Your Turn

Mary Sharpe Guest columnist

There’s a feeling of peace that seems to ascend over the earth during the holidays. Even during wars, there have been cease fire for Christmas. After the turbulent year that we have just come through, I was particularly looking forward to some peace this year. I naively thought that once the election was over and all the campaign ads and signs disappeared, it would be peaceful.

Then the president started calling the election fraudulent, stolen and illegitimate because Biden won. His claims that he really won have been repudiated by over 50 court rulings since the election. Republicans seem to think that if they stomp their feet and threaten officials, we will overturn the election. As a Democrat, I have been on the losing end of many elections but I have never picked up a gun and sought to overthrow our government over it.

Trump’s most ardent followers bought into the conspiracy immediately, holding armed demonstrations outside of elected officials homes. Many believe that the election was stolen by Democrats. While I would like to think of my party as that organized, as a lifelong Democrat, I know the truth. We are not capable of stealing a running bus in a snowstorm. (Nobody told us to get on the bus!) We are simply not capable of a large organized anything. Period. Didn’t happen.

We definitely need to turn down the heat and have a sensible conversation. We all need to give up on hate. Social media has given us a curtain of anonymity where we can say things that we wouldn’t dream of saying in person. It is a pot that is always boiling, using words as weapons and the internet as armor against return fire. It is also hard to disagree with someone whose true opinions you do not know, but our society has managed to accomplish it. If we could just turn down the flame on that boiling pot and have a reasonable conversation about what we each believe, we may just discover some common opinions.

Instead, the president continues to ramp up the rhetoric and enlist others to buy into his theories. He found a willing partner in Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who, along with attorneys general 17 other states, filed a long-shot lawsuit with the Supreme Court to have the results in four other states thrown out.

The president was always hoping to have the Supreme Court that he so carefully stacked place him back in office. He said so repeatedly. One tiny mistake there though, these are lifetime appointments and can’t be undone. They also apparently can’t be bullied into overthrowing an election either.

They threw out the case because Texas has no right to tell other states what to do, to which Texas declared that they advocated secession by all of the red states and forming their own union that goes by the constitution. Wait, they want to leave and take our constitution with them? Another tiny mistake: the constitution is exactly what the Supreme Court is using in its decisions.

I always worry what is really going on behind the smokescreen. Now we know. Russian hackers have been regularly dancing around in our top secret cyber systems for nine months. The Pentagon, power grid, Treasury Department, etc. They know our troop deployments, nuclear capability, power structure, financial positions. Just about everything.

The long-awaited vaccine is piled in a warehouse instead of being distributed because the company is awaiting instructions from our government.

All the while, the president is in the oval office, not discussing the appalling systems breach or demanding answers on the vaccine roll out, but rather, how to declare marshal law and get the military to seize all of the voting machines in a last ditch effort to hold on to a job that he has no interest in performing.

I long for the days when breaking news is somebody wearing a tan suit! Maybe next year.

All of this insanity does indeed have the elements of provoking a civil war. Advocating for secession and a civil war is to be totally ignorant of American history when during just such a war U.S. citizens killed 620,000 fellow U.S. citizens.

We don’t need a civil war. We need a civil conversation.

We definitely need to turn down the heat and have a sensible conversation. We all need to give up on hate.