Prior to last week’s Trump-led assault on our nation’s capitol, the conventional wisdom within the Democratic establishment was to, in the words of House Majority Whip Hakim Jefferies, ‘look forward; not back’ on the isssue of holding the Trump Administration accountable for the myriad of transgressions during the past four years, the most recent of which was DJT’s attempt to coerce the Georgia Secretary of State into committing election fraud by allocating the requisite votes to insure a Trump victory in the state after the results had been legally certified. This willful dismissal of wrongdoing is consistent with the Democratic Party’s track record of ignoring the need to pursue justice in deference to the perceived need to move ahead with the business at hand while allowing the sins of the predecessor to go unchallenged. The classic example of this approach was embodied by the Obama/Biden Administration’s decision to give the war criminals (entering a war in Iraq on a pretext based on the lie of non-existent WMD’s, subsequent atrocities involving the deaths of thousands of civilians, and the explicit policy of torture) within the Bush/Chaney regime. Sadly in 2021, it took an act of insurrection to finally persuade the Democrats to realize that accommodation for law breakers was not in the best interests of the country and that failure attend to the transgressions of the past does not lead to reconciliation and a clear path forward. As we might now see clearly, such a position will lead to the normalization of wrongdoing and the implicit assurance of its replication in the future.
This is precisely why all of the individuals responsible for last Wednesday’s act of wonton domestic terror need to be identified and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. This group should include not only the active participants in the violence at the Capitol building but also all of those enablers who quite consciously incited and encouraged a violent attempt to halt the lawful recording of the certified results of the Electoral college’s vote for the next President and Vice President of the United States. In so doing, this mob of insurgents attempted to subvert the will of the people and the democratic process itself. These actions, unlike the unaddressed crimes cited above, must be adjudicated and the perpetrators and enablers must be held accountable in order to preserve the rule of law, which is a bedrock of our democracy.
There also is a larger reckoning that we must embrace here in this still-relatively nascent republic. We must collectively decide between the hopeful promise of genuine patriotism and the narrow confines of rank nationism. This will entail, perhaps for the first time, a decision as to who we want to be as a people. This, in turn, will require us to confront the ongoing and persistent presence of an ethnocentric nationalism that holds that whiteness, as a functioning cultural institution, is endemic to our consciousness and is in dire need of serious and permanent repair. The recent hate-filled actions of white-nationalists at our nation’s doorstep underscores their anger and fear of losing historical dominance while the clarion call of the Black Lives Matter movement provides testament to the fact that time is indeed up for us, as a nation, to accept the challenge of coming together in brotherhood and sisterhood by embracing our common humanity and rejecting the paradigm of separation based upon race. The drama currently being enacted on our streets serves to remind us that the time is at hand to finally take a deep dive into truthfully answering the questions of who we have been, who we now are, and whither we all shall go into the future. We can chose to continue to follow the path of division as clearly displayed by those who would blatantly exercise their privilege on behalf of the preservation of that same privilege thereby proclaiming white-nationalism as our ultimate identity; or we might now rise, as patriots, to actually embrace, embody, and fulfill the promise of an America at once enriched and empowered by its diversity in the service the ideal of authentic unity. The events of recent days have made it abundantly clear that our collective choice of national identity will determine our future as a functioning, vital and self-sustaining democratic entity. It’s up to us...we the people must choose well, decide, and create a more perfect union.
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