Words are powerful. But did you know they are powerful enough to call things into being? If you say something often enough and long enough, it enters into reality. If you say “The election was stolen” a sufficient number of times, then just like the spell AbraCadabra, it materializes in the real world like a rabbit pulled from a hat. Suddenly, just like magic, it appears to be true.
Maybe you’re tired of all the election talk and would rather leave the last four years of accusations, misinformation, name calling and contention behind, but the way everything ended still leaves some big questions about “what is.”
Is there more than one reality? If reality is like a road, are you and I traveling on different ones? Are the Conservative and Liberal roads so far apart that we can’t even see one another from our car windows? I always thought reality was objective, empirical. That we all saw and read the same road signs and traveled together, even if we were heading in different directions. I thought everyone acknowledged that reality was one road.
Surely in this shared reality, votes actually exist; they can be verified and counted. In reality, are there not procedures in place to check the validity of mail-in ballots, otherwise why would we have them? Aren’t there means by which these ballots can be proven, traced back to the person who mailed it in, his or her vote confirmed? Yes, in fact, in Georgia they “cured” the mail-in and absentee ballots, meaning volunteers followed up, made phone calls or knocked on doors to ensure that the people who sent in the vote were real and to establish that the correct vote was recorded.
Of course there are different ways to interpret reality, but that’s just more than one interpretation, not more than one reality. We don’t live in separate realities, only one reality where we have separate opinions. Sometimes we’re unable to reconcile those opinions, but that doesn’t mean the reality has changed. It is still there.
Part of our reality is an understood social contract, which contains laws that Congress makes and that police enforce. We may not always like or agree with those laws, and that’s why there are procedures in place for changing them. But we need the social contract to keep society running smoothly. When individualism goes awry, when too many people think they know what is best and that they needn’t abide by the social contract, then we shoot off in all directions, like planets no longer held in place by gravitational pull. We rocket into chaos. The social contract is the gravity that keeps society running smoothly, like planets in their orbits.
The social contract legitimizes government, composed of civil servants who make sure that our food is safe, that the air we breathe is clean, that roads are maintained, that law breakers feel the consequences, that social security upholds the most vulnerable.
Some think that government is the “deep state,” a cabal of anonymous but powerful people who make decisions in secret, behind closed doors. Who are these influential but unknown people? Are they elected officials? Are they government employees? Are they oligarchs, like the Koch brothers and Harold Hamm? Is the Left or the Right the deep state? Is it the news media, fake or otherwise? Is it the military-industrial complex? (But wait, how can that be when the POTUS is in charge of the military?)
Trump constantly referred to and blamed the deep state for anything that didn’t go his way: it was the deep state who was investigating his ties with Russia; it was the deep state making him look bad by delaying the COVID vaccine. By playing the victim yet being deliberately vague, he planted seeds of paranoia in the minds of many, and paranoia breeds conspiracy theories. The deep state can be anyone’s scapegoat because, like the coronavirus, it’s an invisible enemy. The deep state seeks to accomplish the goals of only a privileged few, the thinking goes, and therefore hinders the will of the people. Thus, the deep state is the enemy of democracy.
But it’s too easy to blame others for our own problems.
Americans are like exasperated toddlers who blame the tricycle they’re riding for where they’ve ended up. Forget the deep state; it is we who are steering. Don’t throw the tricycle in the ditch if you don’t like where it’s taking you. Instead, work to change your destination.
And for god’s sake, let’s all admit that we’re driving on the same road.