Fascists Have Come to Cibolo

I’ve known for years that Republicans had lost sight of the principles on which this nation was founded but it was driven home Saturday as I was leaving my neighborhood to get the latest COVID-19 booster and flu shots. Driving toward the exit of the neighborhood I came across an older white man in a red t-shirt standing in the median holding a sign that said “Purge Democrat Voters…”. I couldn’t catch the rest at 25 mph in the smaller typeface but just what I could read said all it needs to say.

I’m among the last of the baby boomers, the children of the “Greatest Generation”, those who fought and bled in World War II. My dad was a private in the Army Air Corps, two uncles were in combat in Europe during the Battle of the Bulge, another served in the Navy in the Pacific supporting General Douglas MacArthur’s “Island Hopping” campaign. I can’t help but feel that the authoritarian direction of so many Republican candidates and voters is a direct insult to the men and women like my father and uncles who fought so bravely against fascists like Mussolini, Tojo, and Hitler. I had to restrain myself from stopping the car and getting out to confront the sorry excuse for an American.

The right to vote for our elected representatives is the most sacred right of every citizen of this nation upon reaching the age of 18. The very idea that this man and so many like him believe it is right and proper to disenfranchise someone with whom they disagree is beyond the pale.

These are the same people who rant about the constitution and yet either don’t seem to have read it or simply don’t understand it. They are the same people who will look you straight in the face and tell you that if it isn’t in the constitution then the federal government can’t do it while at the same time claiming that the United States is a Christian nation when the constitution says nothing of the sort and in fact says in Article VI: “…no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

One of their long running non-sense claims that has been pushed to the fore once again is the notion that the United States is “a republic, not a democracy”. That’s like a child saying that they're holding chocolate ice cream, not ice cream. Encyclopedia Britannica defines republic as follows: form of government in which a state is ruled by representatives of the citizen body. Modern republics are founded on the idea that sovereignty rests with the people, though who is included and excluded from the category of the people has varied across history. Because citizens do not govern the state themselves but through representatives, republics may be distinguished from direct democracy, though modern representative democracies are by and large republics. A republic is a flavor of democracy, a representative democracy, rather than a direct democracy where everyone votes on every issue of government. Not every nation holds true to the name they of their nation such as the USSR which was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; just like calling something a rose doesn’t make it smell sweet.

It’s important the people like the guy standing in the median with his frightening sign are overwhelmed at the polls so that the authoritarians that the Republican party has been raising into leadership don’t get their way. Just you voting is not enough, bring your family, bring your friends too.

 Published in the Seguin Gazette - October 5, 2022