By: Lisa M. Hayes – Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.
It means something.
In fact, it’s very meaningful.
Many might think I’m being overly dramatic when I say we’ve watched our democracy die in plain sight. It’s been a slow, painful, messy, bloody death of one of the most cherished institutions history will ever know. Now we can mince words, and say it was never really a democracy because it was always a republic, and while political science majors can have fun with that debate, the reality is our nation, as we knew it will never be the same as it once was.
As democracies go, the United States is barely a historical adolescent. Our system of checks and balances has been dismantled bit by bit. The founders could never have imagined a time when an entire political party would be infected with a virus so vile and corrupt that they would turn their backs on the constitution, civility, morality, and the rule of law.
Our fathers and grandfathers who put their lives on the line to fight communism could not have imagined a time when our President would sell our democracy to a hostile foreign power. We’re putting people in concentration camps again as if the hard lessons of history are meaningless. We have every reason to wonder about the security of our electorate. Free and fair elections no longer feel like a birthright in the U.S.
The framers of the Constitution couldn’t have protected us from ourselves in a day when a nation so divided would fall painfully into an abyss of chaos. We don’t live in the country we thought we did. The illusion of that dream has crumbled around us.
One might say the impeachment process has been political theater because when the impeachment articles hit the Senate they will go nowhere. We will see grown men turn into monsters defending an evil they’ve grown to worship. They will contort themselves into the faces of our darkest nature. They will protect his throne as if their lives depend on it – and maybe they do.
Short of a miracle, he will most certainly not be removed from office and we all know it.
But this process means something.
It leaves a historical record for future generations to learn from. Combined with the Mueller report this impeachment is the roadmap of how we got where we are so possibly at some point we can follow that map in reverse out of this darkness.
The impeachment process itself puts the death of democracy in the dark, into the light.
The impeachment tells the truth.
His impeachment might be the first block of the foundation of rebuilding someday.
And that someday probably won’t happen until the old white men elected out of the sickness of greed and racism have died.
Some might say it’s our darkest hour.
Short of a coup, impeaching a sitting president is the most serious political process modern history will ever know. It’s ugly and it’s painful.
But make no mistake, this may be one of the brightest moments our democracy has ever seen. My hope is that it’s bright enough that when it’s time to rebuild the nation we once knew, we will remember how we fell, finding ways to protect the ideals of democracy against threats from the inside of the White House.
The Senate will not remove him from office.
That will be the work of the people.
I pray we’re ready because we have no idea what doing that will look like.
Lisa M. Hayes, Senior Editor of Confluence Daily.
Confluence Daily is the one place where everything comes together. The one-stop for daily news for women.
