-month slog through the desert, they offered their services as a ‘foreign legion’ to Maximilian 1, an Austro-Hungarian who had been installed as emperor of Mexico in 1864.
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In the last weeks of January, and into the first two weeks of February, I was floating. I would wake each day, nearly bounding out of bed, and ready to take on the world. We were counting down the days to Biden’s inauguration, and even the horrific attack on the Capitol on the 6th was but a speed bump, easily acknowledged by both Democrats and Republicans as an obvious and seditious attack on the Constitutionally mandated work of the Congress.
The Dems impeached trump AGAIN. Biden was inaugurated without incident. And with trump silenced by Twitter, life was sweet.
Sadly, however, a few weeks sans trump had left the GOP with a bad case of amnesia, and, just last week, they yawned like teenagers through video evidence of trump’s guilt, and voted to acquit.
When I was a kid in Montreal, most of the dads (and some of the moms) were veterans of the World War II, and the Korean War, which had ended just a few short months before I was born.
“You wouldn’t know a diamond if you held it in your hand.” Truer words never spake, Messrs Becker and Fagen. Ah, the things Americans have thrown away in fits of pique.
The domestic terrorists that sacked the Capitol on January 6th did a gross disservice to themselves, and every other American citizen or visitor to America, that will have impact for the next many decades. If they thought wearing a mask, or being ‘cancelled’ for their QAnon views impinged upon their ‘freedumbs’ before, they’re about to find out the very hard way how much more they lost with that day’s sedition.
In the face of a soon to be ex-president who has lost spectacularly and consistently, at the polls, and in and out of court since November 3rd, it’s hard to grant any credibility whatsoever to the Republican Party – no, scratch that – the Trump Party. The cult is being run by a master gaslighter, who tried, but failed to steal an election, despite using every dirty trick in the book, who is now arguing that the election was stolen from him, he believes, by a better thief than he.
In the last several years, I’ve written umpteen thousands of words about the trump presidency. I’ve tried my best to point readers and voters towards the truth of what so many warned us about – a rogue presidency ending in political, financial, and physical disaster for American citizens.
Three years into his disastrous reign, the damage being inflicted on the people, their institutions, and, sadly, their psyches, is no longer up for question. If there is to be any hope for the country in the future, it will require decades of labour, just to bring things back to where they were in November 2016, when Trump won the Electoral College, after losing the popular vote to Clinton by 2.8 million votes.
Whether America will ever get the chance to even start that repair, is now moot.
At the end of the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King Jr famously paraphrased the words of Theodore Parker, American transcendentalist and pastor, when he stated, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
For baby boomers, on whom the shadow of World War II fell the darkest , the post war years teemed with possibility. Our future lay before us like a shimmering landscape, designed by the brilliant minds now free to bring us sci fi and fantasy tales of a world filled with scientific and technical advances beyond our wildest dreams.
If anyone had said to me, even a couple of months ago, that in July of 2017 the President of the United States would suddenly decree, apropos of nothing, and via Twitter no less! to “please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military” I’d have snorted like an outraged donkey.
The United States is going to decide on Tuesday who gets to live in the White House. That’s it. It’s a fight over curb appeal. It comes with a desk job related to maintaining the façade of Leader of the Free World. The outcome is already foretold in the ancient scrolls. Americans call it The Constitution. It’s like the Get Out of Jail Free card in Monopoly. Invoke the incantation called ‘The Second Amendment’ and men with guns appear as protectors of freedom.
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