Caffeinated Politics

It does not take a news junkie to realize that something is dreadfully wrong in our nation. Someone with severe macular degeneration can witness the absurd overreach and absolute lack of humanity after an ICE employee murdered a woman by shooting her in the face multiple times. Following that, numerous law enforcement and military veterans, in interview upon interview, publicly stated that what occurred on video was not a justified action. It would be a logical assumption that any administration confronting such a disaster of their own making would take a step back and grasp the fact that they need to recalibrate their policy and behavior

If anyone was hoping for a dose of sanity and maturity from the Donald Trump White House regarding the events in Minneapolis, they were left wanting, as only increasing tensions along with an uptick in wild rhetoric resulted from Washington. To make matters even more unacceptable, the administration has refused to allow an independent organization to investigate the shooting.

This morning, the crazy autocratic lingo from Trump continued as he threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell the protests in Minneapolis, which are legitimate and warranted given the abuses of federal officials. Like sending more deadly weapons into a war zone, the Trump administration has placed 1,000 more federal agents in Minneapolis to join the 2,000 already there.

I fully understand the tactic the goon is making. Desiring to unleash the Insurrection Act, which is one step from martial law in large urban centers where Democrats predominate, underscores the sickness within Trump. He is trying to set up a situation where folks like you and me need to make a choice between standing up for our nation, democracy, communities where we live, and the rule of law, or kneeling to an autocrat.

I want to make my points as clearly as I can at this perilous hour we seem to be reaching in the nation. History teaches us that our path as citizens becomes unmistakably clear. Minneapolis is now one of those moments when our clarity of thinking must guide us. The threat of the Insurrection Act — floated, hinted at, or dangled as a political weapon cannot and must not be countenanced by the people. Trump is not different from the mad dog thugs of the past who provoked unrest, then claimed extraordinary powers to “restore order.” It’s a playbook as old as authoritarianism itself.

A free people cannot be expected to kneel in the face of intimidation, be it from mobs, from foreign enemies, and certainly not from their own government!. Protest is not a threat to democracy; it is one of its purest expressions. The right to assemble, to speak, to dissent, is not conditional. It does not evaporate when it becomes inconvenient to those in power.

To accept the threat of the Insurrection Act as a legitimate response to civic participation would be to accept the erosion of the Constitution itself. And once a nation accepts that, it rarely stops at one exception.

Let me make an awkward segue in this column to make a larger point.

My Dad, Royce Humphrey, and I never fished, rarely tossed a baseball around, or tinkered under the hood of a car. He had done those things with my older brother, who was born 11 years before me. By the time I was of age for those activities, Dad had been elected to what would become 40 years of service as a town board supervisor. That was when I started to enjoy history and reading about the past. While I was unable in those years to get Dad to regale me with stories of his years in WWII, he did again and again talk about the larger issues of why the nation sent him to war. That is why his entry into this column matters.

He never failed to impress on me that World War II taught the world a brutal truth. That was tyranny does not retreat because it is asked politely. It does not soften when confronted with silence. Tyranny advances until it is stopped by courage, by unity, by the refusal of ordinary people to surrender their rights.

Americans fought and died on foreign soil to defeat regimes that used rogue and unjustified means to crush dissent. My dad and all the others who were in various theaters of WWII did not make their sacrifices so that future generations would accept the threats from a deranged outlaw in the White House.

When a government threatens the Insurrection Actin response to protests, it is not merely responding to unrest. It is signaling that it views its own citizens as adversaries. That is not law and order. That is an outlandish action aimed at intimidation.

Communities in Minneapolis — and across the country — understand what is at stake. They are not standing in the streets because it is easy. They are standing because they know that silence now would echo for decades.

The United States has never been a nation that bows to threats. Its defining moments, from independence to civil rights, were shaped by people who refused to kneel. That legacy does not belong to any one party or ideology. It belongs to us all. THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

I urge my readers and fellow citizens to show courage, anchored in the unshakeable conviction that democracy is worth defending.