January 20, 2025 - A Day of Remembrance

January 20, 2025 will and should be a day of remembrance. The phrase: “A day that will live in infamy” has been taken, but may be reappropriated with equal force to today’s events. On this day, the United States was not attacked by a foreign enemy, as in Pearl Harbor; it suffered an irremediable assault from an enemy within. It is for some a day of mourning, and it is hoped that those who support and gloat over the events of the day will also respect the right of those who have respected the nation and its constitutional democracy to mourn.

On this day, the United States has ceded any moral authority it might have retained in the world. It has chosen to dive into a venal cesspool of cynicism and exploitation. The national demise cannot be blamed solely upon the vacuous character of one narcissistic autocrat, as he has demonstrated sufficient followers and enablers to win a national election.  It might well be argued that this leap has been foreshadowed and is no surprise. Steps toward the edge have been apparent, in decimating the Voting Rights Act, overturning Roe v Wade, attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, corruption of SCOTUS justices. Yet there has been a significant and viable resistance, a willingness to call out perfidy and betrayal of fundamental constitutional and humane values. It was believed that there were certain lines that should not and could not be crossed. That belief in the American electoral system was naive, not just a belief that the system would sustain a balance, but in failure to recognize the degradation of its very underpinnings.

Today is a watershed moment in US history, a staining event unlike any other in its admittedly tainted history. A convicted felon is installed as President. A draft dodger who is disqualified from admission to any national armed service, who disparaged war veterans as “suckers and losers,” and who threatens military invasions against sovereign lands is being installed as Commander in Chief of the national defense. A convicted grifter and fraud who has filed for bankruptcy no less than six times is placed in charge of the national economy and budget administration. An anti-intellectual whose children have never attended any public school, and seeks to abolish the Department of Education, is now in charge of national education policy affecting millions of public school children. A person so scientifically ignorant that he promoted drinking bleach to remedy COVID-19, has appointed a science denying anti-vaxxer to lead the national health agency and protect public health. And the very person who incited an armed mob to attack the Capitol and hang the sitting Vice President in a treasonous insurrection to overturn the 2020 national election, and now promises to pardon the traitors as “patriots,” is the person with primary responsibility for preserving constitutional democracy. And this is not a complete list of his transgressions. During the Inauguration ceremony, he declined to place his hand on the bible as he took oath of office, as all his predecessors have done, indicating the vow is an empty promise.

To be sure, the historical record and performance of the United States has not been without fault and there have been many shameful events, foreign and domestic, calling for reflection and remedy. US support of foreign wars, Viet Nam, Iraq Invasion, and Israeli genocide in Gaza have all diminished the nation in the global sphere. The distinction is whether the ethic of the general populace could be said to trust in a rational and moral balancing dialectic of informed public discourse, or whether the public mind has been so infected and corrupted that belief in E Pluribus Unum can no longer be sustained.  Two important factors suggest the latter. First, corruption and decay of the fourth estate, whose function was supposed to inform the public and foster rational debate, has degraded such that the media is little more than a megaphone and echo chamber for a wealthy oligarchy. Second, the fundamental architecture of representative democracy includes an independent judiciary capable of maintaining some legal standards and precedents as “guardrails” against corruption and antithetical chaos by the executive and legislative branches. Less than a third of the public now believe in and trust the SCOTUS as capable of reliably performing that function. And certain politically driven judges in the federal district and circuit courts of appeals can predictably be counted on to issue sweeping rulings to facilitate corruption and undermine legal standards and precedents. 

All is not lost; all is not doom and gloom.  The sun will rise and set tomorrow and life will go on. However, it will be a decidedly and palpably different America, and by no rational or moral measure a “great” one. People will of necessity adjust to life, commercial and social interactions, albeit within much more limited parameters than before. Violent official anti-immigrant rhetoric will be manifested in nationwide raids by armed ICE agents under the new “Border Czar” to terrorize immigrants. The assault by executive order is to include schools, hospitals and churches. The terror will be visited on all brown people, whether or not documented or citizens because, as former Arizona Sheriff Joseph M. Arpaio maintained, “they all look alike.” Any citizens who resist such authoritarian pogrom-like tactics are also threatened. Voices like that of Rev. Martin Luther King have been intimidated to silence or drowned out by right wing hate speech. 

The rise of unbridled gun rights activism means that one dare not get in an argument with any stranger on the street, in the supermarket, or in a parking lot for fear that the challenged other may pull out a concealed weapon and shoot. Children are no longer safe when sent to public schools, and virtually every fourth grader is versed in lockdown and active shooter protocols. Even smaller scale interactions withdraw into more restricted spheres, where one must be chary of broaching “liberal” topics at social parties or at work. Even innocuous arguments at neighborhood football or baseball games over referee calls can become lethal; and playing partners at the golf or tennis club will become segregated along progressive and MAGA lines. What may once have been thought of as paranoia or irrational fear now becomes a survival standard. Despite cynical and hypocritical calls for “unity and prosperity,” after January 20, 2025 America becomes a very divided and morally bankrupt place.