KNUCKLEHEADS?

  John Boehner, who himself must share in the road leading up to the insurrection of Jan. 6, has now called the America First Caucus "idiotic" and its adherents, "Knuckleheads". But that is wrong, in so many ways, dangerous ways. Playing down a dangerous trend, a movement based on hate and incitement to violence, is simply opening the door to an existential danger. How many dictators throughout history have been called clowns and worse, yet the danger they did to humankind is beyond description in so many ways.

Hitler was called a clown. Nero was a target of epithets and insults, and Mussolini was poked fun at for his grandiose military costumes. Trump was laughed at even as his following, a dangerous, wildly skewed demographic, grew and finally erupted at the Capitol. I wonder how many people out there realize how close this government came to being overthrown, how near to death by violence and lynching, the leaders of the body politic were. Those who knew - denied, denied, denied, made little of it, trying to hide facts behind the ever growing storm of Big Lies.

One would think that the nation had enough, that a close call with death, literal and figurative, would have set the stage for some sanity, some reality, to clear the fog in so many heads, but it did not. In fact, in my opinion, we are now at a more dangerous point for now we have the official beginnings and openly expressed desires to found a 'caucus' of supposed leaders that is based purely on hate, purely on the same fascistic foundations of Hitler and the Nazi party. While suggestions of death and labor camps have not yet been made openly, the quarters of migrants, the hatred expressed towards them, the ugliness of attitudes towards anyone other than Anglo-Saxon white, well, it does not bode well for the rest of us. If you deny it, well, it is not only your neck at stake but also mine and the people I love along with anyone who opposes such virulent hatred.

No, these are not knuckleheads or idiotic. They are dangerously shrewd mentally damaged souls and minds who are too close to the seat and reins of power in this country. Those who laughed at Hitler spent their last days in a concentration camp or prison prior to horrific deaths. Those who laugh at Putin find themselves in a revived gulag. And here? I shudder to think of  the possibilities. And mind you, they are not out there, for they have been expressed already.

Trump is a dangerous joke, for we laugh, but he remains in the public eye, damaging all even as he plays his eternal golf game. Taylor-Greene is a fascist, a hater, a hatemonger and needs to be out, expelled from Congress and banned from all legal political bodies. No, it is not Maxine Waters inciting violence, but rather the Trumpians and worse who are the culprits here.

Even more dangerous, for they have no clue as to the real danger of their enabling of the haters, of their falling in line with dangerous people as they struggle to maintain their power, trading partisanship for patriotism, are the people like McConnell, or those like Murkowski or even Kinzinger, who speak out, but so often, too often, vote the straight party line. Words not followed and buoyed by acts will not do the trick.

Today, we are the knuckleheads for denying reality, for dismissing the true danger to our nation's soul. A woman wrote of a purple blister on her finger, a sign of a developing sepsis, which caused removal of fingertips and feet. Well, we already have too many purple blisters on our nation's body, signaling an all too well developed sepsis of the nation's soul.

Soon there will be no medicine strong enough to cure this sepsis, certainly not without violence and bloodshed. Perhaps that stage has already begun and I am closing my eyes to that truth. Maybe. I don't know what to think what with all the shootings, the growing danger of the white supremacists, the explosive anger of so many groups who have been targets of virulent hatred.

All I do know, with every bone in my body, is that at the very least, we are on the cusp of a life change within this nation. Either we go one way or the other, for there appears to be no middle road viable at this point. Too bad, for extremism at either end is not good, to say the least.

Wonder what history books or discs or whatever will be used in the future, will say about this time period. Guess it will depend on who is on top. We had better be, not the not so inaptly named 'knuckleheads".