I am not celebrating today. I will celebrate when the current regime has been removed, and the US is back on track working toward the ideals set forth by the founders. I doubt we'll ever regain the place we used to have in the world going forward. We have shown the world that we are not a reliable ally. Our voting public can and has been seduced into abandoning our ideals in favor of the cruel, horrific assemblage we now have occupying the White House and running both chambers of Congress into the ground. I truly hope we can make a huge difference this November by restoring some sanity to Congress and putting the checks back in place to stop the madness of the current regime. More than that, I hope that once we restore that sanity to Congress that we put additional guardrails in place to prevent what has happened over the last ten years from ever happening again. No one party can have that much power. No one person can be above the law, not even (or especially) the president of the US. It's not what our founders envisioned or created. It's not what any country needs.

Democracy at its best is messy. It requires cooperation and compassion. It requires striving for the best solutions for the greater good. We used to have that in some respects. We have never achieved the lofty goals laid out in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, but we had made significant progress over the years. In the last ten years, we have reversed much of that progress, but we cannot forget what we were before this reactionary period. We must also never forget what is at stake for all of us. Together we can make a positive difference for our present and our future.