By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
McALLEN, Texas |...We're there, there at the old wooden bridge to something else. Who and how many will cross to the other side? More than a few Americans are asking that very question as our political world explodes. Shards of a country cracked wide open fly across the land.
Will it be a president or a king?
Our 2024 presidential election will soon tell the tale, but, kids, the miles-long rollercoaster has left the loading zone. Buckle up! The time for decisions is here and how we answer a few questions will tell us whether we go and where we will go. Already, the clouds turn dark, the evenings halt at going into the dead of night, the sun musters itself for another day.
I'm of the opinion that America will never be our Old America after this hoedown.
Why would anyone think that they could upend more than 200 years of believing in something so defined by the country's fathers, namely that, here, from sea to shining sea, no one is above the law. Excuse me while I get pissed, while I reach for my alcohol drink, while I down it in anger.
Republican candidate Donald J. Trump cares only about himself. That we have seen and heard for eight long and turbulent years. No mystery in that guy. Off his odd four-year term as president from 2016 to 2020 we got more than enough evidence of his aims and weaknesses. Now, he seeks the same office again out of desperation.
Four cases of wrongdoing, one conviction by a jury, three trials to go, some 50 additional charges to resolve. Any other defendant would have long been gone down the sewer pipe of needed justice. Trump endures, backed by millions of so-called MAGA cultists who see an entirely different candidate, one they say will save the country from internal destruction.
They want immigrants from Norway, those with white skin. We're not getting those; we're getting the darker ones who come and do work ever-bitching MAGA types would never do. Would a Trump presidency rid us of the Black-dominated National Basketball Association?
The NFL? Professional boxing? Interracial marriages? They're already dealing with diversity in the workplace and doing it with a sharp axe.
Back then, in the late-1700s, Poor John Adams easily imagined that American revolutionaries were founding a government of laws, not of men. But we now know that Trump’s ideal is a government not even of men, but of a man - his own unprecedented and astonishing self.
The hallowed Constitution will keep getting reviewed. That ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court last week to do with presidential "immunity" is a blow at its concept. Laws are for the many but not the few. The Court opened up a can of beans, dealing good news to Trump, who claimed absolute immunity for his actions as president, and bad news for federal prosecutors armed with so much evidence that to say they have a mountain of it is to downplay the amount.
Many of us in this star-crossed country have looked the other way every time a new angle to our freedom is thrown in our faces, as they did with this latest High Court's surprise ruling and with a litany of legal moves that only delay true justice.
Donald Trump is the luckiest American ever.
He remains above the law...
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