“The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph” – Thomas Paine

So I guess the moment has come.

It’s time for America to confront its ghosts and demons and decide if what we want is a country that is great, or if we want a country confronted by angry white people who wish to stay on the top of their mountains and keep everybody down below.

It’s as clear a decision as a country can make. It’s a moral issue now; there is no ambiguity, at least for me. I can’t find two sides any longer, only one.

Whatever is my right as a citizen is also the right of every other, and it becomes my duty, wrote Paine, to guarantee as well as to possess.

Do we want to be led by people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and her greatest fan, Donald Trump, and the goons who trashed our capitol, or the cowardly Republicans, or do we wish to fulfill our promise, once and for all, and be a country for all people, regardless of their color or place of birth?

It’s time to hear the call or run and hide, to make our country great or hide behind our computers. Facebook is not  a place of courage or honor. This is not a conflict that will be won or lost on Twitter, believe me, but out all over the country,  wherever people live and vote.

Do we want to be a great country or pretends to be? In one way, it’s the chance of a lifetime. I’m in.

Because that’s what it’s about, that’s what it’s always been about.  White people wanting to stay on top, all the other colors of the world knocking on the door to come in.

All this poison and pretense and lying and rage, coming to a boil, right out in the open where we can see it.

I am confident that our national fate will not be a small-minded bigoted nation full of selfish whining and resentment. Still, the country our founders hoped we would become, a melting pot where all kinds of people can come together and live in peace and opportunity and quarrel all today but come together as one every night.

I see and sympathize with rural people’s plight, but this is not their way back, their path out of trouble. The Republican Party is destroying itself this week, opening the way for something different and something better.

That will come; we’ve come way too far to end in this way.

I think that’s the country we will choose to be, the generous and compassionate one, but just as it has always been a fight, it is a fight now and will be one for a while.

We got to take a deep breath in November, time to awaken once more.

I said just two weeks ago that I would step away from politics, but that was before the Republican Party collapsed and bowed to Donald Trump and has embraced and enabled his leadership, white nationalism, and extremism.

There is no chance of him being convicted of his impeachment; there is every chance of him and his For Trump, the tide ebbs and blows, and one day it will just wash him away.

He and his Army of enablers will be defeated and rejected repeatedly. Because what they want is no longer possible, can no longer work. 80 million people cannot be kept in captivity by scheming bureaucrats and corrupt politicians. It is just not possible.

America is not a nation of extremists, but of people who seek the middle. The Republic Party made the wrong choice – again. And this time, a fatal choice.

The news has rushed right past me and my intentions. We have to decide if we will be a diverse nation or a white nation, ruled by bigots and white nationalists, the ultimate manifestation of racism.

I can hardly believe I’m writing that. Until recently, I never thought it could be true that the lines could be drawn so quickly that we are in another civil war, or maybe the same one.

But I’m not blind, and I’m not deaf. And I’m not afraid. The truth is my faith, and I will stand or fall on it.

All over the country, Republican leaders censure people who oppose Trump, expelling and rejecting those who disagree with his policies, who told the truth about the November elections.

They are turning the very soul of democracy over on its back.

This is the deal with the devil, writ large.

After the capitol assault, it appeared Trump had finally worn out his welcome and left us in peace, but that gave the Republican Party a lot more credit than was warranted.

Trump is the Republican Party; there is no longer any space between him.

I need to be clear, and perhaps everyone needs to be clear about what is happening.

Just several weeks after a bloody insurrection that killed five people and nearly killed some legislators, Republican leaders in Congress and elsewhere are backing off their condemnations of the Presidents’ outrageous behavior and embracing him again.

They are cowards and hypocrites, even in the face of treason.

We’ve come so far from the courage and honesty of some of the founders of our country, one has to ask if we are still worth a democracy that is free and decent and open to different points of view.

They call the Democrats and their opponents radical every day, but it now quite clear who the radicals are and what they stand for – they are the party of Donald Trump and QAanon, the liars and racists and haters.

This week, the Republican Leaders of the House of Representatives gave the very hateful U.S. Rep Marjorie  Taylor Greene a promotion, they promoted her to the House Education Committee.

