General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I'll be blunt. Democrats help "normalize" Trump if we wait for an election to hold him accountable [View all]Tom Rinaldo
(22,911 posts)Resistance to Trump online and on the streets has swelled from the moment he was inaugurated, and the midterm elections featured a massive turn out by Democrats. We will get to vote for President again in 2020. In the mean time, in the mid terms, we elected a Democratic House to represent our interests. It is my view that when grave impeachable offenses occur there is a constitutional obligation for impeachment hearings to be launched in Congress, and a failure to do that (something which is clearly within the powers of the House to initiate, and to initiate now) contributes in some degree to the normalization of those impeachable offenses.
The options that the public now directly has are limited. And it is harsh to call even the non voting public directly complicit in the evil that some elected officials commit. My focus in this OP was on Democrats in the House of Representatives and the options that they currently have to take actions.
My first reaction, many years ago, to seeing a person lying homeless on a city street was akin to horror. I am no more responsible now for homelessness than I was then, and I am just as saddened by it and the policies and priorities that allow it to exist as I was then. But I am no longer as visibly viscerally shocked by the sight of it as I was back then. When an outrage occurs, and it keeps occurring, and life goes on around it without that outrage manifesting in the strongest possible ways, eventually what caused that outrage to an extent gets incorporated into our perception of what predictably occurs and is not adamantly pushed back against when it does.
You wrote a very thoughtful reply. Thank you. Realty is far more complex than any blog post, mine included, can adequately address in several paragraphs, and yes words do get used as simplified short hand for concepts that are not really so easily pinned down.