WHAT’S UP WITH REPUBLICAN LEGISLATORS THESE DAYS?

By Ruth A. Sheets

Nearly every couple of days in the past few months, maybe way longer, news comes of another law being passed in a red state legislature and quickly signed by its governor that can and should be described as mean, even cruel.  I can’t help but wonder what is going on that red legislatures have become instruments of social warfare wielded by state governors with the state’s citizens the targets.

A lot of that social warfare has been going on in Florida where Gov. Ron DeSantis just has to nudge the state conservative legislators and it will be law, whatever DeSantis wants for his own personal vengeance, fear and hatred of the other, and some as yet, unidentified reasons.     These are not laws that are needed, as DeSantis claims.  They are laws of personal and political grievance.  The mostly white men among Florida’s conservative legislators don’t seem to have a problem with advancing the DeSantis fearmongering and hatred.

One would expect in a vulnerable state like Florida, the legislature’s attention would be on planning to cope with global warming, improving health care for the people of Florida, considering needed modifications to farming and fruit industries, preparing for the huge seaweed mat heading toward the coast, countering flooding challenges, or ending Florida’s food insecurity, the real problems facing the people of Florida.  Why would any legislature neglect the real problems to serve their governor’s whims?  That’s the question! 

I have been pondering for several years, since Trump was “elected” president, that any semblance of concern for the American people on the part of the Republican party seems to have drifted into oblivion.  It appears cleaving oneself to Donald Trump as leader requires sacrificing one’s moral compass, caring little or nothing for the people one is supposed to be serving, and finding ways to use cruelty to achieve questionable goals, goals which are rarely if ever stated, but must be present since so many Republicans have latched onto them.

The current targets of Republican legislatures, women of child-bearing age, the LGBTQ community and transgender youth in particular, Black citizens, asylum-seekers, public schools, and minority voters do not deserve this Republican vitriol.  I do wonder how Republican legislators get away with it and keep getting elected.  Here are a few potentials I am currently contemplating.

1. Voting suppression has been underway in the former Confederacy and Confederate wannabee states for a long time.  There is still a lot of resentment concerning the 1865 loss.  There is some kind of romance tied to the “Southern cause” that feeds a whole lot of ugly attitudes and behaviors.  Gotta still blame certain groups for the loss.

2. The current business world is obsessed with fascism, controlling other people,  making employees accept whatever pay bosses say is what workers deserve, and the unwillingness to pay their fair share of taxes.  This led to huge wealth in the hands of a few and many of them finance conservative white Republican legislators at all levels, as long as they do what the rich white guys want.

3. Evidence has shown that children are vulnerable to  indoctrination.  Republicans see that as an avenue for gaining power when they know the things they stand for are unpopular.  Go after the schools, public schools, of course, and dictate what is taught there under pain of dismissal, even arrest.  Few real teachers want to teach only what Republicans want taught if they have a choice. 

4. Book banning is a selling point for Republicans because one does not even have to have read the books they want to ban.  It just has to have a suggestive title, cover art, or author of color.  

5. Conservatives are obsessed with sex in all its forms.  Can’t teach sex and no discussions of menstruation for girls, I guess because ignorance for girls is bliss.  Getting teens pregnant works well for Republicans too.  Hey, in 13 years or so, those forced birth children can fill the factories of the legislators’ donors.

6. Evangelical and Roman Catholic Christianity in the United States has taken a turn toward support of fascism (which they call religion), claiming god tells them that people who don’t look like them, experience the world like them, and believe what they do are to be suppressed.  There is a history for them to follow.  1920s and 1930s Italy and Germany come quickly to mind.

7. Perhaps, when a political party chooses to follow a leader who has no moral compass, its leaders will see as acceptable, even valuable;  grabbing women’s bodies without consent; openly voicing racism and misogyny and expecting people to see it as normal; being uninformed and lying as often as possible, even tens of thousands of times, knowing they will rarely be challenged on the lies; inciting, supporting, or participating in an insurrection and 28 months later still not charged for it; stealing secret documents if you can get away with it, lying about having them, then claiming to have the right to them, expecting no charges.   It seems political bad behavior is the way to go to get power and attention and to avoid accountability, and Republicans are practicing every day. 

8. Red states have been heavily gerrymandered and the Supreme Court has said “OK, as long as it is political.”  (Gerrymandering is always political SC conservatives!)  So, the state legislatures have Republican supermajorities because the state’s people have been groomed to vote only “R” despite the fact those super majorities have done little to nothing to help them and have no intention of changing.

