Dear Editor,
Today’s attack on the U.S.A. is not coming from China or Mexico or Canada or even Greenland and Denmark, and not from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, or Panama, likewise it is not coming from Ukraine, Europe and NATO, nor Taiwan, Okinawa, South Korea, Japan, Australia or New Zealand, or even Samoa, and not from immigrants or even Democrats and Socialists.
Today’s attack is coming from an odd collection of highly insecure, lying, abusive, and narcissistic billionaires. They have done this by using democracy to gather the many votes of mostly uneducated and naïve citizens, and attracted into a club, or cult, called MAGA. The Orange One is expert at making its members feel welcome and included with distinctive apparel, lingo, chants, slogans, secret codes, and conspiracy theories.The topics that hold them together are a collection of grievances focused on an understanding that they are victims and under attack by scheming, sneaky and sleazy foreigners and liberals who are well-coordinated.
Today’s attack communicates via Fox News, OAN, conservative talk shows on TV and radio, informal coffee-shop talk, and rallies. Oh the rallies, today’s version of Woodstock for frustrated-dull people. They are nonetheless picturesque. There they affirm their suspicions and prejudices into concrete “facts,” making MAGA-symbolism substitutions for those of the KKK and Nazis.
Today’s attack makes people anywhere to the left of the political spectrum in rural America, in my case Sweetwater County, Wyoming, very uncomfortable and keeps us looking over our shoulders. I personally have had a rock break a window in a rental property on November 2, 2024, three days before the election. I had allowed a Democrat campaign sign to be displayed in front of my building. I am out $175. Several Democrats have not put candidate bumper stickers on their cars for fear of retribution.
Today’s attack on the nation is worse than The Day of Infamy, December 7, 1941, the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Then there was an identifiable foreign enemy easily explained as a fascist and aggressive dictatorship attacking a peaceful democracy and a Sleeping Giant (all of Us).
Today’s attack is from within our democracy. It did not begin with, nor did it end with, the violent insurrection of January 6, 2021. Still, these sorts of events are what many of this nation’s founders feared, that a popularly elected fraudster, a charlatan, “a showman,” would win and mob rule would assert itself, replacing process and custom and law with hate and chaos. The weak and minorities would be trampled and the rich would reap rewards during the confusion and fear.
Today’s attack, if successful, will result in the destruction of all the things that have structured us as a viable society, often expressed and organized through bureaucracies charged with upholding complex but beneficial laws and institutions that have made all of our lives better with improved health, education, water and air and nature, justice, equality and inclusion and opportunity.
Today’s attack may end The American Way, and soon.
Tom Gagnon
Rock Springs
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