So.
Breathe.
Donald Trump's reign of stupidity will end in January, cooler heads have prevailed.
There's going to be SO MUCH NOISE between now and then – fights over elections, foreign influence, fake news, propaganda – it's going to get nuts. Since nobody is asking for it, here is my opinion:
All of that is in the past. All of the protests and marches – those become celebrations. Don't protest the past, influence policy for the immediate future. Say their names, then describe the proposed policy that could have saved their lives. Defund the police, then fund the proposed program that frees the police to do police work, and keeps them out of fragile situations that require specialists.
In the background, through the noise, look for the shy, quiet republicans speaking rationally. Those who gave us Trump identify as RED, so let's look for the purple thinkers among them, and establish a counter-argument to the monikers "Never-Trumper" and "RINO - Republican in name only". Those which the RED thinkers identify as RINO's – those are their rational thinkers, and we need to be able to walk toward the middle of the road to talk with them there. Those on the fringe should be left there, in the past, as we move forward, toward a less partisan future.
This is NOT to say let's all put on a happy face and let bygones be bygones. The majority of "republicans in suits" who are irredeemable assholes who need a serious de-programming, and sometimes jailtime. This is also not to say that it is now our job to re-educate those who believe that Hillary ran a child-prostitution ring out of a pizza parlor, or JFK Jr. is secretly running things from behind a curtain. Don't befriend a proudboy or listen to someone's defense of "Q". We don't have time for any of that crap.
We need to let government be government until January, let pundits do their punditry, and focus on next spring. What do you want your first day in April to look like? Personally, I'd like to be rejoining my masked friends for the first time after a mandatory nationwide 60-day lockdown, when we watched the "New Cases" plummet for the first time in a year. I'd like to have a roof over my head, which was preserved through the lockdown by the first-ever "Citizen Bailout" – where everybody got $10,000 to keep themselves afloat through the very-effective lockdown. I'd like to see different uniforms on my streets, folks trained to be able to care for folks dealing with "issues" in public. I'd like to know the plan to re-establish normalcy.
One way to get there is to look for the normalcy on the other side, and highlight it. Saying "Trump/Barr/Rudy is an asshole, here's yet another reason to think so" over and over gets us nowhere – they're all in the past. A republican speaking logically about covid, or women, or racism – we need to listen for those voices and amplify them. We already know what we think, and we think we know what they think, but let's look for the outliers. I'm sure we can find some.
I think that might be the only way to avert civil war. Republicans need to talk other republicans down, and we need to identify a path to do that. If someone says, "That guy's a RINO," say "No, he's really CONSERVATIVE. He's a republican." Let's point out the fork in the road, clearly: "Those trumpers WERE assholes, glad that's IN THE PAST and we can just have a normal CONSERVATIVE party again."
It's worth a try.
D.
