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Repealing a Strong Black Man’s Legacy

Sometimes you see evil and you try to convince yourself it’s something else.

You do your best not to ascribe motives to the offender, you run through all sorts of reasonable and sometimes even comically far-fetched possible justifications for what you’re seeing. You even attempt to convince your own eyes not to believe what is in plain sight.

You do all you can in fact, not to come to the conclusion that the people you’re sharing this planet with could actually be that vicious, that diabolical, that hateful—because to admit that would be to admit that this place is pretty jacked-up and that you’re actually terrified of your neighbor.

But eventually the evidence is so overwhelming, the commitment to contempt so sustained that you have no other recourse: you need to name the evil for what it is. 

Times like this are why we have such a word.
These days evil is having a Renaissance.
These days evil is having run of the house
These days evil is being legislated.

The Republican leadership in our country has spent the past four years trying to repeal the legacy of a strong, intelligent, popular black man—and they don’t seem to care how many Americans they drive to bankruptcy or despair, or how many they kill in the process. It simply doesn’t faze them. This appears to be about the political win regardless of the body count—just as long as they take down that one man. We are the collateral damage.

Week after week as they flail and in-fight and stumble frantically through failed annulments and fizzled partial rollbacks and new proposed dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, those of us watching can see what’s going on here: These men (mostly white) really want to erase Barack Obama. That’s the end game. If they can line their pockets on the way that would be a bonus, but they are making money hand over fist anyway right now. No, it all feels nauseatingly personal.

This isn’t about cutting taxpayer costs or caring for people in a more fiscally responsible and sustainable way. If that were the case, these men would have spent the last seven years preparing their own plan, instead of complaining and condemning, and then hastily cobbling together an 11th hour, Frankensteined “answer” that would take coverage from tens of millions of Americans, gut Medicaid, and essentially tell the poorest and sickest of this country to go die quietly somewhere.

That was their alternative solution to universal healthcare: widespread annihilation. People focused on retribution wouldn’t have an issue with such clear frightful irony and such terrible optics.

If these leaders were acting with any kind of decency and nobility, instead of perpetually burdening the political system and terrorizing the very citizenry they’re charged with serving, representing, and protecting—they’d be working with Democrats to alter the ACA, which though flawed, is a really sensible place to begin from. If their hearts were pure, they’d be attempting compromise for the common good, which is their primary calling. These Republicans aren’t just trying to reinvent the wheel, which would be reckless enough. They’re trying to toss out the wheel just before throwing sick people under the bus it was resting on.

Barack Obama left office as a well-regarded President who brokered a nonpartisan solution to healthcare that was saving millions of people’s lives—and keeping them from going bankrupt for being sick. Men like Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence, and Paul Ryan hate that. Their blood boils at such thoughts, and that seems to be the primary reason they are all-in on this madness. They’re not concerned with insurance company gluttony or the rampant waste in our hospitals or the fundamental flaws in our healthcare system—otherwise that is where they’d be spending their time and influence and resources. Instead they’re attempting to cancel care for millions of families with nothing as their backup plan—expecting us to trust that at some magical time in the future, their sense of compassion will overcome their contempt; a glorious day when they’ll grow hearts for people who don’t look like them.

Their conduct in these days, is in the very best case scenario, a vomit-inducing idolatry of party; a sickening sucking at the teat of wealth and power at the expense of millions of their brethren.

But at worst (and sadly more and more likely) is that this is simply legislated racism. It is an attempt by largely a group of white guys, to dismantle the legacy of a man, whose two most offensive traits as President were his competence and the color of his skin. I’d love there to be another answer, but that just feels like what’s happening here.

These desperate, unrelenting machinations to strip people of care speak to these people’s hearts. Their insistence on destroying instead of fixing the system already in place, is a referendum on what they value—and it isn’t life, as they are known to profess and preach. They aren’t burdened with helping sick people get well. They aren’t interested in making our healthcare system substantively better.

It seems like they just want Barack Obama’s name stripped from anything that enabled healing and helped people and secured history—and their commitment to erasing him is so complete and so myopic, that damaging lots of people is inconsequential. It’s incomprehensible callousness, and it’s seemingly become their Administration’s most pressing agenda.

Racism isn’t a charge to make haphazardly or suggest on a whim, and it’s a fairly horrible reality to contemplate on that level. I certainly wish it was something else, because this is the country I live in, call home, and love dearly. I so want to believe that our President and his Administration and these angry men possess no such prejudice—but that’s almost impossible because their actions won’t allow it.

Sometimes you see evil and you try to convince yourself it’s something else.

And sometimes evil makes such a strong, continual, air-tight case for itself—that you can only agree and weep over it all.

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