We have entered the Age of Aquarius: Denial is no longer an option

 

I’m advocating for equality, so I’m against denial in all its forms. I’m also an advocate for solutions, and any problem-solver knows denial will kill any chance you have of solving any problem. In fact, denial may be the biggest single source of all our problems. Whether we’re talking about climate change, medicine or politics, denial is a killer. Here are just a few examples.

Between 1946 and 1985 our government worked to remove the life-threatening uranium in mines throughout the Navajo Nation. Obama’s administration even put a moratorium on uranium mining due to the documented health hazards it creates. And yet, just this year the Trump administration has decided to resume uranium production. This headline says it all:

Trump is using a pandemic to weaken environmental law. First victim: The Grand Canyon

Opinion: There is no such thing as a ‘safe’ uranium mine. Yet a new report recommends excluding these mines from public review and comment.

Just leave the information out of the report, right? Problem solved.

Lest you think this is a Trump phenomenon, here’s an example from the way way back machine.

Before Pasteur discovered germs, a Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis discovered a connection between increased death rates of mothers whose babies were delivered by surgeons vs. nurses. He noticed that nurses were not exposed to the same conditions as surgeons, who were typically covered in blood and debris from whatever procedure or autopsy they were performing when they were called to deliver a child.

Those men carried disease to these hopeful mothers and were killing them in unprecedented numbers even though nobody understood how.

When Dr. Semmelweis tested his theory by having the docs wash their hands before delivering babies, the death rates dropped immediately and dramatically. But instead of maintaining that practice, the other doctors thought it would make them look bad if they changed that one thing. They feared it would send the message that they were indeed responsible for the deaths of so many women. So, they stopped the experiment, and the death rates went back up.

The genius who figured it out was shunned, treated as a pariah, and died in a mental institution 18 years later. This is not a one-off. For centuries people have agreed to lie for each other to maintain their positions of power.

When Trump tried to do business in Australia in the late ‘80s, his “known ties to the Mafia” were cited as the reason he was not allowed to set up a business there. If the Aussies figured it out in 1986, why didn’t the Republican Party know this in 2016? Denial.

If any member of Congress failed to know the truth about the Republican candidate they voted for, they are guilty of enabling the destruction of our democracy.

Every supporter who decided to support this incompetent and mentally ill candidate so they could get a little of what they wanted from him is guilty. It doesn’t matter if they finally saw the light. What matters is that when it did matter, they denied reality to get what they wanted.

John Bolton had the audacity to say it was the Democrats who were at fault for the failure of the impeachment the Dems attempted in 2020. He cites their narrow focus on Ukraine; he says Trump did similar things in Turkey and China, and it’s all the Dems fault for not adding that to the impeachment charges. He knew of Trump’s guilt, he knew more than the Dems knew, yet he withheld that information, willingly. He denied us the truth as he knew it, so he would not have to oppose the Republican Party’s wishes. He caved.

The only thing I’m aware of that might have caused Republicans to find Trump guilty would have been the sworn testimony of Robert Bolton. Yet he used the excuse of a technicality to avoid testifying—he said he would only testify if the Senate were to subpoena him. But he knew they wouldn’t.

Wouldn’t a patriot have volunteered this information to protect our country? I think so. I think Bolton is a traitor. And his colleagues are no better. All of them are deniers, pretending they don’t know what they know, so they don’t have to do what they don’t want to do.

Several days ago, just after the assault on the Capitol, Colin Powell was interviewed on CNN and said he wouldn’t recommend another impeachment of Trump. “It would take too long; it would be a distraction,” says Colin Powell, former Secretary of Defense and a retired Four-star General.  

I would like to correct him. A distraction is not what facing reality and acting appropriately should be called. We should not refer to doing the right thing as a “distraction” just because it’s hard and might not have the desired effect.

Who gave Congress permission to watch this unfold rather than save us from this monster in the White House? Where is the public service they are so proud of now? If nothing else, impeach him so he can’t run again. Is that not worth the trouble either, Colin Powell?

It appears Republican leadership (one exception: Mitt Romney) has no capacity for understanding the significance of allowing the natural consequences of one’s actions to be felt. If their children were breaking windows and destroying their neighbor’s furniture, do you think they would say “Gee, we don’t have time to punish them, let’s be nice and hope they stop.”  

Of all the Republicans in Congress, it seems that only Mitt Romney has consistently been willing to face reality. Only Mitt Romney is willing to admit that “the best way we can show respect for the voters who were upset is by telling them the truth…President-elect (Joe) Biden won this election. President Trump lost.”

Even Jeff Flake, who left office and is no longer part of the Republican machine says simply, “I just want Trump to go away.” That’s not how this works.

Even after the Capitol riot, which has left five dead so far, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Jim Jordan, and others keep feeding the Big Lie. (If that term seems vaguely familiar, it’s because it was first used to describe Hitler’s propaganda machine.) If you still think, “It can’t happen here,” you’re wrong. It’s happening here now.

In the words of Cori Bush, from her January 9^th Op Ed in the Washington Post:

Many have said that what transpired on Wednesday was not America. They are wrong. This is the America that Black people know. To declare that this is not America is to deny the reality that Republican members of the U.S. House and Senate incited this coup by treasonously working to overturn the results of the presidential election. It’s to deny the fact that one of my senators, Josh Hawley, went out of his way to salute the white supremacists before their attempted coup. It’s to deny that he appropriated the sign of Black power, the raised fist, into a white-supremacist salute — a fist he has never raised at a march for Black lives because he has never shown up to one. It’s to deny that what my Republican colleagues call “fraud” actually refers to the valid votes of Black, brown and Indigenous voters across this country who, in the midst of a pandemic that disproportionately kills us, overcame voter suppression in all of its forms to deliver an election victory for Joe Biden and Kamala D. Harris.

Thankfully, two men capable of facing reality are about to join the Senate: Rev. Raphael Warnock and David Ossoff. With Kamala Harris holding the deciding vote in case of a party line fight, we have a chance to finally make progress. But it won’t happen automatically.

It will be imperative that going forward we elect people to lead us in Congress who accept reality rather than relying on denial; we need people who will proactively move toward solutions rather than waiting for things to improve on their own; we need people who will work actively to protect the people of this country from enemies both foreign and domestic.

This is still America. We still get to choose. But we need to choose a lot more wisely going forward. And we need to accept the fact that denial is no longer an option. Because we now know, unequivocally, that what you don’t know can kill you.

NOTE: Since I wrote this, Colin Powell has declared himself no longer a Republican and a handful of other Republicans have spoken out more vehemently against the violence. Unfortunately, the Republican leadership didn’t have the foresight to see this horror coming or the courage to take a stand before the violence occurred.