A Virtual Church

Where do we even begin?

Yesterday

There is so much buffoonery, it is even hard knowing where to start. We could start with the capture of Venezuela. Illegal seizure of a sovereign state should be a point that concerns every American. I don’t care if Maduro is a bad actor. We have our own share of those, and nobody is coming across our borders to capture the Donald.

Sending American troops to Venezuela would be a grievous act, not too unlike May Lai. Viet Nam was a great teacher of what not to do in warfare.

Resisting illegal orders is a fundamental tenet of the US military.

But law is a mere inconvenience to our bone spur president. His corruption, grifting, and general disregard of all democratic values and principles is on full display daily.

People like me are alarmed that Congress is not standing against such corruption. Even our own North Carolina congressmen have elected to follow the lead of this tyrant rather than buck the bully.

My husband, Tom, has a story about bullies. His school chum picked on him mercilessly. One day, school-age Tom came home yet again crying. Tom’s mother told him she was opposed to violence but the only way to deal with a backyard bully was to punch him in the stomach.

The gut punch shocked the bully so much, he ran home crying, never to bully Tom again.

Bullying is an act of weakness. It means you have no intellectual argument, no vision or ideas for a better solution. Brute force is the raw animal “fight or flight” instinct. It is the law of the jungle.

That is what we look like on the world stage. The reputation of America is tarnished daily as complicity and self-preservation become normative among MAGA leaders. Our congress is more concerned with keeping their jobs than doing their jobs.

Even people who voted for Donald Trump cannot be blind to it. The right-wing propaganda machine feeds the line that somehow all this is acceptable.

When I teach, I tell people not to leave their brains in the parking lot. Critical thinking is a learned skill. It requires effort to broaden your scope of knowledge.

The theory of the munching sheep comes to mind. Sheep are not very intelligent in the animal kingdom. They will eat and eat to the edge of the cliff and fall off the cliff because of their ravenous hunger. Lemmings have a similar pattern.

One thing this Madura incident points to is the weakness of international systems that have failed in their watchdog duty. And whatever happened to the international criminal court?

Nation-building is not putting America first. It is just plain imperialism.

Apparently, no country is off limits for hostile takeover. Trump has talked often about confiscating Greenland and Cuba. Watch out Sweden!

We’re told Trump does not sleep, except in Cabinet meetings. He is over caffeinated, eaten up with aspirin overdoses. Plus, he is 79 years old.

Nobody is willing to hold Donald Trump accountable for anything. Across the congress, there is willingness to let him grift and grind American values into the ground.

Jack Smith reported the most damning evidence of Trump’s culpability in the January 6^th insurrection. Plainly and without emotion, Smith said evidence showed Donald Trump directed the melee. His fingerprints are all over the actions of the angry mob that desecrated the Capital and killed officers who stood in the path.

Michael Fanone, one of the DC policemen attacked on January 6^th testified that those in the congress and those who allowed this behavior without standing up to it are COWARDS!

History will not be kind to this era in American politics. We have lost our way and few of us seem to care.

Disagree all you want. I am not the one writing the history, but I know what I saw. And I know I am on the right side of this history.

Lib Campbell is a retired Methodist pastor, retreat leader, columnist and host of the blogsite www.avirtualchurch.com. She can be contacted at libcam05@gmail.com 

 

 

 

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