Several years ago, my wife and I downsized our home, discarding many things that had been ours for decades. We were moving into a smaller home, appropriate to our age and abilities. Such downsizing is a common practice for our generation.
Today’s Republican Party is leading our United States into downsizing, even though we are not old as nations go. We are shedding much of what we have picked up during the last two and a half centuries, even some of what we claimed was ours at our founding.
Republicans under Donald Trump seem to think our country is weary of its life, and no longer able to muster the energy to imagine and live beyond the present moment.
Have we tired of the rule of law, and the equality of all people before that law? Does it take too much energy to respect one another and our appropriately constituted authority? Are we weary of protecting religious pluralism, and of encouraging the unfettered search for truth in science and the humanities? Are we so shriveled inside our thin skins that we cannot tolerate diversity of personal expression and artistic experimentation? Does age-related ringing in our ears make it hard for us to sort out political tensions as they are reported to us by a free and responsible press?
The Republican right legislates and budgets as if we no longer have the resources to assure basic necessities of life for our poor, or health care for our sick, or opportunities for those who have long been excluded.
The party of the right downsizes our understanding of who we are when it denigrates the millions of us who are not of European heritage. If it cannot deport them, it can and will end programs and policies that might allow them to participate fully in our economic and social abundance. It is as if we tried that kind of idealistic thing when we were young, but now we are old, and we really don’t care any longer about anyone but us and our kind.
We shrink back from the rest of the world, and forego long-established treaties and alliances, often in favor of regimes the likes of which the United States has spent the last 80 years resisting. Relationships of mutual trust are bullied into transactional deals, reducing ourselves to one more player among many. It was hard work being the leader we once were; let someone else take the reins.
We abandon our history by insisting its telling be scrubbed of anything that does not make us look good — like a funeral elegy in which it is not polite to tell the whole truth.
Keith Dean Myers is a retired Presbyterian minister living in Willoughby.Photo courtesy of Keith Dean Myers
When my wife and I downsized our possessions, we did not give up who we are at heart. But that is what is happening to our country under this administration and its fellow travelers. An impoverished hard-right leadership is trashing the very things that have made us a truly great nation, casting aside values and promises that can never be reclaimed or restored. Loud boasting about our greatness will never regain what we have given up.
Our republic does not have to end this way. We can challenge the agents of our downsizing by renewing our commitment to what made the world take notice of us in the first place — our love of liberty and justice for all. Each of us can choose at least one ideal, practice, or person to stand up for in public. We can send the naysayers on the right packing, and reclaim our heart.
Keith Dean Myers is a retired Presbyterian minister living in Willoughby.
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