There is still time

Used with kind permission by the author.

Yes, I blame you for the murder of Renee Good.

If you voted for Donald Trump, her blood is on your hands.

If you voted third party, her blood is on your hands.

If you stayed home, her blood is on your hands.

And if you voted for Kamala Harris, but under protest, holding your nose, and criticizing her as the "lesser of two evils", her blood is on your hands.

Washing his hands didn't absolve Pontius Pilate. It won't absolve you.

You, and you, and you chose this. You are responsible.

"I was not inspired." You need to be inspired to fight fascism? 

"Genocide in Gaza!" Gaza was more important than the orphan left behind by Ms. Good? Than your neighbors? A conflict you have absolutely no understanding of, and yet wear around your neck like a virtue-signaling totem?

This country is filled with fickle, uneducated, unserious people who, conversely, think that they have access to all righteousness and morality. 

You are more concerned about the price of eggs than your ancient liberties. You would gladly trade them away if you could save fifty cents a gallon on gas. Nothing is more important than that.

You can't even bother to get up off the couch to vote. You can't be bothered to drop off a ballot at a drop box. You can't be bothered to do the bare minimum expected of a citizen, for a nation in which you were raised and to whom you owe your allegiance. Sitting on your ass is more important.

You, through your actions, have set this Republic on fire. And why? Because you thought the fire would not consume you. You thought you would be immune. And now that you see you are not, you blame the people who foretold all this. You blame the people who begged you to not throw away this democracy. You stabbed us in the back, and then wonder why we don't rise up from our wounds to set things to rights. You did this, and you have no solution.

Democracy, the destin’d conqueror, yet treacherous lip-smiles everywhere, / And death and infidelity at every step. 

Democracy, more honored in the breach than the observance. That was the situation which obtained in Weimar Germany. But there it was understandable, if tragic. Germany had no tradition of democracy. What is our excuse, with centuries of self-government behind us? Mere boredom. Manipulation by malign actors. Sloth. The idea that we owe nothing to others, to our neighbors; we, ourselves, reign supreme, and must be catered to at every turn, or we will burn it all to the ground in our pique.

We who believe in democracy, in this imperfect Union, must rise up. We must apportion blame where it belongs, and not be afraid or ashamed. We must be ready to be called names, and worse. Because democracy is an end in and of itself. It is not a means. It is a way of life, a philosophy of life. And it means that all have a voice, and all are protected. If you do not do your duty as a citizen of a democracy, you should have no recourse to its benefits. If you abuse the freedom for which countless have fought and died, you do not deserve that freedom. Freedom isn't license. Liberty isn't anarchy. Democracy is the belief that we are bound, one to another, working for the common good. And I will blame and shame each and every person who traduces this. I will blame and shame every person who allowed these times to occur. We are faced with a vast enemy which does not believe in liberty, which wants a world of power and domination. We need to act like we are in a civilizational war, a war for the very fate of this fallen humanity.

Wake up! We are being set one against the other because of our hatreds. Those who want to rule the world know well human frailty. What we are going through right now is not the matter of one nation. We must again take up the cry of "Never again". Not how it's been corrupted by the cynical. The path on which we are treading leads only to a new Auschwitz. 

Do not give in to what you've been fed. Use that intelligence which the Universe has bestowed upon you from millions of years of evolution. We are our only saviors. If only out of contrariness, out of that American spirit of freedom, we should not allow malefactors to determine our fates. We are our own masters.