The Cavalry Isn’t Coming: “We The People” Are Our Only Defense

There was always the moment, in those old Westerns, when the settler families, perhaps led by John Wayne, realized that the Cavalry weren’t going to get there in time to save them from the outlaw gang which was intent on raping their women, stealing their horses, killing them, and burning to the ground everything that they had worked so hard to carve out of the wilderness.  That was the moment when those peace-loving farmers and ranchers realized that it was either them or the bad guys, and that it would be a fight to the finish.  And that’s where I think we are right now.

There are two very different visions of America which are competing for the hearts and minds of the American people, and they may well be mutually exclusive.  Without strict environmental laws and enforcement, what’s left of our water, air, wild places, etc. will be polluted beyond recovery by the wealthy landowners/corporations/industry groups which have bought so many of our elected officials.  Without strict construction/product safety laws and enforcement, there will be many more people dying when poorly built buildings collapse in a storm (not to mention the cost of repairs and rebuilding with all the attendant economic and community disruption), medicines will prove unsafe (does anyone remember the thalidomide crisis?), and you will have no idea what’s in the foods you eat or how contaminated they may be.

But there’s a lot more.  Without sensible immigration policies and enforcement, we won’t have the workers (their skills, energy, consumption, taxes, and social insurance payments) to drive continuing innovation and growth in our economy, keep the baddies out, and live up to our own humanitarian ideals.  Without sensible gun laws and enforcement, we’ll all be afraid that anyone in our family or community, upset over who knows what, perhaps having serious anger management/mental illness/ideological issues, will shoot up their own families or go on a killing rampage at a school/church/government building/etc.

And then there are those pesky reproductive rights and their enforcement, without which most young women will not be able to hold professional/executive jobs, or even aspire to them, and still become loving mothers and wives.  Without voting rights and their enforcement, and the important voting access which goes with them, people of color and poor people of any race will be far worse off than they are today — and today isn’t great.  Without LGBTQ rights and their enforcement, it’s back to the closets, the bullying, and the physical assaults that were the norm just a couple of decades ago.  And without the strict separation of Church and State and the modest reduction in anti-Semitism of the late 50’s/early 60’s (before which it was pretty hideous, with maximum quotas and “No Jews Welcome” signs), this Jewish girl could not have attended an Ivy League college, joined a major corporation as my first employer, or even conceived of marrying my amazing but gentile husband.  I could go on, but you get the picture.

Some of these rights, with their need for enabling laws and effective government, are touched on in our founding documents, but many were not.  And even those which our founders — wealthy, landed, Protestant (with one Catholic) white gentlemen of a certain age, albeit amazingly farsighted, educated, and well-intentioned — incorporated into our founding documents have depended for their equitable, humane, and intelligent implementation and adjudication on several centuries of all white male elected officials and judges.  As for universal voting rights, women’s reproductive rights, environmental protections, building codes, product liability laws, and marriage equality, to name just a few of the rights and enabling laws which many now take for granted as foundational to a civilized and modern society, none of these were even imagined by our founders, and that’s entirely understandable given their historical context.  But then they also couldn’t imagine a world of near instantaneous communications and access to news, or today’s global environmental interdependence.  So even as we hold dear each word of our founding documents, it’s long past time to accept that they must be viewed as living documents, documents whose underlying principles may be sacred but upon which we can and must build to reflect the needs of our country in 2018 and beyond.  Yup, those founding documents, no matter how literally or figuratively interpreted, are not coming to our rescue anymore than those settlers could depend on the Cavalry arriving in the nick of time.

No one gave us these additional rights and protective laws willingly.  “We the people” carved them out of the wilderness of big money/corporations/industry groups/etc. doing as they pleased with our environment and safety.  We carved them out of the hatred of racism/sexism/homophobia/anti-Semitism/etc., and all the other horrible bigotry (to include the imposition by law of one religion’s views, which just happened to be Christianity on the rest of us) that was the norm when I was a child.  I fought my heart out for these additional rights and protective laws, along with many millions of others, and we have come a very long way since the 1950’s.  But like those early settlers faced with marauding thugs, everything we’ve worked for — and for which many, many Americans have died — could go up in the smoke of Trump’s tweets and his enablers’ longing for a certain type of white guy’s gauzy memory of the 1950’s, a time when people of color and women knew their place, what was good for General Motors was agreed to be good for America, and America was the envy of the world.

So my friends (who are of every political stripe but within a standard deviation or so from the middle of that old Bell curve), it’s up to us.  There’s no magical candidate going to ride in on a white horse (and wearing a white hat) to beat Trump in 2020 hands down.  There’s, no hard right GOP fandango (i.e. pile of mistakes, from bringing us the Great Recession rooted in funny financial dealings to the market tanking completely at the first hint that China is going to cash in a few of their huge supply of US Treasury Bills because their pissed at Trump’s tariffs) which will overcome the GOP’s decades of effective grass roots organizing/hate mongering/big money cultivation.  And, sadly, there’s no collection of Presidential tweets/policies/blathering/etc. that’s so stupid, corrupt, offensive (or all three) that will cause his base to stand up and declare themselves free of the Trumpian spell.

The Cavalry isn’t coming to our rescue, but I can no longer march or sit-in or cope with being tear gassed or arrested as I did in the 60’s.  Now all of you who are younger than me — and that’s almost all of you — will have to do the same or you will lose these rights and protections for generations to come.  And some of what’s happening, especially as regards the environment and our place on the global stage, may take generations to repair.  We’d best get started right now to rescue America from those who are too many standard deviations from the center of the American values Bell curve.  “We the people” must be our own Calvary.