GENERATIONS

16 June 202

I've been following the January 6 hearings and listening to all the proof of all the terrible things that we have heard about the previous administration and I decided to check Twitter (which I almost never check) to see what people were saying.  It was a shock to read that the overwhelming comments were either that nobody had watched the hearings and didn't care about them, or that "yeah, he's guilty, but I'll still vote for him."

That seems to be the attitude toward the Republican Senators too.

To me, it has been so scary to think that one man could destroy the democracy that we have lived under for 200 years...and that people don't care.

I read Katy Tur's autobiography this afternoon and found this paragraph interesting:

I found that it didn’t matter to people whether the president had improved their lives. They supported his fight unconditionally. One man, for example, had been in the grips of unemployment for years but told me the president was doing great work on the economy. An older woman said her number one issue was health care, and although Trump hadn’t even come out with a plan in two years in office, she was confident he would soon and it would work out in the long run. How much more time will you give him? “Maybe six more months.” Will you vote for a Democrat if he fails? She laughed. “Never,” she said. “I’ll just be sad.” But at least these people were engaging with a reality we could both recognize.

Later I read

A man had told me—on camera—at a rally over the summer in Pennsylvania, just a few months ago, that he was willing to do “whatever it takes” if Trump lost the election. There was no way Trump could lose, he said, unless the whole thing was rigged. He was listening. Others were listening. They took Trump seriously and literally.

I just don't understand how Trump has become so popular when everything he does is illegal.  People don't even seem to care that he raised a quarter of a billion dollars for a defense fund...that doesn't exist. In reality, though, campaign finance filings show that much of the money spent by political committees affiliated with Mr. Trump went toward paying off his 2020 campaign expenses and bolstering his political operation in anticipation of an expected 2024 presidential run.  Trump's allies knew his claims of a stolen election were false. Yet they continued using fund-raising appeals to spread that falsehood, and to raise money that the committee suggested was paid to Mr. Trump’s business, and groups run by his allies.

And his fans don't care.

I'm beginning to think this is a generational thing.  I was raised with a very strong sense of the importance of democracy and how it's what makes this country special.

I'm wondering if two generations later, with all the weird things that schools are forced to teach--and not teach--learn the same thing. 

Free and fair voting is being eliminated in many states.  Republican controlled legislatures that are the result of gerrymandering will lock in permanent control of those states because they have given themselves the power to overturn the results of popular votes.  Since January 2021 corporations have given more than $18 million to seditionists (people who rebel against the authority of a state or monarch.

Do young voters even care?

Did they learn to care about democracy and the importance of democracy in a country, or do they figure that if you have a "king" like Trump, he can rule the country for as long as he likes.