9. Hurting people works for a lot of folks as long as the targets are not themselves and their friends and families.  Since many white people in the red states have only white straight friends (or it seems that way), passing “bathroom” bills that force people to use the bathrooms of their birth gender, keeping trans girls from playing girls’ sports, denying care for transgender kids and youth, making drag shows illegal, keeping trans adults from getting care, taking over cities whose populations are mostly Black, make sense to them.  What happens when those targeted groups find ways to make the pain less, figure out how to get around Republican bullying?  Will Republican legislators move to inflict greater pain?  Will they trump up more crimes they can charge members of those “hated” groups with?  Richard Nixon and his team did it through their “war on drugs” aimed  at “Hippies and Black Americans” (part of his “Southern strategy”).

10. Hate, fear, anger, and resentment are powerful emotions that get adrenalin going.  Maybe people who have schooled themselves to feel very little can get high on those negative emotions.  To be truly effective, they need to be directed toward someone the person can convince himself/herself deserves their hatred.  Following up the hit of adrenalin, they can move to passing bills that will in some way hurt that target.  I suspect a broad smile lights up their faces as they enter their votes to inflict what the Republican legislators see as righteous pain.

11. Republican legislators, at least some of them know what they are doing is wrong, or at least they have a tiny twinge in the back of their mind that it is unamerican, unconstitutional, but they do it anyway.  When one of their target groups dares to challenge them, they will make the person(s) pay.  We saw that in Tennessee when the Assembly voted to expel 2 Black representatives for standing with protesters at the Assembly’s inaction related to gun violence after 6 gun deaths at a school not far from the state Capitol.  The Black legislators were reinstated by their cities.  Then, Montana did the same when the transgender representative dared to tell them their bad actions would cause harm to trans youth among whom there is already a high suicide rate.  She was silenced and is now suing because the action of the legislature is unconstitutional, first amendment, that free speech thing.

12. Our Federal government Republicans are also behaving badly, holding our economy hostage so they can seriously cut programs that serve disadvantaged people:  elderly, poor, disabled, American veterans.  That is shameful, but they are on a roll and will do as much damage as they can before the people stop them.  I just hope it isn’t so much damage that it cannot be repaired.   

This legislative violence started out with the goal of doing harm to the groups they planned to target.  Some groups were added later, like trans kids, but the writing, as they say was on the wall.  Each law has ancestors which took away bits of citizens’ rights.  Legislatures required Black drug users greater sentences than white ones using the same drugs; they put all kinds of conditions on abortion, who could get one, how long they would have to wait, the kind of invasive procedures would have to be done to the woman first, what kind of facility could house abortion providers, parental consent, etc.  Despite the Constitution giving every citizen the right to vote at age 18 and up, states began chipping away at those voting rights:  need I.D.s the Republican legislators would approve, voting locations limited in districts that are heavily minority or Democratic, permitting only specific people to use mail-in or absentee ballots and somehow those privileged people would have to deliver the ballots themselves, gerrymandering became very precise, surgically cutting up districts to give Republicans advantages they did not deserve, you get the idea.  

These ancestor laws have morphed into what is going on in the red states.  Texas and a couple of other states are incentivizing citizens to rat on people they think are getting or helping someone to get abortions and some state legislatures want to execute women for having abortions (sound like Russia, China, North Korea)!  They are also threatening anyone who crosses state lines to get an abortion.  (can we say “obsessed?”)  For those same red states, being transgender is a crime and parents who help their desperate children get trans care are abusers, criminals.

Colleges and universities are not allowed to make their fragile white students uncomfortable learning about diversity because, let’s see, white people want to pretend they are the only people on Earth who matter?   Everyone else is a potential servant or slave? 

I think, as I have for a long time now that conservative white people are scared, scared all the time.  They know in their “heart of hearts” they are no better than anyone else, which is why they have to keep feeding themselves with the Fox Not Nearly News lies.  They need to hang together in legislatures and pass appalling laws that will hurt those people they know are just as good as they are.  They warp Christianity to fit their equally warped world view, essentially creating god in their own image. 

All this effort by bigots like DeSantis and the other conservative white legislators and governors have one slight upside.  Democrats and independents are starting to wake up to the fascist laws that are descending on us.  People are talking to each other trying to figure out how to do an intervention to treat Republican insanity. 

