January 2017 to January 2021

 

It started with the Women’s March in Washington DC and ended with the insurrection at the Capitol. The intervening years have been unbelievable for many reasons.

 To start with the Trump win came as a surprise to all.  If only those eligible to vote in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the past four years would have been significantly different in many respects. The shock of the election outcome was so jarring that it resulted in spontaneous growth of activism.  The activism led to the defeat of many Republican House members. It paved the way for flipping the House seat from the Republicans to the Democrats in Orange County, California.

With Trump’s win it is was easy to identify many who are naïve to think that Trump was a business man who was good for capitalism in the country.  There are a number of issues with this acceptance. One of them is that so many were willing to take Trump on face value – that here is a business man who was going to make them wealthier.  They were prepared to ignore the many red flags. 

It was concerning to see the chaos the country had to endure.  It is pretty much like the last four years did not exist.  But they cannot be ignored.  The last four years showed how precariously close democracy came to destroyed.  This is not hyperbole. One shudders to imagine what would have happened if the 2020 election resulted in a Trump win. It would be very difficult to bring the country back after another four more years of lies, conspiracy and incompetence.

How did we survive four years of chaos?  Fortunately, we had a job to be engaged in which kept our minds engaged. There were so many outrageous happening that distressed many in the country.  One of them was the action of ICE.  Parents with children, who were citizens, were deported.  It is unimaginable, what the children would go through when they would return from school one day and be told that their father or mother was arrested by ICE and deported and that they would not be able to see them.

Another cruel action was separating children from their parents at the border. It is difficult to understand not only how they could come up with an order that would separate children from parents but also how those who carried out the orders did so. It was one of the many cruel of actions.

Not until the period of 2016 to 2020 did many of us become aware of white supremacy. They are a very dangerous group of people that have been laying low and finally arose with support of a demagogue head of the state. Who took seriously the topic of conspiracies and fringe groups until the insurrection?  Now we know how dangerous all these can be.

 The country was the laughing stock of the rest of the work. With a demagogue as the head of the government and a cadre of subordinates – some taking advantage of the circumstance and advancing their agenda and others helpless in changing course. It is genuinely refreshing to have a thoughtful administration in place as of 20^th of January 2021.

Hopefully all have learned a lesson, never to take democracy for granted, even in an “advanced nation”.  The country is made up of citizens, whose insecurities can result in irrational thinking and manifest in dangerous actions.