The reckoning: Plenty of hurts coming for the people who didn't care about their country

It has been five weeks since we got the unbearable news that the soul of America is, in fact, still in a cancerous state, rotting intellectually and morally from the inside out.

To those of us who deeply care about, and internalize these things, it has been a helluva lot to deal with.

Too much.

Our prognosis has actually gotten worse — much worse — since the disease that started killing our nation was first discovered in early November of 2016.

The terrible news of our possible demise and slide toward authoritarianism came as quite a shock back then, but it also produced a righteous fury that was squarely aimed at proving we were better than all that. With proper care and feeding we would slowly, but tenaciously build ourselves back up to once again become a picture of democratic health worthy of the United States of America.

We had let ourselves go, sure, but were determined to make the most of our second chance.

We connected, we marched, and we flexed. Battles were fought, and most of them were won. We were not going back, but more than that, we were pushing hard toward a place that would be far better than the one we so casually left in such disregard on November 8, 2016.

By the time the 2020 election rolled around we had built ourselves into a muscular, well-organized force that would finally whip the moral turpitude that had ravaged us the previous four, terrible years. Even a once-in-a-century pandemic that the dark forces had heartlessly and disgracefully mismanaged would not stop us from our appointed duty.

By the second week of November 2020, freedom rang, and we were finally able to exhale and take satisfaction in our life-saving actions to rescue a country that was becoming increasingly difficult to love.

But only for a minute … well, 12 hours actually … because the day after Democrats secured the United States Senate thanks to victories by Patriots Warnock and Ossoff in Georgia on January 5, 2021, our country was brutally attacked, and an attempted coup was underway.

Twelve, damn hours is all we got after 1,457 days of dealing with sheer hell, because the repugnant spoiled brat was making his final gruesome play to decertify our vote and end our Democracy for good.

No less was at stake on the terrible, gray winter day.

January 6, 2021, ended any notion that the orange America attacker was anything but a sick and demented criminal who was unable to control his most terrible impulses and would do literally anything to harm others.

In a nation that stuffs its jails full to overflowing with too many people who could use a hand up instead of Barbaric incarceration, there was absolutely no question that this broken man richly deserved one of those jail cells and for whatever was left of his miserable life.

He had led and then rooted on an attack on America.

That’s when we started getting the first signs that the manmade virus that had descended on us only four years before was shamefully and inexplicably going to be allowed to fester.

-First, our Senate refused to do its job to ban the America-attacker from ever even considering holding office again.

-Then our Justice Department repeatedly disgraced itself by incomprehensibly dawdling, and ultimately putting itself in check for close to two years before making any kind of definitive move to address the madman’s attack on America. By then, it was too late.

-Finally, our disintegrating media failed to give weight to the most dangerous internal threat to our country since the Civil War. By the time the 2024 elections were upon us it was painfully clear they were more interested in propping up the money-making horse race, than what menacingly awaited us (and them) at the finish line if the wrong person won.

Now, but five weeks since all hell was allowed to prevail, we, the people who put our hearts and souls into rescuing us, are being asked to carry on when we, the people, know for sure we are living in a place that is barreling downhill toward authoritarian rule, where truth is optional, and cruelty is the point.

What should we, the people, be doing now? What is our best move? How-in-the-hell did this happen again?

I see it as my job to help provide answers to these questions, while chronicling the most precarious times in our nation’s history since Abraham Lincoln was our president, and our nation bled from within.

Since November 5th, I have written a string of columns that I stand behind. I am very proud of a few of them, but I wonder if a few others could have just waited.

Things are still too damned raw.

We all need time to process what just happened. Some people would rather not think about it, some people do nothing but think about it, some people are angry, some people are devastatingly sad, some want to fight, and others are just flat-tired.

All of these feelings are warranted and completely understandable. They are the price we pay for caring so damn much.

Like many of you, I have had difficulty digesting news from many sources that catastrophically failed us the past eight years. In the last week or so, I have spent some time reading speculation dressed up as “after-action reports” from Democrats trying to get a handle on what went down in this tragic election.

There will always be the imperative need to learn what led to the crippling fall with the flickering hope that it will never happen again.

But did we learn anything from 2016?

We are also finding out what voters actually did at the polls, instead of the endless, years-long speculation about what they might do with their votes. These findings are especially hard to process, because in many cases, we are tragically learning that millions of people actually made the decision to vote directly against their own their self-interests and for plenty of pain, which defies any cogent explanation.

How are any of these people going to be better off with a vile racist in power who has no plans for them but a world of hurt?

We look to be quickly becoming a country that is now specializing in self-harm spurred in large part by the dirty work of its selfish, grubby billionaires, who stand for nothing but themselves.

After five weeks of wrestling with all this, I suppose I am landing exactly where I did in the wee hours of November 6th, in the choking smoke of the latest electoral bonfire: We did what we could, embraced love over hate, truth over lies, good over evil, and came up short.

We thought our country deserved better than this, and as we pick ourselves up and carry on, that’s a vice we should all be able to live with comfortably.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.