Things We Lost in the Coup

From a Google Image Search - C. S. Young, Jr. Fine Photography

Things We Lost in the Coup

This Trump/Republican coup has taken away many things from the American people. We need to acknowledge this and decide if we really want what is happening to be part of the American story going forward. The actions of the Trump takeover do not feel like governing. They feel like a smash and grab robbery. We have lost, and we stand to lose, many rights we treasured, our feelings of national stability, our participation in our own governance, and any control over the finances connected with good governance. The fraud and waste supposedly unearthed by Musk and his Muskettes, seem rather puny in the face of what we the people stand to lose.

Losing Our Rights

Voting

Our voting rights have been tampered with, so we have lost trust in voting. Tactics like purges of voter rolls, legal challenges to voting counts, messaging about fraud in voting, questioning who is voting, gerrymandering and more have shaken our faith in our elections.

Women's rights

Conservative ideologies have walked back women's rights and there is the fear that this will escalate if the right-wing stays in power. Women lost the right to control their own bodies. Women can be fired or find it harder to work because women are now considered DEI hires. The original message was that they were benefiting from "woke" policies. When did we ever hear the acronym DEI on the campaign trail?

Women could lose their equality under the law to the dominance of men. Women could lose their financial autonomy which they did not win until the 1960s. Women might lose the right to speak freely. Women might experience higher mortality rates. Without Affirmative Action, women, especially black women, could find it harder to pursue a college education. All in all, women stand to lose many rights and privileges in a male dominated Old Testament Christian nation.

Losing our Religion

Many folks in these times have been losing their faith in religion because religions that are supposed to inform our values and morals have, throughout history, been contentious. Religions have fomented wars, crusades, inquisitions, terrorism, genocide and worse. The Evangelical Christians who have joined with the right-wing extremists to overturn our government seem to be fixated on petty issues, issues that grew out of scientific understandings and social enlightenment, which are now to be suppressed because they don't conform to new/(old) and narrow-minded ideas about Christianity.

So, when science tells us what happens with X and Y chromosomes in reproduction, that this complex biological process sometimes produces people who do not fall neatly into either male or female roles, and then religion asks us to ignore science and human wiring, and proclaims that there are no alternative sexualities, we slide backwards. You must remain with your sex as determined at birth. Humans who don't match these pronouncements lose their rights to live a life that feels natural to them.

We all lose the right to read books that favor science over ancient religious beliefs. Government becomes repressive, oppressive, at the behest of a Christianity which, after the birth of Jesus, was supposed to feature understanding, charity, forgiveness, and compassion. Meanness and narrowmindedness are the exact trends that led people to retreat from religion, but here are the old judgmental religious leaders, once again wanting to control human behavior despite how our understanding of biology has evolved.

Our Rights to Spend our Money on Ourselves

Because excesses of the wealthy led to the Great Depression, because the Industrial Age led to the abuse of workers, because as our population grew the spread of disease affected the functioning of our society, wise leaders decided that tax dollars could be spent to lessen misery.

In hard times people responded positively to government programs intended to benefit everyone by seeking ways to address areas of society that were inhumane or dysfunctional, or discriminatory. Presidents like LBJ, FDR and others addressed problems by using our tax dollars or funds removed directly from our paychecks, to offer benefits to groups who needed a lift so that they wouldn't be a burden on our society.

Recently the taxes to pay for these benefits are seen as a burden on we the people. This is not occurring because we no longer need these programs. Citizen anger was ginned up by a party that wanted smaller government and lower taxes. The richest Americans have told middle-class Americans that their tax dollars are being used to support "deadbeats" who can't, don't, or won't work.

They were told that the government was buying cars for immigrants, paying for their housing and their healthcare. There may have been some truth to these oft-repeated pronouncements because immigrants may need startup funding to be able to contribute as workers, at least when they first arrive, but immigrants are not being supported indefinitely.

The part that got left out of the propaganda was the part about immigrants creating a pool of low-wage workers and savvy entrepreneurs who contribute to our comforts as a society. If the government denies that climate change can be fixed by human efforts, then one of the most important contributing factors to increased immigration is discounted.

By buying into arguments drummed into our heads by extreme right wingers, we stand to lose benefits that we the people rely on to stay afloat.

We could lose Social Security for our seniors. How will they live then? Right-wingers suggest that we recreate extended families to care for both young and old without acknowledging that a lack of jobs has forced many children to seek employment miles away from their parents.

We could lose Medicaid, which also covers seriously ill seniors and the disabled. Who will provide for them? Will everything be solved by GoFundMe? We were once willing to give tax dollars to tackle these special needs of our loved ones. We also could lose Medicare, which provides some, although not enough, help with our own healthcare and the care of our children.

