Long time readers who’ve read my dissections of relayed mail from conservative friends are aware that I object to mail that engenders a distrust of our government.
I use the phrase “our government” with great particularity. All too often, in those emails, it’s the government. It seems so innocuous, doesn’t it, interchanging the two? Yet, in my opinion, there’s a major, if subtle, difference. One suggests the government is an alien, imposed force upon us; the other, it’s our government and we can change it if we can muster the arguments to do so.
When someone uses the convenient excuse that they have to have a gun to defend themselves from the government, someone should stand up and say,
Buster, you’ve got it wrong. It’s OUR GOVERNMENT, and if you feel like you need a gun to enforce your political opinion, then you don’t understand how the United States works.
So I was really pleased to see singer and artist Billy Porter express something similar in this interview:
Q: How do you think the country ended up here?
A: We, the people, have to be engaged. You know, it’s a really complicated landscape to take in. And so the more complicated you make it, the more people turn off. Voter suppression is not just slowing down the mail system. When you don’t think your vote matters that’s voter suppression. That’s the whole point — to create distrust of your government. And if you distrust and it’s just chaos then nobody knows what to do and then nobody does anything. This is a playbook, y’all. And this is coming from a singer and an actor who’s educated enough to know what y’all are doing. So my opinion actually does matter, and I won’t shut up. [WaPo]
Porter is someone who definitely has their head screwed on right.
