My One New Year's Resolution

Going Greek...an Ostracon from ancient Athens...
a vote to ostracize someone from society.

Sorry to say, this will not be a cheery holiday post. 

First, a little background: When I was a fervent young Catholic boy, I poured my righteousness into the editorial page of my high school newspaper for which I had been elected the rare underclassman editor-in-chief. It was in an editorial calling on my fellow school mates to ostracize those of our peers who took part in underage drinking. I believe ostracize was the first word I ever learned to use from a thesaurus, and the editorial may have been the first thing I wrote that got serious adult attention. The editor of the local town paper called to interview me about the editorial and reprinted it. Among my peers it received mixed reviews. A few upperclassmen pulled me aside to tell me in effect to “Stay in my lane"  (had that been an expression back then). I was undaunted, as the righteous tend to be, and continued to write editorials that called upon me to express moral indignation at the behavior of others. 

Fortunately that habit got tempered with time…and humility and maturity and a broader, less upper-case C Catholic, more lower-case c catholic understanding of humanity. Yet, here I find myself on the verge of 2021 being pulled in that familiar direction for my one and only New Year’s Resolution. I’m not only resolving to have nothing to do with any supporters of Donald Trump in 2021, but I’m calling on all my peers...The Resistance if you will...who have also opposed this grotesque disruption of our democracy to do the same. 

This resolution will save us the agonizing of trying to figure how to deal with the Trump supporters in our lives…family, friends, co-workers, classmates, etc. It should be straightforward…anyone with sympathies for this corrupt, incompetent, treasonous bigot assumes ownership of all that. There is no such thing as I was only in it for my 401k or I only voted for him because I couldn’t vote for a Democrat or I just wanted to shake things up in Washington. There is no mitigating your endorsement of someone who was so clearly unfit for office from the start and only confirmed his unfitness nearly every hour of every day he was in office. There is no amount of party chit-chat, social obligation, or forced decorum at the dinner table that can cover over the fact that anyone who supported Trump supported his gross negligence in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, his ongoing assault on the Constitution and democracy, his grand theft from the public till in broad daylight, and his total disregard for common human decency. 

I’ve already broken Godwin’s Law regarding Nazi analogies. So I don’t mind repeating myself here:

It was Good Germans, after all, who made Hitler’s concentration camps (and ovens!) possible. The “Good Americans” who walk among us in blissful/willful ignorance make the wretched conditions at our border possible. They turn away when the media covers it because they find it too unpleasant. They shut down conversations about it when they arise because they don’t like talking about “politics”. They persuade themselves that the problem is too big and complex for them to deal with and so they leave it to the authorities. That’s how Good Americans arrive at a place where they can allow awful things to happen in their name without a pang of moral pain. 

We’re not just talking about those who silently acquiesced to Trump’s outrages, of course; we’re talking about those who actively participated through their votes, donations and open advocacy of the cruelty, deception, and treason. They have bought into his narcissism, denying science, national intelligence, legal findings, and common sense to do so. 

Can we force our way through casual conversations about culture, cooking, children, etc. with such people, knowing that their core values support bigotry, fraud, and authoritarianism? I can’t. These people are carrying a virus as surely as if they tested positive for Covid. Get within six feet of them, and you’re bound to be infected…and forget about masks. They don’t care about protecting you, so why on earth should you care about protecting them with social grace?  Don’t put that thing on me, the song says. Indeed.  

For all the real and understandable longing for national healing, 2021 also has to be a year of consequences for all those who enabled this hideous episode in American history. The wheels of justice should take care of those at the top. Ostracizing those at our own level should be the least we can do. If they don’t pay a personal price for selling out America, they’ll do it again.  

Here's to a happy, purposeful New Year.