As it was when we watched the towers fall in 2001, the unreality of this moment has engendered not only worldwide grief, but, for many, despair. The days pass and we continue to reel in sick horror, shell shocked by the incomprehensible, struggling to process the unthinkable, and daily, watching the Inauguration draw eerily closer.
But surrendering to the unprecedented elevation of a grotesque and loathsome racist to highest office in the land is not an option. At what point in this timeline do we, as a nation, stand up and so no?
We cannot allow our government to be populated by appointees who represent
the racist idealism of the pre-civil rights 1950's. This is not who we are
as a nation in 2016 and these are not the prominent ideals of our current
society. Right now the corporate-owned media, the Congress and the Republican party are seeking to normalize this nightmare in our eyes, just as they normalized Trump's flagrantly racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, self-aggrandizing candidacy. We cannot let them.
Collective shock can be paralyzing, but to relax our opposition,
without straining every nerve to combat this outcome, is to usher in a
reality from which this nation may never recover.
These
are the times when Evil is done: the bombing of Hiroshima, Japanese
internment camps, the passage of the Patriot Act, the Iraq War,
Warrant-less Wiretapping, Electronic Voting, all were ushered in during
times of national shock, because shock takes advantage of ignorance and
fear.
The mainstream media, with their endless blather
of Presidential transition teams, cabinet appointees, and inaugural
gowns, will strive to convince the nation that a Trump Presidency is a
fait accompli - not a looming disaster that can and must be derailed at
all costs. In just the same way, the media convinced millions of
Americans that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that
George W. Bush was a legitimate President, and that Bernie Sanders
wasn't a viable candidate.
It is high time that we sought or own
reality and learned from these mistakes. This will not be not a "normal"
transition of presidential power, and we must not allow anyone convince
us that our very democracy will not be dire peril the moment Trump succeeds in
being inaugurated - it will be.
In the days and weeks to come,
it is imperative that the American electorate hold fast to it's fury and
leave no stone unturned to legally and morally expose and impede this
threatening Presidency. We should not be swayed, pacified, or shamed
into stepping weakly aside and accepting Donald Trump as Commander and
Chief simply because MSNBC, NPR, Fox, ABC, or CBS say we should.
Trump's
election is the latest, and by far the most terrifying, result of the
powerful 24/7 misinformation machine that regularly hypnotizes an
uninformed public into working against its own interests and supporting
the corporate billionaire agenda.
But no one gets a pass
anymore. America has reached the end of the line, the nadir of our
Democracy - and no excuse is good enough for remaining uninformed.
Our remaining lifeboat is to stay three steps ahead of this media
juggernaut. Arm ourselves with the truth. Fight the misinformation
machine, do our own research, follow the money, question authority, turn
off the corporate noise box and stockpile and share genuine, vetted
information from independent, viewer-supported and reader-funded news
and information sites.
They say "The truth will set you free" and right now American Democracy is in lock-down. Being uninformed in the aftermath of this election is as dangerous as being Donald Trump himself.
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