For the Voters

Some five minutes after posting my silly little piece and lamenting it wasn’t more meaningful if indeed I have 2,000 readers at the moment, I read this post from a fellow Orff teacher. I was quite surprised to hear her political history, but moved by her courage in facing head-on the change in her party to its present toxic character. If there’s any reader out there still somehow on the fence or who knows undecided voters, this is a convincing argument. She has given permission to freely post and share, so by all means do. (For the record, I don’t agree with her about Reagan, but I, like her, look forward to the time when we can have a civil conversation about such disagreements. Well, more accurately, when we all can have such conversations. She and I can indeed discuss this — after the election!)

 

I was 16 years old in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected President. He shaped my political consciousness and made a Republican out of me. My first vote was for him in 1984, and I don't regret it one bit. He was far from perfect, but his love of country and his moral clarity in dealing with the Soviet Union outweighed the flaws I saw in him at the time, and since then. Reagan loved America, and he loved his fellow Americans. His rhetoric united rather than divided us, and when he did poke fun at his opposition across the aisle, he did so in a way that made them laugh, too. There wasn't a mean bone in his body. 

 

From 1984 till 2016, I voted Republican in every election. But by the Obama years, I was growing disillusioned with a big part of the Republican base. For a long time I had stubbornly resisted the idea that Republicans were racist, naively believing that the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's had eliminated the majority of America's racial problems and that we were on our way towards fixing the rest. Just a few adjustments around the edges, and we would have a colorblind society, as Dr. King had envisioned.

 

But then, Barack Obama got elected President. Suddenly racists came crawling out of the woodwork. I voted against Obama twice - I found him rather arrogant and far too liberal for me. But some of the ugliness of the rhetoric that was deployed against him was shocking in its racist nature - and it all came from the far right! But that wasn't the mainstream of the Republican Party, I thought. Just some fringe kooks and quite a few senior citizens who simply never outgrew the nasty racial slurs they grew up with. I still believed in Republicans like Mitt Romney, who were gentlemen.

 

Then the tea party movement came along, targeting traditional Republicans who got stuff done in Congress and in Austin by finding common ground and working across the aisle with Democrats to pass laws that would benefit all citizens. My Republican State Senator, who was a problem solver and a man of character and great intelligence, got beaten in the primaries by a Tea Party opponent who has yet to sponsor a single meaningful piece of legislation - all because the challenger embraced inflammatory, hateful rhetoric and slandered our Senator with the ugliest of lies. I was discouraged.

 

Then 2016 came along, and Obama's years as President were over. 17 Republicans declared their candidacy; I'd say that probably 10 of them could have beaten Hillary Clinton. Then there was Donald Trump. A rude, brash, ruthless con man who has boasted of his marital infidelities for decades, who had been sued for fraud over 4000 times, who constantly appealed to the lowest emotions of the electorate. And one by one, he outlasted all the decent, sensible Republicans in the race. And then he squeaked out a narrow win in the electoral college and became President.

 

In 2016 I couldn't support him. I knew by his own words how utterly unqualified for the job he was; I also couldn't stand Hillary Clinton because I still believed many of the things I had heard about her on FOX News and talk radio. So I threw my vote away on a 3rd party candidate; I figured, since Texas was a solid red state, it wouldn't matter much. And it didn't. And I decided to sit back and watch and see what kind of President Trump was; to give him a chance to earn my respect and my vote.

 

What I saw was chaos. The highest rate of Cabinet turnover of any one term President in history; cabinet officers were fired on Twitter, bewildered generals were informed that "no one knows more about the military" than Trump, traditional allies snubbed and mocked, and dictators coddled all around the world. I saw a man who had no clue what he was doing; who constantly had to be told "Mister President, that's illegal!" - and then fired the people who were trying to protect and advise him. I saw a constant flaming hatred directed at all who would not give praise and adoration to Donald Trump. Anyone from the other party was blasted for "hating America," Republicans like me who voiced criticism of Trump were called "the scum of the earth." Trump made NO attempt to unite Americans; instead he poured gasoline on the flames of partisan hatred. He brought out the best in no one, and the worst in both his supporters and his opponents. Complex issues were reduced to bumper stickers, the opinions of experts derided as "fake news," political compromise became a dirty word - and then came COVID. From the start, Trump flubbed our response. Thousands died while he bragged about the ratings of his COVID press briefings; when asked if he had any words of comfort for those who were afraid, he responded: "What a nasty question!" Now we know that, at the height of the pandemic, he sent desperately needed COVID tests to his buddy Vladimir Putin - at a time when hospitals in the USA desperately needed them! 

