Him and US

“I don’t speak because I have the power to speak; I speak because I don’t have the power to remain silent”

-Rabbi A.Y. Kook

What do Vladimir Putin, the first conviction related to  the January 6 insurrection and the state of American cities have to do with one another?  

Everything.

Let’s start with the awful war in Ukraine.  Why did Putrid Putin decide to invade Ukraine now?

The 21st Century Stalin looked around the world and saw that the liberal democracies of the West were in decline.  He viewed their leaders as bumbling cartoon characters and their nations as disunited and dispirited.   He saw polarized legislatures, unable to reach consensus, paralyzed by partisanship.

He saw a former President of the United States who thought NATO was the name of a trendy new restaurant that wasn’t paying enough rent and he saw a current President who couldn’t remember the name of any restaurant if he tried.

But Vlad the invader’s insidious war has united the West. 

Thanks to the unity of the democracies, heroic Ukraine has been holding on and rogue Russia has been slapped with economic sanctions that will send it spiraling out of the modern era.

Paraphrasing Samuel Clemens, reports of the death of democracy were greatly exaggerated.  

And that brings me to Guy Reffitt.

Reffitt is a Capitol insurrectionist, a member of the “Texas Three Percenters,” who was convicted this past week on all five of the felony charges he faced.  He’s now looking at twenty years in a Federal slammer.

What does his conviction have to do with the war in Ukraine?

When a jury of his peers unanimously convicted him, it proved that democracy lives.  The rule of law is not dead.  As horrific as the events of January 6 were, our values and institutions held. The people spoke loud and clear.  Did you hear them, Vladimir Putin?

Putin saw the invasion of the Capitol and he thought the USA was finished.  He thought he could invade another sovereign nation and our decrepit democracy would cower and fold like a cheap Soviet-era suit. He badly miscalculated.

Guy Refitt’s conviction should give us hope.  Plenty of hope is what we need.

In order for foreign no-good-niks and for our own citizens to believe that democracy works, they need to see it with their own eyes. 

What citizens of our cities are seeing right now is not the glorification of democracy but rather the desecration of democracy.  

Laws are ignored by the people. Laws aren’t enforced by our officeholders.  

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are in grave peril.

You know what’s going on.  You see it, you live it.  I don’t have to belabor the point.

If we can’t fix our urban areas, Putin’s perspective on western democracy will ultimately prevail.  Our leaders need to stop the partisanship and the bickering.  They need to bring safety to our streets.  They need to provide decent housing. They need to pull us out of our post-Covid malaise.  We need to be vaccinated, not by serum but by deeds against despair.

In 2016, the great American historian David McCullough spoke to members of Congress in the Capitol.  He said, “High achievement is nearly always a joint effort, as has been shown again and again in these halls when leaders of different parties, representatives from different constituencies and differing points of view, have been able, for the good of the country, to put those differences aside and work together.”

What we now see are legislators who act the opposite of what McCullough spoke about.  They argue, they obfuscate, they demean and they spurn compromise. They recoil from reconciliation. They are self-absorbed.  They’ve forgotten they work for the people they represent, the taxpayers who pay their salaries.

From high atop his all powerful perch, at the pinnacle of the Kremlin power structure, Putin saw U.S. cities and states drowning in violence,  homelessness and hatred.  He saw what we’re all seeing.  A total inability to unite to confront our perilous threats from within.  So he figured we would never be able to confront a pernicious threat from without.

Putin is the personification of cynicism and evil.  We rose up to confront his dastardly deeds and his war on the world order.  

Will we, can we, use our democratic defiance of a dictator as a springboard to unite and confront the battle to save our own cities?