CNN also found a 2019 video that shows Greene harassing two survivors of the Parkland, Fla. shooting in front of the U.S. Capitol.

She’d make a great holocaust denier.

We’ve entered new territory. The fight to keep our democracy did not end with Donald Trump’s defeat, as many people hoped. In a way, it has just begun.

You probably know about her; she thinks the Parkland shooting was a hoax and suggests that Democratic leaders be hung. We’ve just sailed over the top. She is both racist and anti-semitic.

This is nothing less than civil war 2.0; we can’t put a nicer or softer label to it. Up to now, it was bloodless. The attack on the capitol ended that.

It is time for me to accept what is happening.

The first civil war, bloodier than any other, was left unfinished by Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Many white nationalist elements in the South refused to accept black Americans’ emancipation and equality. They still don’t.

Clearly, many still wish to fight that war and turn that election around. The conflict we all face now is becoming etched in stone: white nationalism versus a diverse and multi-cultural America, urban versus rural, red versus blue, left versus white.

So much of Trumpism is about restricting free and fair voting, ending immigration, labeling African-Americans as thieves and rioters, and blaming the poor for being poor. Every other word of the Republican’s mouth is “radical.”

What a smokescreen to hide who they are and what they have become – a party of quislings and opportunists and slavering followers.

If you take the “radical” away, they stand for nothing and have nothing to offer.

The pandemic’s awful death toll should have crippled the Republican Party and our President, who failed to confront it at every turn.

Instead, it simply strengthened them because they are good at propaganda and because most of the virus – those who die are overwhelmingly black, brown,  yellow, and old.

No wonder President Trump and the Republican Party didn’t care about them; they are mostly Democratic voters.

So the dimensions of the new civil war, or perhaps more accurately, a continuation of it, stand out when the fog clears.

The Republican Party is now officially a White Nationalist Party, joining white nationalists’ struggle to keep America white and remain dominated by white men and women.

What a disaster for the rural people.

Trump might control most Republican voters, but he still lost the election, and suburban, moderate, and independent voters will abandon this party in even greater numbers than they already have.

I expect now that disaffected conservatives and traditional Republicans will move quickly to fund and establish a new kind of political party, a conservative but more moderate party than the Republican Party has become.

That is long overdue and could transform our politics overnight.

I would guess America will drift towards a parliamentary government system, where several or more political parties form alliances with one another and radically change our two-party political system, which is now almost completely dysfunctional.

Our two-party system is exhausted and bankrupt; it no longer works.

The Democrats need a new, articulate and gifted communicator to point out that the Republican Party no longer exists in its traditional form and has lost its soul and honor.

It is Trump’s party and only Trump, no longer a conservative party with distinct values. The party’s decades-old flirtation with right-wing extremists has come to a boil; their leaders devoured or on the run.

People of honor can quit it or leave it, and many will go or be pushed out. For the rest of us, this is a time to make sure we register to vote, pay attention, save up some money for political donations, run for office if possible, and dig in. Fear and argument accomplish little or nothing, just as Stacey Abrams.

2020 has shown me that most Americans will not sit still for the destruction of our Democracy, even if a major political party enables and supports that very thing.

This is a serious thing, but not apocalyptic. As in the first war, the emerging and diverse America is powerful, with our biggest and wealthiest cities, many of our largest corporations, and vast cultural and financial resources.

The idea stands. Be strong and stay calm.

Trumpism is a powerful element in America, but it is not the most powerful element that still belongs to the people, as we learned this year.

Anything is possible.

I am just another citizen; no label fits me except wanted to live in a free, just, and compassionate world that cares for the needy and vulnerable.

If that makes me a radical, I’m in.

But the lines have been drawn now; this is a civil war between white, mostly rural Americans and almost everyone else in the world.

We learned quite a bit in 2020. I suspect most of us are ready.

Stay alert, if you’re worried, stay off of Twitter and go out and join something useful.

Don’t spend your precious time arguing or worrying.

Try to do some good every day. This is not the way it ends for this great mess of a dream.

Paine gets the last word: “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.”