Letters From Red Country - Part II

 

Town Hall, Coos Bay, Feb 19th, 2017

 

Town Hall, Coos Bay, Feb. 19th, 2017

Coos county showed up in force at the town hall meeting with Ron Wyden on Sunday Feb. 19^th at Marshfield High School auditorium. 

When I first arrived, there was hardly anyone there, but a couple of police officers, a security person lurking in the hallways and me. They seemed like nice guys, not too nervous and itchy. But the political environment being what it is, you never know. And I didn’t know what to expect being around a major politician, so It occurred to me that when the time came to take a picture I ought to pull my cell phone out of my pocket nice and slow like. 

In an hour or so the auditorium was filled with an energized, sign-carrying crowd.

The biggest crowd reaction (and the biggest surprise) by far was when Sen. Wyden promised to push for investigations into this administration’s Russian connections and for the release of Trump’s tax returns. Large numbers of attendees jumped out of their seats at that moment and cheered. I tried to get a photo of it, but my cell phone got caught in the zipper of my jacket pocket, and everybody had already sat back down by the time I had disentangled it from the zipper. 

I got the feeling that this whole Russian thing, whether Trump and the Republicans like it or not, is going to be a central issue going forward. They can try to ignore it and keep stonewalling investigations, appoint nice, respectable old generals for national security advisor, and so on – but it’s just going to get more and more costly for them as time goes on.  

As for Sen. Wyden, he seemed competent and reasonably honest, as politicians go. He knew his subject matter. I felt glad that he was one of my Senators.

Know Your Opponent - Know Yourself

Some thoughts about Republicans and how to deal with them going forward.

I realize these concepts are probably obvious to anybody who pays attention. But there’s so much confusion and wishful thinking out there that sometimes it seems necessary to repeat the obvious.

First of all, 

They want One-Party Rule - with them as the one party.

They’re not the slightest bit interested in sharing power. I wish it were not so. But it’s true. They do not want to compromise. They don’t care about doing the things necessary for the democratic process to work. They want to rule, period. Completely. It’s not just that they have tendencies in that direction. They’re committed to it, fully conscious and with eyes wide open. You can see this when you look back over their behavior, from the personal disrespect and insults to Obama to the obstruction of his every move - to the refusal to even vote on a supreme court replacement, which was their constitutional duty to do –  to the interference of a Republican FBI director and Russian hackers on behalf of the Republican candidate in this election - to their consistent violations of norms and traditions with increasing frequency as time goes on.

Second,

They don’t share our same values.

They just don’t. It’s not even close. This is a hard one to understand, because many of them are friends and family members. But no one who votes for a Trump with his obvious disdain for democracy and basic lack of decency and respect for others can really be said to share very many political and social values that I would recognize as mine.

So, understanding this, we should acknowledge that we have been complacent.

We tend to assume that our side is the logical and reasonable side. We often sit back and let facts, reason and logic speak for themselves, assuming the other side will eventually see the light. We point and laugh at their inconsistencies and contradictions, and we think we’ve done enough.This has been a great mistake. We should stop assuming that facts and logic will win in the end when these days there is no consensus on what facts even mean.

It sounds harsh, but we should assume in many cases that the other side is not persuadable. While it’s important to try to come together on some things, if we can, we should not allow ourselves to be sidetracked or taken advantage of because of some quixotic need to search for common ground that no longer exists. We all believe the facts and truth are on our side. But facts and logic are not enough. From now on, passion, energy, unity, unremitting effort, momentum and courage are what is going to win this game.