By Edward Miller

Here’s a passage written by political philosopher Hannah Arendt in 1951:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. …

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” 

Sixty-seven years later we can observe this propaganda-fueling phenomenon at work every day in the White House and its servile megaphone –– Fox News.

The only way to prevent this scourge from further poisoning our democracy is to:

1. Get off the couch and register new voters, especially Millennials.
2. Write postcards to progressive voters reminding them to vote.
3. Remind them again.
4. Offer to drive them to the polls on Election Day. (They probably don’t need the ride, but they do need the reminder.)
5. Take a carload of your friends to the polls.

Don’t preach that “Every Vote Counts” until you’ve done your part to get those votes cast.

 

By Edward Miller

After the recent shameful outburst of profanity by the president, it’s no longer acceptable to be silent. Those who resist as our country is continually defiled must speak out.  Here’s my voice in the form of a letter to Georgia Sen. David Perdue, one of the witnesses to the outrage.

Sen. Perdue,

I would say “Shame on you” for your claiming you didn’t hear the president use despicable language in your presence, but in my 75 years I’ve learned you can’t shame someone who lacks moral grounding.  Your claim not to have heard the repeated use of racially focused profanity implies agreement.  That doubles my disappointement.

In Saturday’s New York Times, the lead editorial said something I never thought I’d ever read in an American newspaper:  “Remember, Mr. Trump is not just racist, ignorant, incompetent and undignified.  He’s also a liar.”  What makes that documentable indictment even more distressing is the cadre of enablers in the Congress who make Trumpism possible.  A few of your Republican colleagues, to their credit, spoke out against the president’s indecency.  Most others –– among them the bullies and bigots who betray our country’s values at every turn –– stayed silent.

You, sir, will forever be remembered as one who stood mute.  It will be your enduring legacy.  But here’s the irony that keeps my despair in check: You and your fellow enablers have aroused millions of Americans to resist, to marshal our anger and disgust and go into the streets to take back our country.  For that I thank you.

To be continued.

Edward Miller

Woodstock, GA

Photo credit: Migration Policy Institute

By Edward Miller

Donald Trump has been called many things, among them: “Grandiose, impulsive, bullying, bigoted, narcissistic, dangerous, unpredictable, gauche, greedy, temperamentally unsuited and emotional unsound.”

An accurate if incomplete list. Here’s my addition: Mean.

He hurts people because he can, including all Mexicans, parents of Arab-American soldiers killed in combat, transsexuals serving in the armed forces and former POWs serving in the U.S. Senate.

Now it’s children brought into this country illegally through no effort of their own. As Jay Bookman described them in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently:

“The immigrants whom we tacitly invited here made homes here. They brought their children with them. Those children didn’t know legal from illegal. They grew up here; they went to school here. They learned English and played baseball and soccer and even American football. They thought of themselves as Americans like their classmates and friends, because in many cases this was the only country they had known.”

Now Trump has decided to throw them out, but not before he tortures them with uncertainty for six more months by holding out the prospect that Congress might legislate a more humane ending to the DACA story. With a Republican majority that can’t even take a firm stand against the outrage of the president’s support for the Neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, that a slim hope.

Polls show that that a majority of Americans decisively support the idea of shielding the 800,000 from deportation to what would be “foreign” countries. That would be the decent thing to do, but “decent” is not on the list of descriptors for Donald Trump.

As Bookman concluded his column: “It makes us a smaller, meaner country, a country that has lost both its confidence and its faith in what has made it special.”

All my life I’ve been proud to be an American, a citizen of a country that, after exhausting all the alternatives, does the right thing. Why do I now feel ashamed?

(Photo credit: ABC News)

By Edward Miller

In days long gone, Republicans revered as a patron saint British statesman Edmund Burke. It was Burke, as a member of Parliament, who supported the American Revolution and who first said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Now that the American president has unequivocally demonstrated his support for neo-Nazism and white supremacy, where are all those “good men” in the Republican ranks?

Actually, some are starting to come out from behind the curtain and stand in opposition to the president. Like most dissents, this one has begun slowly. This week Sen. Corker of Tennessee spoke for the brave pioneers: “The President has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful.”

The president had already faced a rebellion of sorts from Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona and struck back by calling him “WEAK on borders, crime and a non-factor in Senate,” and urging his defeat in next year’s primary. This is a reliably conservative member of his own party the president is attacking.

Also stepping out from the voiceless ranks is Sen. Tim Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate: “What we want to see from our president is clarity and moral authority. And that moral authority is compromised when Tuesday happened. There’s no question about that.” His South Carolina colleague, Sen. Lindsey Graham, was equally unambiguous about the president’s false equivalence of the white nationalists and their opposition.