 

I hung onto the hope, at the beginning, that the older, wiser leaders in the GOP would work with Trump, help him grow into the office. But instead, one by one, they bowed and kissed the ring. Those who refused were primaried out of the party. Hateful, divisive rhetoric that would have earned Reagan's scorn and instant rejection by the voters became the standard dialect of the Republican Party. Little by little, Trump remade the party in his image. He crowned himself "the greatest President of all time; better than Washington, better than Lincoln!" The lack of humility before history was appalling. 

 

By the time 2020 came along, I couldn't vote against him fast enough. I no longer cared who the opposition was, I was just ready for the hateful clown show to END. And, like 81 million other Americans, when all the votes were counted, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Finally, it was over. The grown-ups had won. Maybe we could get back to normal, and politics would be boring again.

But no. For the first time in 232 years of Presidential elections, an incumbent President rejected the will of the people and sought to remain in office by force. Sixty court cases seeking to overturn the election were filed and LOST, many of them rejected by Republican judges Trump had appointed. Every audit, every recount, found that the initial call of the election for Joe Biden was correct. One audit funded by Trump's PAC actually wound up finding he lost Arizona by a larger margin than first called! All the allegations of mass voter fraud were investigated and shown to be untrue. 

 

Then, on January 6, after the electors had voted, when all that remained was a ceremonial certification of the vote by Congress, Trump sent a mob to stop the certification. For nearly four hours they rampaged through the U.S. Capitol, injuring over 100 Capitol Police officers while Trump watched on TV, threatening to hang VP Mike Pence, and desperately trying to find Nancy Pelosi so they could do God only knows what to her. Only when it became evident that they had failed did he finally tell them to go home, reminding them how much he loved them as he dismissed them!

 

How is this man not in jail? How can anyone want four more years of such chaos? I don't understand it and never will. Yes, inflation was bad in 2022 and 2023, but the truth is, all the factors that caused the global inflationary spike we saw in those years were already in place when Trump left office. America's recovery was faster and stronger than nearly any nation on earth. The recession that many economists feared didn't happen. Right now, unemployment is at 4%, and the U.S. economy, according to the World Bank, is driving the global recovery. Border crossings are back down to where they were during the last year of Trump's presidency (when COVID did even more to limit them than his policies), and America is respected again around the world.

Why do we want to go back to the chaos? Why do we want to embrace a man whose rhetoric is angrier, more racist, more divisive, and more extreme than it was in 2020 or in 2016? Not to mention Trump's increasing inability to remain focused on anything, his bizarre, meandering rants that never complete an idea, and his lies which have gotten more self-evident and bizarre as time goes on - from Haitian immigrants in Springfield eating cats and dogs to public schools giving kids sex change operations to babies being murdered "up to two months" after they are born. The man is lost in a bizarre fantasy world that bears little resemblance to reality, and people want to give him the nuclear codes?

I'm so tired of it all. Tired of the hate, the lies, the CONSTANT drama, of seeing people become the very worst versions of themselves in order to keep defending the indefensible. I'm tired of the downward spiral of the Republican Party into a personality cult where the ONLY measure of your party credentials is unshakable allegiance to Trump. I'm ready to turn the page.

 

I am not a Democrat. I disagree with Democrats on many things, abortion not the least. But I won't sacrifice our Republic for that issue, or any other hot button topic that I once regarded as a hill to die on. Once Trump is gone from the national scene, we can debate all these things again, and I'll enjoy the back and forth. But right now, the ONLY thing that matters is making sure this wicked, dangerous, erratic man is never allowed near the reins of power again.

So that's it, guys. If you read to the end, congratulations. This hasn't been an easy process for me. I've taken a lot of criticism, and I've unfortunately lost some friends along the way. But every decision I have made, I have made because I love this country dearly, and because the oath that I took way back in 1982 has no expiration date: "to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

 

That oath is what drives me, and that is why I have taken the stand that I have. 

Now please, everyone vote.