To the Editor,

Our collective shared democracy is under extreme stress by privileged bad actors.  The Constitution and Bill of Rights have always been an impediment to the gross selfishness and entitlement of supremacist oligarchs and others.  Total compliance of the manipulated, self-destructive true believers brought about the January 6 coup attempt.  

Since the 1980’s the twin pyramid schemes of trickle-down economics and trickle-down democracy have been accepted.  The culture wars began in earnest with redlining of public education, housing, and economic and social equality.  The anti-science, anti-intellectual fear mongering had and still has a profound debilitating effect on our “shared” democracy.  Political rhetoric has degenerated into a grievance, false equivalency, what-aboutism, plantation group think and conspiracy-laden form of phony populism.

The conservative movement has reduced reality and critical thinking to its lowest common denominator based on peer assessment and pressure.  Minorities, Democrats, independent thinkers and a few who don’t think at all are not your enemies. We all have a common purpose and that is the advancement of our children’s futures. In other words, my friends, it is not a sin to learn how to learn, to denounce bigotry and misogyny or to stand up for equality, including your own. Voter suppression, repetition of hateful language and actions will never make your lives better. Just look at what has happened to us: the propogandists are all in with the January 6 coup attempt and are adding gasoline and gun powder to the supremacist hostile takeover.  It’s too bad the Republican leadership doesn’t have the cojones to tell the truth!

The condominium collapse in Florida is the perfect metaphor for our election situation.  The undermining of the foundation and structural supports caused a failure of the integrity of the building.  So too, the undermining of our nation’s institutions: the electoral process, the judiciary, the military and other democratic structures.  Trump’s corrosive saltwater rhetoric and criminal behavior has clearly exposed their weaknesses.  Our political savior is a collective shared national code of conduct; and that is the Constitution and Bill of Rights.  Every legitimate Republican that has taken his or her oath of office seriously abides by that.  Our national democratic institutions are being undermined by “Tea Party’ extremists (Vanilla Isis), thus requiring a full and complete investigation, complete with generous amounts of disinfectant and accountability. Perhaps our Republican senators should start looking forward through the windshield at the future of our children, instead of being terrified of their creations in the rear-view mirror.

Leland Jenson,

Detroit Lakes