America ~ The Faintest Glimmer of Hope ~ Part I (revised edition)

Journal

America ~ The Faintest Glimmer of Hope ~ Part I

I

The Congressional Hearings and the testimony of Ms Cassidy Hutchinson, a former Whitehouse Staffer during the calamitous events of January 6, 2021, and the days leading up to that terrible event may just may, be the faintest glimmer of hope that the American People will realise how the world will react if they gave Donald Trump a second term in the Whitehouse.

I do not hold my breath.

Last week a Trump supporter’s defence of that man’s sexual abuse as “that was when he was a young man” moved the ground from beneath me. What is it, that causes women to applaud this grotesque man?

Next came a thrown-off cliff-edge moment with an accusation made against the sitting president. I was reminded to pay attention to the television. ‘It’s all on the television. Everyone knows it.’

Fortunately, reason popped its head around the corner of the door, winked, and reminded me that maybe it was time to leave but not before changing subjects and departing on a happier note.

In 1939 there were families in Britain who took Hitler’s side.

In 2022, I finally understand the seismic effect this has on a family, a community, a people, and a nation. It is unnerving. And I have to accept that there are people in the West, yes, even in NATO-protected states, who favour Putin and his regime over their own.

 II

When we make accusations based upon the ‘infallibility’ of ‘what the television says’, then we obtain a very clear view of what the Russian People have been subjected to for more than twenty years. State TV has fed them lies and propaganda, so vast a scale that they have lost the ability to discern truth from lie.

The few who can discern, very quickly find themselves behind bars.

I have no doubts that the sitting president has his faults, just as the sitting premier (at the time of writing this Journal, the Right Honourable self-seeking-self-serving Boris Johnson) of the United Kingdom has his.

But we are also witnessing this week superb international governance in Madrid with the NATO summit. Everything that Putin sought to prevent has come to pass. Where he sowed division and strife, he has produced a united front. I wonder where he would be in the Parable of the Sower?

 III

Paradoxically, the elephant in the room is the American People.

Will they see reality? Will they see, even now this morning, their former president’s ridiculous excuse that Ms Hutchinson’s evidence is hearsay and, therefore, inadmissible.

Ukraine is in exactly the position that Britain was in, in 1940. In 1939 we sought America’s help. Not until 1941 did we secure Lend-Lease. Not until December 7, 1941, did America enter the war, and only then because of Pearl Harbor.

With the virulent anti-British pro Nazi Joseph Kennedy, the American ambassador in London (the father of JFK) doing everything he could to bring about the defeat of Britain even during the Battle of Britain by misreporting events to President Roosevelt, the British were sober-minded and grateful when assistance came.

The British People were also blunt, direct and to the point, when cock-sure American service personnel informed them, ‘we’re here now.’ Well, you don’t say! That is not a wise thing to say to a Nation that is already in its third year of total war. Quite a few Americans discovered another side to the fortitude of the Anglo-Saxon roots that many of them had.

One American once chided me … yeah, but it’s not like you’d been invaded. You’d had a few air raids with an Al Pacino shrug of the shoulders while munching an apple.

I giggled. Yep. True. But those few air raids took forty-three thousand civilian deaths just in 1940. In other words, the majority of that 43,000 would have heard Churchill’s speeches in 1940 but few would have believed they had already had their last Christmas in 1939 and would not live to even see Pearl Harbor, but they would have lived through the endless pleas to America.

I think my American friend and I would be very sober-minded if we were looking on now at Ukraine.

Yes, it is up to the American People to show resolve in the same way as the Nation of Ukraine is doing right now, except that their resolve is paid for in blood.

IV

I fully support the United States of America. I always have. I have always been an Americanophile. But I also see things in the cold light of day, and America has much to do to re-establish the free world’s trust in them as the leader of the free world. It is not for the outside world to dictate American domestic politics. Absolutely not.

But that comes with a caveat.

It is grim.

To return the former president, a man so disgraced by the events of January 6, 2021, would result in the entire western world never trusting any American ever again.

That is the burden you now carry. Your burden is not to make America great again. That is the language of dictatorship. It is straight out of Mein Kampf.

With their Supreme Court on the most extreme trajectory seen in a century, even overturning decisions that have been passed to deal with climate change, we see a nation of fifty states that is ripping apart at the seams. A reactionary, divisive, partisan, political supreme court is a nation’s guarantee to embracing dictatorship, and that dreaded rise of religious fundamentalism that regularly plagues the Greater American People.

Yes, there is the faintest glimmer. But the beacon of Light is by no means yet lighted.

6 August 2023
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© 2023 Kenneth Thomas Webb


Digital Artwork by KTW

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First penned 30 June 2022