Paying Attention
Terry H. Schwadron
Dec. 9, 2022
Are we in America paying attention? The week’s far away events seem awfully pertinent to our own issues. But there seems little attempt among our political class to bring out the necessary public association with the obvious dangers.
In Germany this week, authorities rounded up and charged two dozen right-wing plotters who wanted to storm the German legislature with weapons and to impose their own government. Another two dozen are under investigation in a domestic terrorist plot to kill or remove lawmakers and others in an effort to unroot a “deep-state” bureaucracy and replace it with their own.
How much more like the Jan. 6 insurrection do we need to be spelled out? Yet, in this country, as we hurtle towards the end of this congressional session, an incoming Republican House majority is already promising an investigation to undermine the last year plus of investigations into the root causes of who brought about the Jan. 6 rooting.
In Argentina, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, currently vice president and a former politically polarizing president and first lady, was found guilty of widespread fraud, sentenced to six years in prison and barred from holding political office — after years of skating away from investigations about a wide variety of allegations.
Using various protections, delaying appeals and her political status, it is unlikely to see her behind bars and she is promising to run for president once again to make Argentina great again. What does it all say about the role of law in democracies?
Sound too close to comfort to our own legally wayward former president?
The world is screaming at us to pay attention over our economic, climate and democratic way of life.
Plenty More World Lessons
China is fighting itself over zero covid policies after widespread street protests while we spend our congressional time grilling a retiring Dr. Anthony Fauci over his continuing advice for masks and distancing as our own disease rates skyrocket again.
Ukrainians are braving hunger, darkness, and power outages to defend democracy from Russian invasion while our Republican leaders are questioning whether we can and should sustain economic and weapons support for the effort.
A returning Benjamin Netanyahu coalition with Israel’s far-right, xenophobic party is promising to strip Israeli Arabs of voting and representational rights while we listen to a U.S. Supreme Court hearing over ways to adopt a fringe legal theory that would allow partisan state legislatures to run roughshod over election fairness and judicial review.
Climate denial remains a high priority for an incoming House Republican majority, which promises to try to roll back Joe Biden administration policies that are seen as favoring solar and alternative energies over fossil fuel profits. The dominant note is U.S. supremacy in all things, apparently including energy consumption as well as energy production.
Even the release by Russia of basketball player Britney Griner in a prisoner trade could not be celebrated for the shortcomings of not having obtained further inmate releases from an uncooperative Russia.
In issue after issue, we’re seeing our incoming Republican House taking positions that not only ignore what the world’s nations are telling us, but that actively oppose them.
What It Portends
“A relatively mild pandemic brought our civilization to its knees. We couldn’t even vaccinate the world to end it. The world is already resorting to resource wars in anticipation of climate change. And we’re our climate inaction is causing levels of warming faster and worse than scientists predicted,” writes economist blogger Umair Haque.
The price of our continued insistence on winning America’s political hearts is that we are losing the trust of Americans and we are in danger of looking only at our own experience as a measure of truth and direction.
Slogans don’t solve problems; real work does. It is not an accident that gas prices are now lower than they were a year ago, despite an election campaign where Republicans pressed the unsupported idea that the Biden administration was letting energy policies get out of hand.
Our problems are serious ones; our solutions are not necessarily equal to the task.
We need to be doing a lot more learning.
If we listened only to our own Republican-instructed voices, we apparently would believe that Jan. 6 was a regular tourist day at the Capitol, that laws are being twisted to prosecute an ever-blameless Donald Trump against a stack of allegations from fraud to election coup plots, and that we will address inflation by endless investigation of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Wake up and look at the world.
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