The insurrectionist mob of Trump diehards who desecrated our national capitol on that new day of infamy, January 6, 2021, were a nationalized version of the same treasonous spirit displayed by the gun-heavy insurrectionist mob who threatened and hanged in effigy our honorable young governor last May. Both mobs displayed identical absence of respect for the laws necessary to maintain a civilized constitutional democratic republic.
Another version of this same disrespect is underway in slow motion in our Kentucky Legislature. Republican majorities in “our” Senate and “our” House yearn to strip our Governor’s authority to mandate utterly sensible public health controls during the world’s worst pandemic in a century. These unwise people should consider a broader perspective.
Two colors on the collars, but one agenda
What is the ultimate difference between blue collar separatists disrespecting our laws with mob violence (think Fort Sumter, think January 6th) and white collar separatists diligently intent on exploiting our democracy to undo the laws we enacted in the past to protect us and our democracy from just such mean spirits?
Under both collars, very small and bullying minds wish to overthrow the Governor’s intelligent compassion that, by trying to help all of us, verily stands in stark contrast to a rampant stupidity that equates “freedom” with not wearing a mask while waving a bully gun. Impervious to the bald fact that a mask protects them from the airborne viruses of others as well as others from them, their gun and flag waving well symbolize a defeated political loser who hatefully incites mobs to violence, again and again without cease, without shame.
Ignorance is not bliss
Our society’s forty-year trend has resulted in this descent into ignorance – notwithstanding that public education has been, throughout my lifetime, perennially touted as Kentucky’s highest and most urgent priority. God knows it’s needed.
Consider: How many are the Kentuckians so poorly equipped with education, factual knowledge, ability to think, or any concept of civil cooperation that they
- actually believed Trump’s lies that he would bring back the good-paying jobs created during the New Deal and Great Society years;
- actually still hold in high regard this would-be dictator, this blustering caricature of a self serving folk anti-hero; and
- actually don’t know that it is Republican policies of austerity, wealth stratification, and corporate deregulation that have caused the decline of their own income for forty long years now?
It is directly due to policy tamperings in Frankfort that our educational system has failed them so badly; our beleaguered teachers’ certainly didn’t cause it.
Actions have consequences; so do inactions. We badly need major economic, political, and educational reforms in Kentucky. A good start can be a return to truly educating our children in those orphaned subjects, Civics, History, and the Arts, taught at a level of emphasis at least equal to the STEM curricula now so intent on turning them into “human resource” fodder for corporate America and ever growing GDP, even as we steadily use up all our finite “natural” resources. Given a truly well-rounded education, perhaps they won’t grow up to riot at the Kentucky and U.S. capitols, shooting holes in their own feet, unaware of the rule of law and their own great civic responsibility to maintain it.
Two kinds of people in Kentucky politics
Such a start can begin in the very next state and federal elections by throwing out all those politicians who have given their souls and common sense to Ronald Reagan’s ludicrous one-sided trickle-down neo-economics – featuring heartless corporations-run-wild that over four disastrous decades sent millions of our vital American jobs overseas and impoverished millions of our declining middle class, leaving much of two whole generations poorer and poorly educated. In direct consequence many of them now revere an irredeemably selfish lout who, with the whole world watching, publicly committed sedition against his own government and the Constitution he is sworn to uphold.
We are better than this. And we are on the return to rebuild better so much that has been callously thrown away over forty years to enrich a few at great cost to the many. Those who presently enjoy wielding ham-fisted control over our Kentucky lawmaking, even to the tyrannous excess of seeking to disempower our Governor — romping without ethics, just as McConnell and his Trump sycophants did in Congress, until yesterday — should look a short distance ahead.
Our Kentucky politics, just like our national, has now distilled itself down to just two kinds of people and two political parties that attract them. One is selfish, the other is compassionate. Which side are you on?
–30–
Written by William D. Coffey of Frankfort (Website)