Republicans no longer can be considered a worthy political party.  They lost that position when they let their racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homo/transphobia, pseudo-Christianity take over their thoughts and actions.  I can honestly say, “these are not good people, even if they themselves don’t realize it.”  I hope a lot more Americans will come to see that and vote them out of office.  We all must do whatever is necessary to get registered to vote and swear an oath to ourselves that we will vote in every election and vote for people who care about us and this nation.  That would be a start.  There are lots of people out here to help.  Call out Uncle John or Aunt Mary when they make racist, sexist or other unkind remarks and remind them that we’re all people of equal value, even them.  We can make things better.  In fact, we have to before global warming makes us all irrelevant.

CRUELTY IS THE POINT

By Ruth A. Sheets

Governor DeSantis of Florida and other “red” state governors are pushing their state legislatures into acts of deliberate cruelty, passing laws that are designed to cause harm to residents of their states, appalling legislation that should be unconstitutional, but probably will not be judged so.  Why not?  These new rights-restricting laws fit perfectly into the current ultra-right-wing Republican agenda.

That Republican agenda seems to be to hurt as many non-white, non-“Christian,” non-straight, non-male people as possible and keep those folks in their place, far below the exalted place of rich, straight, “Christian” white men.  It is not enough to just work on removing constitutional rights, there must be pain to remind those folks they are pretty much worthless except for their votes, but only if those votes are for the “R” on the ballot, and, the “red” states’ voters are conditioned to vote for the “R” no matter who it is.   (Mommy and Daddy were “r’s” and I must be too.”

The cruelty is present in much of what Republican leaders do, all of it intentional.  Women’s bodily autonomy, for example, is challenged at every turn even to proposing the outlawing of birth control.  That would put all women of reproductive age at the mercy of male sperm and cause them to produce children they are not ready for or can’t afford to raise and who could have severe disabilities due to the poor quality of health care those targeted poor mostly women of color are able to obtain. 

There’s the “war” against trans children and youth.  Ignorant Republicans claim to believe everyone’s gender at birth is the one they MUST live through their entire lives.  They claim god told them so.  Jesus never condemned people living and dressing as a different gender from that of their birth and he clearly would have known about it.  (Oh wait, that’s the same with abortion, Jesus didn’t condemn that either.  Hmmmm!)

Bills being shoved through now to become law are forbidding medical care for helping trans children and youth.   One of the most common of the medical treatments involves use of puberty blockers to make the child’s transition a bit less traumatic.  Counseling and other hormone treatments are part of the process too.  Knowing that the suicide rate among trans youth is very high, the legislators commanded by the states’ governors pass the laws anyway.  In South Dakota, the families get a year to stop the transition process.  The ignorance of the Republican leadership is astounding!  They pass laws that can only hurt those children and families.  Some states want to stop treatment for adults in transition too.  Why do that?  Republicans these days need victims, suffering-human-meat for their warped base.  Cruelty is the point!

Asylum-seekers and refugees are lied to and put on buses to cities that are not even informed they (including children) are coming, giving them little time to prepare.  Why, to take a kind of revenge on those “woke” cities and to disorient the newcomers.  CRUELTY IS THE POINT and those Republicans are reveling in it, gleefully reporting what they have done.

Republican leadership perpetrates cruelty on white Republicans too! They questioned the value of COVID vaccines and hundreds of thousands died who would not have had their lying not kept them from being vaccinated or wearing masks from a manufactured fear of vaccines and claim of freedom to wear whatever they want.  Republicans also suffered when states refused Medicaid money to support struggling families.  I suspect waging cruelty has become part of who Republicans are now.

Then, there’s the police!  Administrations for decades have been militarizing police and that new weaponry and attitude of police invulnerability and insensitivity have led to many victims of police violence, a high percentage of whom are men of color.  Rape and abuse of women by police is common in some communities too and nearly none of this bad behavior on the part of police has even been prosecuted, so few have been held accountable and whole communities are intimidated by police presence.  Yep, more cruelty and it won’t stop without accountability.  Often, the people of targeted communities are blamed for the police violence, mostly implied; can’t say that out loud! 

Cruelty has been used for thousands of years to control people.  Leaders have employed unspeakable tortures and executions to terrorize people into behaving just as the dictators, those in charge, want them to (or at least that is what they claimed).  And, the more cruel, the better.  In reality, those doing the torture et al were sick people who reveled in the suffering of others (sadists and psychopaths).  Giving those people free rein kept them loyal and useful and terror alive and well among the people.

