Keep the faith, my friends and fellow Americans. The election shall deliver a verdict soon on the national soul-searching that could change our lives — and the laws we live by.
All know it. Everything is on the line. History’s clock falls back if we fail.
Women and children would be first overboard, to have their freedom and future darkened. Donald Trump promised to “protect (us), whether they like it or not.”
Young ones now won’t remember Barack Obama or good ol’ Joe Biden trying to do right by us. They’ll remember a ranting, raving orange ball of fire.
Such presidential memories are formative. Remembering Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon as my first presidents, I learned young not to trust the president, lying about a losing war in Vietnam or the Watergate break-in.
But that was nothing next to “the war within” that Trump ignited, mostly in the former slave states, and from Kansas to Idaho. Even if he goes down in flames, he’s sown seeds of hate that will take time to mend.
For my generation, children in the ‘60s, either Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton spoke to us for the first time. And I need not tell what they brought to the table from different ends: optimism.
From living abroad and travel, that is the signature American character; I love coming home to feeling that this land is our land, where we all belong. Immigrants are imbued with that bright promise, that idea we hold dear. In a Greek poet’s words: “Pray the road is long/filled with adventure and discovery.”
The ancient Greeks invented democracy. We renewed it, as a republic, only to find it more fragile than we knew. A convicted felon (due to be sentenced Nov. 26) could extinguish what it’s all about.
Trump doesn’t know the meaning of our shared journey since the Mayflower pilgrims came ashore. He doesn’t know the first three words of the Constitution. He blatantly named three dishonest Republicans to the Supreme Court to deny a class of citizens, women and girls, our human rights and medical care.
That never happened before, not even in the court’s wretched 19th-century rulings on Black citizenship and “separate but equal” segregation.
In one generation, Trump could coarsen and change the character of the nation with mass deportations and more political violence and vengeance.
Did we ever fully recover from Civil War wounds? I think not. Trump pours salt into that cut every day. Take him at his word, America. He is seething, full of the Bard’s “sound and fury.”
That brings me to today’s billionaires, who take Trump very seriously. So tightfisted, and some cowardly, they make the robber barons look good.
Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and newspaper owner, is the world’s second-richest man. He loves his “Star Trek” fantasies and $500 million yacht more than American life on Earth. At his behest, the Washington Post canceled its endorsement of Kamala Harris.
Heard word, Bezos means to protect his Pentagon space contracts from Trump’s wrath at all costs. He called Trump to say how great it was that he raised his fist when he was grazed by a gunshot. Flattery will get you everywhere, right?
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk is also fixated on space — planet Mars. Let him go. He’s openly campaigning for Trump’s support in that quest, jumping at his rallies. Space travel is a ridiculous rich man’s hobby.
The late Steve Jobs gave little to charity. Peter Thiel, also of Silicon Valley, possesses a PayPal fortune, but not for thee or me. Thiel spent capital clearing way for Sen. JD Vance to jump on Trump’s ticket.
Compared to the 1,679 neighborhood libraries Andrew Carnegie gave to cities; compared to thousands of rural schools Sears leader Julius Rosenwald built for Southern Black children; compared to the famous museums, art, music and rare book collections endowed by the so-called railroad and robber barons of the Gilded Age, they put our current crop to shame.
They weren’t all great guys, but civic philanthropy (with a social conscience) has languished in the shameless Trump era.
Fear not, friends. Free American democracy to go forth for all.
Jamie Stiehm is a former assignment editor at CBS News in London, reporter at The Hill, metro reporter at the Baltimore Sun and public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She is author of a new play, “Across the River,” on Aaron Burr. See JamieStiehm.com.
From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2024
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