EDITOR:
Recently letter writer L. Smith exhorted in this paper, rightfully in my opinion, the senators from Missouri to “address the horrors we’re seeing on the 6 o’clock news every night.”
Trump’s harmful and erratic policies are enumerated in the letter. Eric Schmitt and Josh Hawley need to think about their legacy, Smith reminds them. Not only politicians should consider how history will judge them. Ordinary citizens will also have to contemplate if they are comfortable with the actions of ICE, with the disdain that Trump and his Republican enablers are showing for the Constitution, democratic norms and common decency.
Is it alright to truncate or withhold funds that Congress has already allocated? Is it good policy to dismantle entire agencies or the latest repeal of environmental regulations that keep all of us safe from further harm? The list goes on.
History shows that authoritarians always needed the help from ordinary people to get into power and to stay there. What’s worrisome is that in the USA of today, after 250 years of gradually improving democracy, so many people still turn a blind eye to what’s going on.
What is the reason for this? Are so many people really rather entertained than enlightened and just do not ‘follow politics,’ like one often can hear? Or are they so entrenched in their views that nothing can change them, for example the lie about the ‘rigged elections’ in 2020, even though it has been debunked so often.
What about listening to the rational argument that in a country like the USA with 50 states and tens of thousands of polling places it is impossible to perpetrate wide spread fraud as that would have to include many thousands of election workers? If reason cannot prevail then indeed the experiment of democracy is doomed.
--Klaus Karbaumer
Platte County