Here’s a little trip into history to visit a few popular cruelties:

• If you don’t like a woman (or man on occasion) and the person is a little odd, accuse them of  witchcraft or heresy, torture them,  and watch them burn.
• If you want to keep power over a diverse community as the rulers of Ancient Rome did, publicly crucify “criminals” so others can watch them die and gloat in their suffering.
• Get “ordinary people” participating in the cruelty as Germans in the 1930s did, letting them destroy Jewish property, beat Jews and other “enemies of the state,” turn in Jewish neighbors, and so much more.  They went along with their leaders running unspeakable death and slave labor camps all over occupied Europe.  Those ordinary people claimed, “We didn’t know what Hitler and his gang were doing.  It wasn’t our fault.”
• Enslaved persons in this country and throughout the Americas were beaten into submission so they would function as machine-like beings doing the work rich white people would benefit from, but couldn’t/wouldn’t' do.  And, the various governments heartily approved, and were active participants.  I guess they all thought Black people didn’t feel the pain of the whips, chains, and general abuse, cruelty perpetrated by their owners every day with death or escape the only way to stop the pain.  Cruelty was the point to keep the owned in line.

 And now, the cruelty continues as ignorant conservative white people try their best to erase what their white ancestors did in this country to Black, Native American, Chinese, Japanese (World War II internment) people, and to anyone who crossed white men in power.  And this was all government-sanctioned.  The white descendants of the perpetrators want their fragile kiddies to learn only the great things white men did in our history while downplaying everything else.  They don’t even try to hide their intentions.  They cry in their fear and ignorance, “CRT (Critical Race Theory), ban books about Black Americans as well as LGBTQ stories, and deliberately plot to remove people’s rights.  The story of Rosa Parks is banned in Florida and some other spots, for example.  Why, because she was a hero for standing against white cruelty.

The thing is, we can’t change what happened in the past.  We can’t make the cruelties perpetrated back then any less cruel, but we can learn from our past so we don’t permit the continuation of the cult of cruelty.  Republicans need to be stopped from working to maintain and perfect their ability to cause suffering.  We the People all need to stand up and call it what it is, CRUELTY!  Evil! 

None of what these governors and legislators is doing is accidental, but a lot of it stems from deliberate ignorance.  Fact-checkers can’t keep up with the number of lies and the media often dismisses the harm their words and actions are causing.  That is just as these Republicans want it.  While We the People try to chase and counter their lies, they work even harder to take away people’s rights and our appalling Supreme Court conservatives are on board.  Cruelty is the point for them too.

So, Democrats and any Republicans who still believe in this nation and the value of diversity need to vote down any proposed laws at any governmental level designed to cause suffering or to make suffering more severe.  Banning books and blaming teachers and librarians for wanting students to know our full history is cruel and should be seen as criminal.  All, and I mean ALL educators and support staff in schools need to stand up against it.  It is also cruel to deny financial support to struggling families; to charge rent too high for minimum-wage workers  to afford; to deny asylum to people who have lost everything, even some family members’ lives to get here; to separate children from their parents for any but the most critical reasons as the Trump administration did at our southern border; to plot to cut or privatize Social Security and Medicare; to allow insurgents to hold important positions in our nation’s congress; and to allow people (white people) to carry concealed weapons without a permit.  There is a lot of cruelty going on in our society right now and a whole lot of people in power are causing it or like the ordinary people of 1930s and 1940s Germany, lie and pretend they don’t know about it. 

Some questions that should be asked of potential candidates for office at every level should include “Where to you stand on the issue of banning books?”  A follow-up should be “In your way of thinking, what should be included in American History classes?”  In short, candidates should be expected to outline their positions on the cruelties being perpetrated by a lot of white and white wannabee officials.  Cruelty is unacceptable done by anyone.  It is time We the People make that clear and start voting for candidates who agree and will note reports of instances of cruelty and act to stop it.

Remember, power can corrupt but so can cruelty.  Cruelty begets even more cruelty and with increasing levels of severity.  We the People can curb it and those who perpetrate it if we have the will.

CRUELTY AND BEYOND

by Ruth A. Sheets

May 21, 2020



I just finished reading an article that made me say “enough!”  It seems ICE is making an appalling  choice available to immigrant mothers in detention, a kind of Sophy’s choice.  This time if a mother gives up her children to ICE, they can be taken from the detention/internment camp.  If she does not agree, the child or children will remain in detention and potentially suffer with her the ravages of COVID19.  There is simply no language to describe the cruelty of this and the inhumanity of anyone who would offer it. 



