O P I N I O N

NOT THAT PROFOUND

By Nate Graziano

Since Felon 47 was sworn in for this second and seemingly interminable term; since I’ve started watching said felon and his oligarchy handlers use the United States Constitution as toilet tissue to the incomprehensible approval of GOP sycophants and a bigoted tribe of MAGA nitwits¹; since observing this whole debacle unfold in less than a month’s time, I’ve come to realize a stark truth, one that shames me.

For my entire life—and I will turn 50 years old next month—I’ve taken democracy for granted.

It took a glorified carnival barker and his billionaire buddies, led by one of the most soulless and reprehensible people on Planet Earth, putting our democracy in grave peril for me to realize that, other than voting and writing a few op-eds along the way, I have not given much to a democracy that has given me everything, mainly my freedoms.

My formative years were largely in the ’80s and ’90s where the thought of this kind of executive overreach eradicating a free society and replacing it with an authoritarian ruling class was simply inconceivable.

Sure, Reagan catered to the wealthy and targeted the poor, the Blacks and the homosexuals, but I cannot ever remember believing that Ronald Reagan wanted to be the fucking king.

And there were times in G.W. Bush’s first term where I legitimately believed that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney’s New World Order posed a veritable threat to the world community, but I never worried that Bush would use executive orders to strip Americans of their basic civil rights with such ugliness and mean spirit.

Admittedly, as a straight, white, middle-aged male, my fears don’t compare with those of immigrant families or the transgender community, but that doesn’t grant me the permission to become complacent.

For those of you reading this who truly don’t see the parallels between what this administration is doing right now with the rise of the Third Reich in Germany, you’re either brainwashed or brain-dead.

While a stroll through any social media news feed right now will result in an inundation of emotive memes taking shortcuts for logical arguments, there was one I saw the other day that has stuck with me.

The meme reads: If you’ve ever wondered what you would’ve done in Nazi Germany, you’re doing it today.

So what exactly does the democracy that we’ve enjoyed in the United States need us to do to stop this rise of evil, this scourge of hatred and buffoonery?

The short answer is everything.

As citizens in a constitutional republic, we need to remember that all of our elected officials—including the wannabe king—work for us. We need to reach out to these politicians who we employ and demand that they do a better job representing our voices in Washington.

We need to resist the orders and laws this sociopath keeps passing with the nonchalance of a nose wipe. We need these rich sons of bitches to know that we’re not going to be complacent when our civil rights are being egregiously violated.

In 1849, a guy who liked to walk around in the woods in Massachusetts wrote an essay titled “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” and we need to read it again and live it right now.

For so long, democracy has given to us without demanding anything in return, always knowing it might one day call upon us to have its back. That time is now. Now is the time to defend our democracy and fight like hell for the very things that have made Americans what we are today, or else risk losing them forever.

You can contact anyone from New Hampshire’s Congressional Delegation here.

You can contact Governor Kelly Ayotte here.

1. There is a lot of overlap on that Venn diagram. ↩︎

You can reach Nate Graziano at ngrazio5@yahoo.com