We could lose safety net services such unemployment insurance, food stamps, and support for single parents. Even two-parent families sometimes need assistance. Through the actions of DOGE we fear that all government supports will disappear.

Because these MAGA folks hate labor unions workers will lose all the protections they won for their right to their own free time, their pay, their safety, and a childhood free from laboring while pursuing an education.

Ironically, we keep learning that these billionaires and millionaires who are telling American citizens what we do and don't need to spend our money on are often not even paying taxes at all.

Our benefits were not just designed to help those in need. The programs were passed to keep our society as livable as possible.

Losing Our Justice System

When our government denies the power of the courts to provide us with the rule of law, when the only law is what one person says is the law, then eventually there will be authoritarianism and even anarchy.

When this same person controls the military and the police respond to all his demands we don't have anarchy, we have oppression.

It's hard to imagine why would give up our democracy for this.

We may not have all been truly equal before the law, but at least there was the hope that eventually we would get there. Racism had been terribly persistent because as Isabel Wilkerson recorded in her book Caste, societies seem to love scapegoats and if there is a group with a difference, such as skin color, which makes it easy to separate the group from the herd, there will be bigotry. (As if skin color defines our differences at all.)

Losing Transparency

If we felt that our government was keeping secrets and that not all those pieces of information necessarily needed to be secret, we will find that there is even more secrecy now. We have no functioning Congress. If your district or state elected a Democrat to represent you, they currently have no voice. (Although they still need to be there.)

Some decisions are coming right out of Trump's head in his Executive Orders. Some decisions, if you can call random acts decisions, are coming from DOGE in response to the directions offered in Project 2025, a Republicans-only project.

Congress ceremonially owns the purse strings, but they no longer control budget realities, which are dictated by the President. Without control of the purse strings, Congress controls nothing.

The firing of public servants seems to be random and against constitutional frameworks.

The cuts to agencies bear no relation to the services they provide.

Is the IRS being attacked because Republicans didn't like being exposed for violating their 501c status? Or are we making our federal government so small that there will be no taxes. If we continue to pay our taxes as services disappear, will our taxes be cut accordingly or will our money simply be grabbed by wealthy oligarchs.

People without security checks are accessing all our personal data. A President seeking random or targeted retribution who has long sought lists of citizens for pogroms (or we aren't sure what purpose) is hardly the person we want to unlock all that data. (Yes, we are properly frightened now that we have seen that horrific El Salvador prison operation and the dehumanizing drama that preceded it.)

Taking our personal data adds to the atmosphere of fear and dictatorial control. It takes away our participation in our own governance/democracy.

Our Pride

We are America - the United States of America. We took our place among the world's nations seriously. We understood our blessings, our freedoms, our quest for equal rights, even our affluence. We accepted that our blessings might require us to be compassionate, to share the products of our research, our educational advantages, our way of life with people who were poorer, or oppressed.

Now we are choosing to join the oppressed. We offered hope to so many. Now we will join the hopeless. We will give up our hegemony rather than share it in a multipolar world. We will isolate and fleece our allies because the alliances we once thought of as protection from war and destruction, we are now supposed to think of as dens of thieves.

Our Allies and Our Soul

Accepting this administration or regime (whatever) means that we trade in our old and trusted allies. We had our differences but for the most part we cooperated, and we all prospered. We have traded a supportive structure for questionable alliances with authoritarian regimes that we compete with for wealth, allies, and natural resources; regimes that are antagonistic and that we may be betrayed by.

We are choosing allies that reflect new values, transactional values. I will only trade with you if trade between our two nations is balanced. I will pass tariffs to make sure that we get our fair share even if it leads to anger and trade wars - or real wars. We will no longer help feed the hungry or give medical assistance to less blessed nations. We think we are preventing some nations from making strides on their own behalf. We don't believe that some of the poorest nations on earth are made poorer by climate changes. We seem to believe that if people can't take care of themselves, then, oh well, they will die. We seem to forget that everything in this life is interconnected and that woes we ignore in one corner of the globe could very well affect our corner of the globe given time.

We are embracing the meanest leaders on the planet to fulfill the adage; keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. We are embracing the rules of the mafia. We are becoming a fascist state, and many Americans seem to embrace this as a kind of "tough love." Have we been bad? Do we need to be punished? Does a nation have a soul? If we did, we are losing it now and it feels awful. We need our democracy back to save our immortal souls, or if we don't believe in transmigrating souls, then just to give us back the ease of mind we once had, the agreement that we would at least try to make humans humane.

We the people no longer have a government. Government is cutting us loose to sink or swim on our own. There is no US in USA. Now we are simply America (or Amerika).

Mariana Enriquez wrote Things We Lost in the Fire so she inspired my title. Thank you Mariana.

Thanks to my followers and subscribers. I appreciate you all. I know we stand together in these challenging times.