The families being given this choice are innocent of anything but wanting to escape violence and poverty in their home countries.  They came here for refuge and safety and get cruelty beyond belief.



What is going on here?  Who is it that gave ICE either permission or the order to commit these acts of inhumanity, and in our name?  This unnecessary agency is under the Department of Homeland Security and is the knee-jerk response to 9/11.  How the agency morphed from protecting us from terrorists to destroying families is a long troubled trail of agony and injustice.



ICE was clearly active during the Bush and Obama administrations, but it became virulent, malignant under the current administration.  Mr. Trump has made no secret of his hatred for anyone who is not rich, white, straight, and male.  For most of us who don’t fit that category, it has meant cuts in funding for necessary services and infrastructure maintenance.  It has meant obstruction to voting, increased pollution in areas where we live, dismissal of the needs of front-line workers and more.  For immigrants, asylum-seekers, refugees, and undocumented persons it has meant criminalization, imprisonment, concentration camps, separation of children from their parents with no paper trail, unwarranted deportations, and more.  It  has meant that anyone seeking our help is condemned to Mexico’s Northern border where those already suffering and stressed people are preyed on by actual criminals.  They face rape, murder, enslavement, and other agonies for no apparent benefit to this country. 



So, what is going on?  Here is my theory.  Immigrants are coming to fill the place African-Americans, Jews, Irish, and other hated groups once held.  African-Americans and Latinx persons still are in the ranks of the hated.  But, there is now more attention placed on the brutalities they have faced and continue to face, so white straight men wanted a new target, one a little less prominent and present in our society.  They needed a target they could readily convince a lot of privileged white people to hate and blame for all their ills. 



Dumping folks into concentration camps with no reporters allowed to know what conditions are like inside has emboldened the current administration to approve atrocities that would most likely not be permitted to occur if the victims were white.  It has been easy to call these mothers and children criminals.  This makes whatever is done to them OK with the rich and wannabe rich white people who are far removed from the suffering and are encouraged to believe these folks are the cause of all their woes.



Of course, the immigrants, asylum-seekers, refugees, and undocumented persons are not the cause of white problems, but are often conveniently, the vehicle for easing their worries.  These people often work the fields, living in conditions none of the privileged would allow their pets to live in.  The white privileged eat the food they pick, though.  These immigrants et al work the meat processing plants under outrageous conditions that allowed COVID19 to spread unchecked.  The privileged eat the meat and cheer on Mr. Trump’s order that the plants start up again no matter the risk to the workers. 



Perhaps this treatment is the new lynching.  It is not as brutal as was done to African-Americans nor as public, but it does produce fear, intimidation, pain, and often, death.  In addition, a lot of Republican politicians benefit from the hate they spew and the pain they cause.  They get elected by the people they have injected with anger toward and hatred and fear of the “foreigner.” 



How has the United States permitted this cruelty?  Why are so many Americans willing to stand by while the cruelty sprouts up around us and grows with the sunshine and water of hatred and fear.  Are we really so frightened?  Are these mothers and children truly a threat to us?  Are those farm and processing plant workers so threatening that we have to force them to work under whatever conditions the bosses decide are right for them?



When do we as a nation say “enough?”  When do we declare that we are better than that and work to change it?  When do we start living the words of the “Declaration of Independence” that all men (people) are created equal?  Is it so hard to believe that other people are of as much value as we are and we are of as much value as all others?  Clearly it is. 



We can’t change Mr. Trump and his gang.  I suspect they have been cultivating their belief in their own superiority for so long they won’t/can’t change.  The only way to  deal with them is to vote them out of office and ditch their fearmongering as the garbage it is. 



We also need to work on ourselves to be sure we are not dismissing others because they don’t look or act like us.  Do we respond when we hear of inhumane treatment of others?  Do we call people out when they make comments that are not only inappropriate, but hurtful to others?  Do we promote peace?  If we do not, perhaps, we need to make some changes in our own lives so we don’t keep moving down the slippery slope toward accepting things as they are, cruelty and all. 



A first step might be to ask ourselves if we would be OK with someone offering us the choice the imprisoned immigrant mothers have been given.  Would we give up our infants to strangers so those in power could do to us whatever their corrupt minds could manufacture?  If our answer is “no,” the answer should be “no” for everyone else too.  If we can’t get to that place, we need to do some heavy lifting to rework our values and re-examine our beliefs about humanity and our place in it.  An election is coming up in November.  Let’s pledge to take the necessary steps to end the cruelty.