The Republicans Are Clinging Frantically to Power - Joy-Ann Reid
The GOP is desperately seeking to build a wall around its power, fearing its imminent erosion as a host of forces—demographic, cultural, and political—come barreling its way.
JOY-ANN REID
03.30.18 5:42 PM ET
The Republican Party is building a wall. Not the one Donald Trump promised his supporters Mexico would pay for (and then American taxpayers would pay and now, apparently, the U.S. military). The GOP is desperately seeking to build a wall around its power, fearing its imminent erosion as a host of forces—demographic, cultural, and political—come barreling its way.
Last week’s historic March for Our Lives was a watershed moment. For more than four hours on a Saturday afternoon, the nation’s gaze was fixed on a group of teenaged heroes and heroines, led by the iconic girl from Parkland, Florida: 18-year-old, Cuban-American, bisexual, head-shaven and powerful Emma Gonzales, who literally stunned a nation with 6 minutes and 20 seconds of remembrance and tear-stained silence. The Parkland students are becoming household names. Cameron Kasky, David Hogg, Delaney Tarr, Ryan Deitsch, Jaclyn Corin, Sarah Chadwick, Aalayah Eastmond and their classmates have entered the public consciousness in incredibly personal ways. They have shown great skill in snatching wigs, careers, and advertisers when attacked. And as they have fearlessly swept aside the tired American stasis on gun reform they have brought with them an army of fellow young activists from around the country: Zion Kelly, who spoke so movingly of losing his twin brother Zaire to gun violence right there in the nation’s capital; Naomi Wadler, the tiny girl with the fierce, curly mane who spoke for women of color whose tragedies rarely make the front pages, and Yolanda Renee King, the 9-year-old sole grandchild of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who spoke of her dream of a gun-free world and proved that there is still magic and charisma in that epic surname.
By taking the power of their suffering, and frankly of their young, affluent, articulate whiteness, and metastasizing it to youth of color from urban centers and to the oldest of the Sandy Hook kids, some now in high school and three of whom spoke at the rally, and to Black Lives Matter (who amazingly, are now their elders), the Parkland kids are doing what white college students in the 1960s did for SNCC when they answered Bob Moses’ call and forced the media and the world to refocus its attention on civil rights by getting on those buses to face firebombing and murder with black students and local activists; and what white ministers did when they answered Dr. King and John Lewis’ call to face the dogs and batons of white sheriffs alongside black marchers on the Edmund Pettus bridge. In so doing, these young activists are shaking the foundations of America’s gun culture, sending the right wing into a full-fledged panic, and bringing the NRA to its knees.
The day after millions of Americans, mostly young but also middle aged and old marched against gun violence, Remington, the company that manufactures the AR-15 death machine preferred by mass shooters, filed for bankruptcy, fleeing to the rescue of banks, many of whom are too shamefaced to publicly comment on their association with the gun-maker.
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with North Korea. Both our local Air Force base and Army post are in breath-holding mode.
Almost makes me wish I knew how to pray, because the weak-assed cowardly Congress will do nothing. And the ass kissers surrounding sTrumpet will egg it on - especially those whose billion dollar businesses would make a - hah- killing.