Still hiding behind the curtain are Senate Majority Leaders Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, both of whom have expressed outrage without naming the president. For that they deserve only half credit.

So who’s next, especially within the administration? Will it be Rex Tillerson, secretary of state? I thought he would jump ship when the president abandoned the Paris climate accord, but apparently existential threats to the planet weren’t enough. Nor was the depopulating of the State Department. But perhaps now, when fascist attacks on America’s commitment to racial and religious justice are condoned by the White House, he will make his move.

Surely someone of stature in the administration will stand apart from the unfolding tragedy. It might be Gen. John Kelly, the new chief of staff, who was visibly distressed listening to the president’s defense of the indefensible. Or perhaps Gary Cohn, director of the White House National Economic Council, who is Jewish and, according to friends, dismayed by the anti-Semitism of the week’s events.

As for the rest of us, we can all take action to encourage a direct and vigorously forthright response from our morally somnolent Republican congressmen and senators. Don’t just lament. Get busy sending emails and making phone calls to the timid legislators who need to find the courage to stand up to the president.

I’m optimistic the resistance will grow within Republican ranks. But I’m guarded in that optimism. Remember, Edmund Burke stood alone as he tried to forestall a revolution in the American colonies. His parliamentary colleagues did nothing. History is not kind to “good men” who fail to respond the evil around them

Photo credit: NBC News

 

Dear Sen. Isakson,

In March I joined a delegation from District 10 that met with Ryan Pelfry, your field representative in Marietta. When asked pointedly about your priorities, he said without equivocation, “Sen. Isakson always favors country over party.”

Although there are dozens of important ways to express your allegiance to country in the political turmoil that is Washington, there are two such paths of existential importance:

• Protecting the accessibility and affordability of healthcare to all citizens
• Expanding the research that will save the world from climatological disaster

Both imperatives are threatened.

I’m sure you are well briefed on the Congressional Budget Office assessment that 23 million people will likely lose their insurance under Trumpcare, but consider this as well. Medicaid provides healthcare insurance to 74 million Americans, among them 60 percent of nursing home residents and millions of people with disabilities. When you add together the cuts to Medicaid in Trumpcare ($834 billion) and in the president’s proposed budget ($610 billion) Medicaid will be reduced by 45 percent over 10 years.

Stopping this cruel insanity should be an easy choice of country over party.

Another clear choice comes in the effort to halt and reverse the effects of climate change. The United States has been a leader in the vital research on the innovative technologies and economic strategies required to address this crisis. This leadership is also threatened by budget cuts.

According to The New York Times:

“The agency’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which has helped nudge down the cost of solar power, faces a 69 percent cut. The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, a program that funds research into long-shot energy technologies, like algae biofuels or advanced batteries, would face elimination. And, despite Mr. Trump’s stated desire to promote “clean coal,” the Office of Fossil Energy, which invests in techniques to scrub carbon dioxide from coal plants and bury it underground, faces an 85 percent cut to its carbon-capture efforts.”

Following the president’s unenlightened and shameful abandonment of the Paris Accord, these and other cuts would destroy any pretense of our leadership to prevent a global catastrophe.

You and I are contemporaries, so I know what it’s like to look back and consider a life’s legacy, to reflect on what, if anything, of value we have bequeathed to our children and grandchildren.

Using your energies to assure adequate healthcare to all Americans and to preserve the very planet we live on would secure that legacy. So I appeal to you, sir, muster the wisdom and courage to part ways with your party and do what every Georgian needs you to do. Make us proud.

Sincerely,

Edward Miller

By Edward Miller

My journalism career began the year of John Kennedy’s assassination, picked up the pace during the turmoil of Civil Rights demonstrations and urban riots, endured yet another Kennedy assassination and then reached a crescendo of intensity during the Vietnam War and Watergate. It was an extraordinary decade fueling an adrenaline rush of news.

By comparison, today’s rush has reached a dizzying warp speed within months, not years:

• A nation that purports to invite “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” tries to apply a religious test and slam the door with a cynical “Never mind” on those masses.
• A nation that brags about the most advanced medical treatment in the world passes cruel measures that would deny that coverage to millions. Thousands will die if the action stands.
• A nation that pretends to live under the rule of law stands by as a prime suspect is allowed to fire his persistent investigator after first asking him to back off his investigation.
• A nation that justifies all manner of mischief and persecution under the banner of national security looks aside as its leader passes secrets to the enemy.

Civil rights was a noble cause worth pursuing.

Vietnam was a tragic mistake worth protesting.

Watergate was a sad chapter distinguished only by the politicians who put their country above their party and drove a miscreant president from office.

