Mass Murder

Today, Senate Republicans voted to commit a mass murder of innocents on a scale never seen in the history of the world. Tomorrow or Wednesday, House Republicans will surely concur with the Senate, and when he signs the death warrant known as the “Big Beautiful Bill,” Donald Trump will surpass Adolph Hitler as the worst villain in human history.

• 6 million Jews died at the hands of Nazi Christians in the four years (1941-45) of the Holocaust.*

• 14 million people will die at the hands of Republican Christians over the next five years (according to the medical journal The Lancet which, unlike Republicans, actually knows what it’s talking about) because of the end of USAID programs.*

• 15 million people will die from AIDS at the hands of Republican Christians by 2040, including babies who will be born with AIDS because their mothers no longer have access to treatment.*

• Un-tolled millions will die because Republican Christians cancelled research into life-saving treatments for a myriad of diseases and capitulated to wackos like RFK Jr. who deny more than a century of reality about how vaccines save lives.

Republicans are doing this with malice aforethought. Those Republicans who do not commit mass murder with glee at best commit it with indifference. A precious few object to precious little but only to protect themselves from constituents who won’t have anyone else to blame and will be dumber, sicker, poorer, and less secure in their fewer numbered days.

• Medicaid cuts will result in 51,000 preventable American deaths a year (Health Impacts of the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” University of Pennsylvania Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics).

Republicans are literally taking from the poor and giving to the rich, taking from those who need help to stay alive and giving to those who morally may not deserve to be.

I dearly hope that someone will research and report just how much PA Sen. David McCormick and his family – along with every other Republican in the House and Senate – will benefit from this slaughter. A benefit-per-death statistic would be a good measure of how cheaply Republicans view human life.

What we must ask ourselves now.

Who in good conscience can continue to support with our taxes a government that inflicts such horrors on its own people and on the world?

Who in good conscience can support with our hard-earned money an economic system that works so relentlessly to turn citizens into serfs and human beings into chattel?

Isn’t it better to support and strengthen a working democracy than to abide the destruction of one?

These are the questions I ask myself every day. Along with: If not here, where?

Stand and fight!

People I respect, particularly veterans, urge that response to the Republican genocide of a democratic American people.

This approach has problems:

1. With today’s technology, it could take no more than a few hours for Republican government to identify, locate and disappear any ordinary citizen who becomes too troublesome. One cannot fight on the home front if one has been disappeared to El Salvador.

2. Effective resistance fighters in World War II and other conflicts have not always stayed in their home countries to fight. But fight they did. See Casablanca.

3. The German people did not get rid of Hitler. The Italian people did not get rid of Mussolini. The Japanese people did not get rid of Hirohito. Why should we think that the American people will get rid of Republicans and Trump any more than Hungarians are getting rid of Viktor Orban?

Vote them out!

Forget for the moment that the damage being done every day to our democracy will not be undone for generations, if ever. It simply takes more faith than I have to believe that America will have free and fair elections next year.

Others have observed, and I concur, that the deployment of National Guard troops and Marines in Los Angeles was not occasioned by any true “emergency.” It was occasioned, I believe, by a desire to test just how far Republicans can go in taking over the governments of places they don’t like.

The “Los Angeles Gambit,” I believe, is a step toward declaring martial law in democratic strongholds based on Trumped-up “emergencies.” Among other things, this allows the military to usurp civilian authority over elections. It is not beyond Republicans to declare that rampant crime in cities makes it too dangerous to conduct elections next year.

Face it. If Republicans are willing to commit mass murder, is it really unthinkable for them to do anything less?

* Some may ask me why I identify these political actors as Christians. Because they identify themselves as Christians. Is there some reason they can say it and I can’t?