New week, new theme! Staying and leaving.
"We hold these truths to be self evident..."
Brent tuned in to NPR this morning to hear their annual reading of the Declaration of Independence. He really felt like it would be good to have a reminder. A connection. NPR did something different this year instead. They spoke with a descendent of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson about the "all men are created equal" portion. What that meant at the time. How it has been used since then.
It was an interesting listen and I recommend it.
It's very strange to be contemplating leaving the United States on the Fourth of July, but here I am.
We talked about it when Trump was elected. That maybe it was time to go. Who wants to live in a country that would elect someone like that? And who knew all of the damage he would be able to do in four years? We went as far as looking into what it would take to immigrate to Canada. Get a work Visa to move and be able to stay.
Then we decided not to. We decided to stay. Why should we leave? It's our country. We should stay and continue to support those people and causes we believe in and vote to make the changes that are necessary and hold on. It's a Republic for as long as we can hold on to it. We decided to hold on to it a little tighter.
And now here we are five years later looking again at if we stay or if we go.
We've seen the damage that four years of Trump did. We had an attempted coup. We have an activist Christian Nationalist Supreme Court that for the very first time in our nation's history took rights away from a group of people. Not just denied rights, which the court has done in the past, but actually took something that was considered a settled right away. And they are signaling that they are not done yet.
We are losing our country. It's being dug out from under us.
Five years later, we are even more worried. And it's not abstract worry this time. Hundreds of anti-trans bills have been proposed and passed. Trans people are the big bad of the Republican party. They are bringing out all of their old greatest hits that they used against communism, people of color, gay people, and those scary liberals. They found a new target to focus their hate. And then added back in the old targeting of gay people and people of color, and people who believe it's wrong that in one of the richest countries in the world we have people who are starving while we have people with so much money they can pretend to be astronauts with real spaceships.
So what do we do?
The debate is the same. Do we stay and continue to fight for what is right? Not right with a capital R but right as in morally right. Not the kind of morals dictated by misinterpretation of an old religious text, but the kind of morally right that you know is true because it's self evident. Self. Evident.
And trust me I know that even being able to contemplate leaving is a huge privilege.
There are people who cannot leave. Who cannot even temporarily leave a conservative state for medical care let alone a country to live somewhere else.
And because of those people it feels right to stay. To continue to fight. To continue to vote and donate and speak out.
And we live on the West Coast in a liberal enclave so really how bad will it get?
The court is taking on a complete dismantling of our voting rights next term. Looking at handing over who wins and who loses not to any sort of popular vote, everyone gets to vote, system but to a small handful of people who can just declare a winner. So voting, which has always seemed like such a tenuous way to gain freedom is now even more limited.
The court is taking away the separation of church and state. They are more and more using religion to dictate laws.
The court is taking away any sort of regulatory powers. You know how your food and water is safe? Well...
The court is right now performing a coup. A take over. Minority majority rule. And Rule is the right word. There is no interest on the Right for voting by the majority, because the majority doesn't follow what they want. Rule by strength, punishment, a police force that cannot be held responsible for excessive force. This is where we are. This is where it gets bad.
So how bad will it get where we live?
How bad will it be for our daughter?
Do we stay and fight or do we leave for safer enclaves? For ourselves and for a path for her?
It's a weird thing to be contemplating on July Fourth, but in a way it's completely appropriate. After all the Declaration of Independence doesn't start out with "We hold these truths to be self evident..." It starts:
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
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