Voices

So where is the media discussing the outrage of the left?

We are living under a system of minority rule. We are enduring outrage after outrage — and the response from our majority — but our fury is not recognized by the corporate media.

PUTNEY — We see stories written daily about the supposed outraged far-right partisans.

They are in high dudgeon about the audacity of wearing a piece of cloth over their mouths and noses, as well as the terrible unfairness of being asked (and, in some cases, pressured) to accept a vaccine that will protect the public from a terrible disease.

They are furious about the nonexistent stolen election of their god, Donald Trump.

The rage extends to the terrible injustice of trying the coup plotters and participants in the invasion of the Capitol on Jan. 6. How terribly unfair that these thugs who committed violence against Capitol police, trashed the building, and threatened Vice President Mike Pence and legislators with death should suffer any consequences.

While the poor conditions in U.S. jails never bothered them one whit before, the coup actors are whining about being treated so badly while in custody.

Fox News and the other far-right outlets share stories of the poor, crying Nazis weeping about having any consequences for their actions, and the outrage that other “innocents” like Kyle Rittenhouse are actually being even tried for their crimes.

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I read this with growing amazement and the realization that the huge and growing anger I feel, and so many of my comrades feel as well, is not recognized by the corporate media.

Progressives and many Democrats are furious. We are living under a system of minority rule.

All statistics are clear that the right wing of this country is 30 to 40 percent of the population. But through truly dirty dealing by Sen. Mitch McConnell, that minority view now controls the Supreme Court and probably will for decades, as the new “justices” are relatively young.

Killing Roe v. Wade will be just an opening salvo to the course of destruction of civil rights of women and people of color, as well as killing the ability to regulate the natural environment, especially the spewing of unlimited carbon dioxide.

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Once the court got through destroying the voting rights of millions of people of color by killing the pre-clearance for states that have a tradition of voter suppression, the far right then decided that anyone's rights are fair game, and women seem to be on the chopping block right now.

Abortion is clearly going away in a large block of states. The separation of church and state seems to be one of the next targets.

Millions of us watched the Trump-led violent criminals walking out in freedom and even being escorted by some of the sympathetic police after their incursion into the Capitol. My mouth dropped, as I have been arrested for peacefully sitting in a road (a very, very secondary road) in front of an ICE office. I was also arrested more than once for peacefully sitting in front of a nuclear reactor.

It was shocking and a true harbinger of the lack of consequences that the violent right wing has faced for their hateful actions. Huge amounts of time and money would have been saved had these monsters been picked up at the door as they left, and it might also have at least given the world an appearance of a justice system that had a modicum of fairness.

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About those anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers: Millions of us have lost all patience with these selfish misguided souls.

As a secular Jew - the kind that still were murdered in droves by the Nazis in the German Holocaust - I am so angry at the ignorant Christians who have the audacity to equate wearing a piece of cloth or paper with being exterminated in a death camp. This analogy is pretty much a daily occurrence on the far right.

Protecting my community is vital to me during the age of Covid. The refusal to follow public health guidelines is bad enough, but threatening people who are trying to keep our world safe from an ever-mutating virus has really got my blood boiling.

I own and work in a bookstore. Almost all our customers are grateful for our strict precautions, but almost every day we get one person who is very upset that we refuse to carry the creatively awful books about the perfidy of vaccines, of Anthony Fauci, or of the “hoax” of Covid.

For those of us on the front lines, we are angry about those who continue to try to prolong a plague that might have been far less devastating if the Trumpy part of the public cared at all about their fellow citizens.

These people have got a power over us that we do not have over them: They can - and may even try to - make us sick, and maybe kill us.

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Congress just passed a massive budget for war, even though we are supposedly in peacetime. The Pentagon is known for its lavish spending - over time, we have heard about the $800 toilet seat or the surplus being so large they give away weapons of war to police departments.

The Build Back Better plan, containing vital social safety net spending such as for affordable child care, as well as tepid (but far better than nothing) climate solutions, is supposedly too expensive, even though it is not even one fifth of the money we spend on war.

This is an outrage.

And again, millions of Americans are furious that Build Back Better has not passed.

Remember that Congress does not fairly represent the U.S. public. With two senators per state no matter its population, the Senate offers far, far greater representation to Republicans than would be reflected by the demographics of their constituents. The gerrymandering that makes the House also far from representative means that the majority of Americans' voices are suppressed every day.

The United States government has had no problem violently putting down peaceful Native American protesters at Standing Rock and at Line 3 in Minnesota, even when the government is breaking treaty rights. Black Lives Matter protesters have become the foil for many far-right commentators, even though the vast majority of the millions of us who came out on the streets after the violent police murder of George Floyd were peaceful.

Everyone I know had the same reaction to Jan. 6: if those people were Black, they would all be dead.

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And possibly the most triggering outrage of all: the criminal Donald Trump and his law-breaking family all remain free to continue to grift, to steal, and to lie.

Trump has gotten away with financial crime after financial crime, from theft of millions of dollars through non-payment of contractors, to cheating extensively on his taxes, to charging the Secret Service millions for using his properties to protect him (apparently, they were even charged to rent golf carts) - a practice that continues to this day.

He was also central to the violent attacks of Jan. 6. So why is he free as a bird? This is a huge slap in the face to those of us who have any desire to live in a country with a functional legal system.

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So where is the media discussing the outrage of the left? Our representatives, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are threatened with death many times a day. Books that we read and believe in are being censored daily. Schools in half our states are being directed to teach a fantasy about the slave trade and African American history. The climate is being destroyed by the unregulated greed of the fossil fuel industry.

And, unless Joe Biden gets to work, elections that are not to the Republicans' liking will be nullified by state legislatures.

Millions of us are angry! Our voices are not being amplified, and our demands for justice and a sustainable future are being crushed by a media that gives the far right a huge megaphone.

Putting this anger to constructive use in organizing, writing, and getting out in the streets is the only way we can save ourselves from a certain takeover by the fascist Republican party.

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