This is short but beautifully written. Read it for the poetry in it....
--Kim
For most of my 67 years on this earth I have tried, consciously, deliberately, and sometimes with enormous effort not to let my hatred of horrible people dominate my life. I have tried to live with the kind of moral discipline that my heroes modeled: Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis. People who confronted cruelty with conscience, hatred with courage, and injustice with an unshakable devotion to human dignity. People who believed that the long arc of the moral universe bends toward justice only when we are willing to bend it.
And then came this era.
And then came this movement.
And then came this crop of Republican grotesques.
What we are witnessing now is not simply a political disagreement. It is the normalization of moral collapse. It is the elevation of ignorance into identity, cruelty into virtue, and corruption into culture. These men are not merely wrong on the issues. They are not merely flawed leaders. They are inhuman destroyers of the civic order, architects of decay, and they carry their cruelty the way arsonists carry matches: casually, eagerly, without conscience or remorse.
They have dragged me back to a place I spent a lifetime trying to escape, a place where anger never sleeps, where the mind circles endlessly around the same moral wreckage, where even rest is haunted by the knowledge of what these people are doing to the country we love. It is exhausting. It is corrosive. And it is the inevitable psychological consequence of watching one's nation be methodically hollowed out by men who have no relationship with truth, no respect for history, and no capacity for shame.
History, however, is relentless.
Every era produces its monsters. Every generation believes its villains are unique. They are not. The names change; the pathology does not. The Hitlers and Eichmanns. The Stalins. The Maos. The Pol Pots. Men who mistook power for destiny and left only bodies, broken institutions, and the echo of their own lies behind them. What defines such figures is not merely the evil they commit, but the mass of ordinary people who enable them, the bureaucrats, the voters, the neighbors, the media figures, who look at cruelty and decide it is "necessary," who look at lies and call them "strategy," who look at moral collapse and label it "patriotism."
Which brings me to the most dangerous force in any collapsing democracy: the politically illiterate voter.
The person who votes for human garbage and then wraps the act in a flag. The citizen who trades conscience for comfort, integrity for identity, citizenship for cruelty. You were not tricked forever. You were not helpless. You chose the lie because it was easier than the truth. You chose the strongman because responsibility is frightening. You chose the mob because thinking for yourself is hard.
The cruelty continues to be the point.
It is the glue of this movement. It is the reward system. It is the signal flare of belonging. If you are not outraged by the suffering of others, you are welcomed. If you are entertained by it, you are celebrated. If you help inflict it, you are promoted.
This is no longer politics.
It is a moral emergency.
This is no longer left versus right.
It is conscience versus collapse.
This is no longer about winning elections.
It is about whether a civilization remembers who it is supposed to be.
History will record this moment with brutal clarity. Long after the slogans rot and the hats fade and the personalities dissolve into footnotes, what will remain is the simple accounting of who stood up, who stayed silent, and who actively helped drag the country into the mud.
This is the test of our time.
And far too many are failing it.
—Michael Jochum,
Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition
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