One year ago today, America was holding on to its last breath as the usurper in the Oval Office was refusing to acknowledge his defeat and was openly attempting to stoke an insurrection in order to overthrow democracy.
December 2020 was one of the deadliest scariest months in American History. The Trump Administration was so incompetent, so underprepared, and so often willfully cruel and inhumane in its thrive to steal more from the people, that tens of thousands dying daily became quite casual and mundane. Over 74,140 confirmed COVID-19 related deaths in the month of December 2020, and the honest tally will forever remain unknown as governors in badly-hit states have altered numbers in their attempt to support the Republican effort of painting the pandemic as a hoax. At that time, the rollout of Operation Warp Speed had distributed only 11.4 million of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccine doses to US hospitals and nursing homes, and of those, only 2.1 million people had received their first shot. Unemployment rates and jobless claims were rising, people losing their homes, people waiting in long lines at food banks, because back in 2018 when the GOP had the House of Representatives and the Senate, they succeeded in significantly cutting back on food-assistance programs and any programs that extended relief to those in need. More children living in poverty, more parents dying alone in overcrowded emergency rooms, more fear, more despair, more ugly, more cruelty, while he tweeted and golfed. And stoked an insurrection.
Against all odds, America was able to temporarily defeat fascism. Against all odds, America was able to hold off the scripted Totalitarian playbook where election results are annulled, where violent insurrectionists succeed in hunting down members of Congress, of publicly hanging party leadership, of openly lynching members of the Democratic Party, preferably Women and People of Color who dared stand up against white supremacy. Remember all the things that have gone wrong that day and now imagine all the uglier crueller things that could have gone even more wrong that day. We all have seen it repeated throughout history, but White Privilege and Entitlement refuses to listen to reason, and still today refuses to be decent and have a modicum sense of empathy.
And so a full year has since passed.
In the first 11 months of the Biden-Harris administration, despite a 50-50 divided Senate where even allowing discussion on a potential bill to proceed requires 60 votes, despite ongoing Republican obstructionism to stall hearings on important nominations with the objective of handicapping important governing positions, the Democrats were still able to sign into law The American Rescue Plan, The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal, Protecting the American Taxpayer and Medicare Act, Supporting Healthcare Providers During The Covid-19 Pandemic Act, and countless other acts. they were also able to save the country from yet another GOP-induced shutdown, confirmed 40 judges (30 are Women), and impeached That Fcking Guy for a second time. Now imagine three more years of this.
It is sad to admit that all of it was possible in part because an entitled jackass, Joe Manchin, is on the Democratic Party’s side. Well, most of the time. Joe Manchin is this cycle’s Lyndsey Graham; a White Entitled Man of many prejudices who at first promised to do what is right, to stand up against all the wrongs, all the lies and Republican bullshit, but then one day, he had one too-many conversations with the crooked and immoral and got swayed into openly propagating its ideology on its favorite propaganda channel, fully embracing its cruelty.
A reminder that you never know when white supremacy would find the weakest link and succeed in swaying it into doing its bidding, into blocking meaningful progress, into punishing Women and BIPOC for daring to want Equity and Equality. That is why members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who have spent a lifetime battling against white supremacists while having to sit daily next to them and having to negotiate with them, fought desperately to push and pass any bill of meaningful help. Imagine if a majority in Congress had opted instead to wait for perfection, for some miracle where everything America desperately needed, everything America hoped for was signed into law.
Please never forget that a lot of good is always much better than waiting for Perfection to finally happen because America is still in the clutches of white supremacy, and that white supremacy would lie, cheat, and manipulate in order to block True Progress from happening. Do what you can when you can, because Fascism is still biding its time.
Have a great day, everyone.
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