Healing a nation's wounds means taking away the knife

 

So Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has proposed secession in the United States in a tweet, calling for a "national divorce."

Last thing I knew, members of Congress swear an oath to uphold the Constitution, not divide the country up into "ours" and "the people we don't agree with." Seems to me, that strategy didn't work the last time it was tried. I read Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address (March 4, 1865) with my American Lit class yesterday, and we talked a little about how, when he called for national healing, there were those who clearly disagreed. Well, here we are again, it seems. To tear asunder an already fragile thing like our form of democracy is criminal (yeah, treason, that thing). But yet, we have elected people who would do just that, and are not afraid to shout it over and over again. 

Lincoln ended his speech with this famous passage:

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

I find it hard to feel as forgiving as Lincoln wanted, when I see people literally raising an insurrection in the Capitol and perpetrating such division in our communities. We have enough existential crises to deal with, and these people can't see beyond their own willfully ignorant privilege.

I sincerely doubt many of them could pass a high school civics class. 

Take care,

C