"Sedition - crime against the state. Though sedition may have the same ultimate effect as treason, it is generally limited to the offense of organizing or encouraging opposition to government in a manner (such as in speech or writing) that falls short of the more dangerous offenses constituting treason."
I woke up today to the sound of our cat leaping at the door handle, followed shortly by Rob's welcome announcement (from his early-morning reading of the I-Pad) that Raphael Warnock had won his Senate run-off race in Georgia and that Jon Ossoff leads David Perdue in the other race. If both seats go to the Democrats, President-elect Biden and his administration will have a chance to get more done, right the wrongs of the Trump administration and bail out our sinking ship of democracy.
The headlines have made me so nauseous recently that my screen time went down 28% last week; I was avoiding the news. Twelve Republican senators and a handful of House Republicans plan to object to the results of the 2020 election in a floor hearing today. This is futile as the results have been certified by the Electoral College and Congress has no authority over these results. None. The members of Congress who protest the will of the American people and the process outlined in the Constitution are seditious and they should lose their jobs for words and actions opposing the legitimately elected government. In effect, they are attempting to stage a coup.
These actions threaten our democracy. What occurs if no side is ever willing to lose an election? If every contest is protested by the losing side until we are at a continual stalemate the government will be inept and non-functioning (as it is now). Critics of modern parenting say that my generation has awarded too many participation prizes to its children, has raised a cadre of young people who are afraid too lose. This is what I see in the seditious words and proposed actions of certain elected Republican officials (though they are much older than the children of gen X), a childish and unrealistic resistance to the truth of loss, the sting of defeat.
Loss is a fact of life, as 350,000 families will tell you after they lost a family member to COVID. The death of a loved one far outweighs the pain of a lost election, and yet losses of life continue to mount as Trump loyalists - and the President himself - continue to throw temper tantrums and fixate on overturning reality. Our country dances perilously close to a cliff-face. If we waltz off the solid ground of reality into the thin air of Republicans' fantasies our form of government will crash and crumble.
We do have heroes emerging from the chaos. Brad Raffensperger, Georgia's Secretary of State, calmly rebuffed a hysterical and desperate President who begged him to "find the votes" to overturn that state's election of Joe Biden. We have Stacey Abrams, a voting rights activist and lawyer, who lead people of all colors in Georgia to the vote and fought back against voter suppression in that state. We have the voters of Georgia themselves, who turned out in record numbers for the Senate run-off races that are normally an afterthought. So many positive examples of leadership and representation, which show the tarnished and dishonorable actions of the few in an even brighter light.
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