SUNSET IN AMERICA?

THE BRISTOL EPISTLE SPUTTERS BACK TO LIFE

Honestly, we are living in dangerous and often depressing times.

As I finish the first half of my 80th year on this planet, I am sometimes tempted to cease blogging my thoughts and feelings. After all, not many read the posts, and is it worth the effort?

Both my parents suffered from various forms of arthritis and bursitis. Why should I be surprised when I experience pain in my joints? My father had Parkinsons and associated dementia. So why should I be surprised that my short-term memory is failing, and I am often forgetting things and losing things?

The other thing I have noticed is that time is passing by much more quickly. I measure time by when I must take the garbage bin from behind our shed to the curbside of our driveway, and that’s every Tuesday evening. It seems like there are birthdays to remember every month. Were it not for my dear wife, who herself has a birthday soon, I would never remember to send cards or gifts to special friends and family.

My volunteer service as a mediator at Erica Baez’s law office gives me great satisfaction, but increasingly I need more help from our staff as I navigate my computer and keep track of my appointments. When I applied to return to active law practice<, I told the bar leaders that I felt I was still mentally competent to practice law. I believe I still am, but for how much longer I cannot say.

For the first time in my life, I have become actively engaged in a campaign for political office. My dear friend and spiritual daughter Erica Baez is running to be the Clerk of the Circuit Court for the County of Chesterfield. Local elections are so interesting. Erica is clearly the only qualified candidate for the office of Clerk, but most people I see at the polls are not interested in who is best qualified. It is all about party affiliation.

And now a very well-spoken young man from Louisiana has been elected to be Speaker of the House of Representatives. That means if somehow both President Biden and Vice President Harris should die, he would become President. What scares me is that he is so appealing on the surface. He is an evangelical Christian who says he wants to honor God through his service as Speaker and he wants to work with Democrats for the responsible governance of our country. And yet, he refuses to acknowledge to this very day that our current President was legitimately elected. At least he was not inciting the mob that invaded the Capitol. But I want to stay positive and give him a chance. When I see him, I notice he looks a lot like Stephen Colbert. All that’s missing is the jokes.

Another mass shooting with an assault rifle, this time in Maine. How many more will it take before our political leaders enact a ban on their possession, sale or use? The same good Christians who profess to grieve over even early term abortions turn a blind eye to the slaughter of hundreds of our people who end up at the scene of a mass shooting. I am sorry to admit that the answer is there will be no such ban until a mass shooter turns his AR 15 on members of the Congress, many of whom have been bought and paid for by the NRA.

The 2024 election will be the most consequential in our history. In my view, if the Republicans win the White House and both houses of Congress, it will be our last election at the national level. Our democracy will be over, as Plato and De Tocqueville predicted. The institutions of governmental administration and perhaps the courts—any who could get in the way of political agendas pursued by the “majority” will be disabled. State power will be expanded and federal power over subject areas like education, the environment, commerce, labor, elections, and immigration will be reduced.

To my children and grandchildren, I issue this warning: if you want to continue to live in a free country where free and fair elections determine who is empowered to lead you into the future, start getting active now and VOTE!

I hope and pray that middle ground will be found and accepted by both sides of the political divide on the issues that are currently threatening to destroy the minimal level of national unity that democracy requires. Protecting our national security, immigration controls, assault weapons, abortion, campaign financing, welfare reform, social safety nets, climate, homelessness, hunger, public health. There are others, but in each case, there needs to be a balance struck between competing interests. Individual rights were never intended to be absolute, nor divorced from individual responsibility. If our elected representatives cannot or will not work on striking those balances, on an urgent basis, then our country is headed for a political revolution of one kind or another.

It is clear to me that former President Trump stands ready to ride to our rescue after his people cause our Congress to fail to enact basic funding for the continued operation of government. It is absolutely beyond my comprehension that he still strikes fear in the hearts of elected officials. Or that professed Christians still follow him rather than Jesus when their respective teachings and actions are diametrically opposed. And I am ashamed to associate with these brothers and sisters.

May God have mercy upon all of us.

How could a free people help their representatives reach compromises on important issues when so often positions are pursued with an almost evangelical zeal that makes any compromise a betrayal? I honestly doubt that “we the people” can ever regain effective control over special interests and “their” representatives. Referenda are the truest barometer of popular will, and yet they are rarely authorized by laws enacted by representatives who fear such popular empowerment.

After the Maine mass shooting, the new Speaker of the House was quoted as saying this is not the time to discuss banning military style assault weapons, and that this is fundamentally a matter of the heart. His Republican colleagues in both houses of Congress made statements about how these weapons are needed to shoot predator animals like feral pigs and foxes. Also, sportsmen enjoy these weapons. Allow me to speak truth, plain and simple. All human sin is a matter of the heart. And weapons far less lethal than an AR-15 have been effectively used in the past for all the purposes cited by their advocates. It simply is not necessary to place military style assault weapons in the hands of private citizens. It is dangerous. Such weapons need to be controlled, just as they are in the armed forces and law enforcement agencies. I fear that the real reason for Republicans to continue to oppose any ban on such weapons is that they hope they will be effectively used by organized groups of their supporters to prevail in an armed takeover of the government. We have always had fringe groups, often led by religious leaders, who planned violent anti-government attacks. Trump’s January 6th incitement was hardly the first.

I have previously noted that when, not if, our current system of government and individual freedoms come to a screeching halt, our epitaph will read “Too much freedom, not enough responsibility.”

What really grieves my old heart is the reality that millions of people of good will who profess to love God and their neighbor have been led astray by political operatives whose only virtue is finding ways to enable a minority of the citizenry to hold on to the levers of political power. To borrow a phrase from the Apostle Paul, “You foolish Americans!”