Last night, as my partner, Penny, and I went to bed, it looked as though for the second time in a row America was going to elect the most misogynistic, homophobic, racist, xenophobic, environmentally-destructive president ever in American history. Don’t forget, he’s a sociopath and narcissist, too.
Penny and I went to bed with our bottles of cyanide under our pillows.
I can’t describe how elated we were when we woke up this morning. The election results were no longer leaning toward Trump, and everything was still up in the air. Even better, Biden’s chances were improving, with several states still up for grabs because the count’s so close.
In fact, as I write this, Biden is ahead by a hair in Michigan and Wisconsin, and with hundreds of thousands of ballots yet to be counted in Pennsylvania that are estimated to be disproportionately in Biden’s favour, we’ve put away our cyanide bottles for now.
We’re also reassured by the secretary of state and election officials in Nevada, who are insisting that no final results in that state be declared until all mail-in ballots are counted. (Due to COVID, for the first time mail-in ballots were sent to all Nevadan registered voters.)
But back to trying to get some sleep last night…I have to confess that I pondered the age-old question, is it always immoral to murder?
During his political career, Hitler was the target of six assassination attempts. The best-known, and best-intentioned, one took place on July 20, 1944, when Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg placed a briefcase containing a bomb under a table at a conference for Hitler and high-ranking Nazi officials. The intent of the colonel and his associates was to topple the Nazi regime.
The bomb went off, killing four officers. But Hitler survived. One of the officers just happened to move the briefcase behind a heavy table leg, which spared the Führer’s life.
If Hitler had been killed, the Second World War would almost certainly have come to an earlier end, saving hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. So we have to ask, if the assassination attempt had succeeded, would Stauffenberg and his friends have acted immorally?
If there’s a Trump re-election, we will certainly go beyond the point of no return with global warming. Four years from now, it simply will be too late to reverse the trend. The negative feedback loops that will then be in place will make it impossible for even the greatest American president to correct the inevitable. Life as we know it on our dear planet will most surely come to an end.
If there is a Trump re-election, hundreds more refugee children will continue to be separated from their parents at the US/Mexican border. Under Trump, more than 5,000 kids, many of them under the age of 5, were taken into custody while their parents were deported. US officials since haven’t been able to track down the parents of 545 kids, so they can’t be reunified. This is nothing short of a crime, at least a moral one.
If there is a Trump re-election, hundreds of thousands more Americans will die from COVID, and explicit racism and white supremacy will continue to mushroom.
Two nights ago, Penny and I watched one of our favourite newscasts, Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now, which showed footage of a very troubling event in North Carolina. Award-winning activist and hip, young theologian, Greg Drumwright, and hundreds of people (including kids and an elderly woman in a wheelchair ) were heading to vote, or register to vote, as part of a peaceful “get-out-the-vote” rally.
As they walked to the polls, they were pepper-sprayed and attacked by heavily armed police — what’s called “militia force” — after they failed to “move along” in 14 seconds after pausing to pay tribute to George Floyd. Reverend Greg and others were arrested. One of the sheriffs involved has known links to neo-Confederate activists.
If there is a Trump re-election, evil incarnate will, once again, occupy the White House, and so many amoral, terrible things will continue to happen that I can barely note them all here.
None of us knows the US election’s results yet, and we may not know for days or even weeks. In the meantime, we all need to be patient and watchful, and as one stalwart leader — Joe Biden — said, keep the faith. Fingers crossed we’ll all be opening bottles of ice-cold champagne soon.
However, if there is a Trump re-election, I will once again raise the philosophical question: Is murder always immoral?
Daily atmospheric CO2 [Courtesy of CO2.Earth]
Latest daily total (Nov. 3, 2020): 410.76 ppm
One year ago (Nov. 3, 2019): 409.29 ppm
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Tim, my feelings on Wednesday morning were similar to yours and Penny’s, but a more striking similarity in our thinking occurred before I read this blog entry. As I pondered the terrible threat represented by swaths of red colouring the U.S. electoral map, my mind reeled before the fact that every Trump vote was cast by someone who absolved him of the Covid death of almost one quarter million Americans. And how many people did Trump’s pal Erdogan kill after American troops were ordered out of Kurdish Syrian territory on an impulse by their Commander in Chief?
Add the murders and genocides in countries like Brazil, where for personal gain the leaders savagely promote the interests of the American 1 per cent. Trump’s culpability must surely be no less than that of Benito Mussolini, whose actions led to the death of an estimated 400,000 Italians and to tens of thousands in Ethiopia. Benito Mussolini was a pathological liar like Donald Trump and, like him, a megalomaniac who had persuaded the bullies of his time that their generation was meant to reprise, in their case, the might of the Roman empire. “Make Roma Great Again” might have been his motto.
When the Nazis had surrendered and Mussolini was attempting to flee Italy in disguise, he was caught and executed by partisans and his body strung up by the feet in a public place. A LIFE photographer published the scene where villagers in their fury threw rocks at the corpse. I remember that photograph and its impact on me as a child. The indignity visited on Mussolini shocked me before I knew the word “indignity.” It would now, seventy years later. But there had been prolonged suffering and hardship endured by those who expressed their anger towards Il Duce in that horrifying way, and the hardship was far from being over. In the United States, the tide of poverty has overtaken communities slowly and insidiously, and gaslighting has obscured the understanding of so many as to what has really been happening. It seems as if no-one has been tempted to do away with the source of so much unnecessary death and hardship. But in America today, the news of an assassination attempt might never reach the public.
No, Murder is not a bad thing. Wonder how many of us have mulled this over. but the
HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE, ROCKS THE WORLD. The basic system in the US
has to be modified/changed or it will continue to spin out of control and bully the rest of
the world.