A Call for Kicking and Screaming

I thought that if America lost its freedom there would be more kicking and screaming. We must have expected someone to show up in a devil suit and announce his intentions: "I am here to take your freedom, please stand aside." Trump is this herald. There may be horns under the hair.

The point of a normal society is the greater good: to curtail the forms of freedom that interfere with someone else's. Not plowing recklessly through intersections is a small price to pay for the carnage it saves. There are harder decisions about this when you get into the middle ground.

Graduated marginal tax rates are somewhere in the middle. Actually, no, not for me but still it's an example. Here's a thought, that we lost the ability to make these decisions even on the "small price" end of the spectrum because we are no longer a people. We are a house divided. 

We have always been divided but somehow we made it work. The biggest division is over race. We made it work when black people were disenfranchised. Here's another thought, that the Republican Party has become an asylum for racists, their refugee camp. They speak another language.

The language is code-talk and innuendo. They are unable to say what they mean which is "I am here to take your freedom, please stand aside." It's too forthright and declarative. What's surprising, though, is how forthright it's getting to be in the absence of appropriate kicking and screaming.

It's getting more forthright in the form of Donald Trump who isn't, I believe, a refugee in the conflict over race but he's an opportunist with a receptive audience full of racists. It's a huge disgrace he's gotten so far. It's time for kicking and screaming. Whatever we're doing it isn't enough.