Sadly, there is nothing ennobling about what we’re enduring now. Just when we thought that deceit and mendacity had reached a nadir, the news gets worse. We’re running out of adjectives of astonishment to describe our worst prophesies unfolding every day. As Rachel Maddow said the other night, “Hyperbole is dead.”

What’s not dead is a vigorous press. Day after day newspapers, networks, political websites and bloggers rise to the challenge of digging out the truth. In response the administration slings the slurs of “fake,” but its defensiveness is unpersuasive.

Also alive and well is citizen resistance. Last week I met two grandmothers working at a voter registration table outside a Walmart in suburban Atlanta. It was their first venture into political activism. I asked them “Why now?” Their answer was simple. “He’s gone too far.”

Hyperbole may be dead, but not the ire of citizens who feel betrayed. In that we can find hope.

By Edward Miller

Resistance works. Not perfectly, not all the time. But the spending bill approved by Congress this week shows resistance works.

Here are some of the victories for resisters reported by The Associated Press:

• Planned Parenthood will continue to receive funding despite repeated Republican efforts to defund it.
• More than 22,000 retired miners will have their healthcare benefits extended.
• Trump’s proposal to slash spending at the National Institutes of Health was rejected. Instead, NIH received a $2 billion increase for cancer research and other programs.
• The bill restored eligibility for year-round Pell Grants for college students.
• Funding for the prevention and treatment of opioid and heroin use was increased by $150 million.
• The bill extended a policy that prohibits the Justice Department from using federal money to interfere with states’ medical marijuana laws.
• Security along the Mexican border was supported, but the “Wall” was not.
• The budget of the Internal Revenue Service was frozen at $11.6 billion instead of cut as initially proposed.
• The White House backed off on a threat to withhold payments that help lower-income Americans pay their medical bills.

The spending bill is a result of media vigilance, focused citizen activism and a rising confidence among Democrats in Congress. It was the perfect storm.

Citizen resistance grows out of awareness followed by commitment to action, which comes in many forms. No postcard is too small, no call to a congressman too trivial, no joyful noise in the streets too traffic-snarling.

Resistance avoids rowdiness, but invites contentiousness. It unites and enables those who see injustice. It gives purposefulness to the chant: “This is what democracy looks like.”

What’s next? How about keeping up efforts to resist an administration that fails to see the threats of climate change, belittles the very idea of scientific research and is willing to sacrifice the air we breathe and water we drink to the highest bidder?

Let’s face it: Any administration hostile to the nutritional needs of school children needs to be resisted. Back to the streets, my friends.

(Photo credit: Robin Utrecht/Getty Images in The Boston Globe, April 22, 2017) 

 

By Edward Miller

To stretch the old cliché, it’s not just who you know, it’s who you keep in touch with. Elected officials are sensitive to constituent contacts. Your overtures are important. They get through; they get logged and counted. Sometimes, they even get responded to.

Facebook just made the process easy with “Town Hall,” a feature that lets you follow everyone from your state legislator to the president. What’s more, “Town Hall” enables you to send messages via email or Facebook. Learn more about Facebook’s Town Hall, and how to connect.

It could not be easier, so get started, or as we say more pointedly, GOYA (Get Off Your Ass). Send your Republican Senator an email today asking why he or she voted against Planned Parenthood, the single most effective organization working to improve women’s health. After you’ve learned how easy it is, send another message tomorrow asking your congressman how he or she stands on an issue near and dear to your heart.

Don’t worry if you don’t get a response. The metamessage is getting through. Elected officials and their staffs have learned that millions of Americans are mad as hell and have decided to do something about it.

Another tip about keeping in contract: Go online and find out the name of the relevant Field Representative for your congressman or senator. These are the officials’ key gatekeepers. Get them to know your name and that you are watching.

Staying AWAKE

Our neighborhood resistance group called AWAKE (Armed With Action, Knowledge and Energy) has been busy. In addition to our voter registration efforts we spent an evening sending 153 personal postcards to Democrats in the 6th Congressional District, where there’s a chance to take back the seat vacated when Rep. Tom Price joined the cabinet.

Now 153 cards may not sound like much, but when you add together similar efforts to “Flip the 6th” you can count about 400 volunteers addressing 10,978 cards that potentially reached more than 15,000 reliably Democratic voters. A lot of small local efforts can make a difference as both national parties pour millions into the campaign, the first post-election referendum on Trump.

AWAKE meets monthly, or whenever there’s pressing work to be done. Over the next two weeks we’ll be canvassing neighborhoods prior to the April 18 election.

We encourage you to form such a group. It can make a difference.