The Proper Response When Half of the Country Has Lost Its Mind

I cared for my father, who had long been a brilliant scientist making discoveries of world-renown, for the last few years of his life, when he suffered from vascular dementia.

The going was difficult.  The territory was steep.  The footing was perilous.

But I learned many things on that journey, and one of them was how to love someone who has lost his frame of reference, his identity, his sanity.

What are the ways to recognize the dignity of the human spirit in the midst of such astonishing loss?

With steadfast generosity, with eternal kindness, with a ready sense of humor, with a profound faith, and with a celebration of the small gifts present in the moment at hand.

If one manages to extend love in these ways to the most vulnerable among us, the rewards are profound, lasting, and transformative.

Now, it appears I am going to have the opportunity to love my older son in the same way -- a young man with an untreated pituitary tumor, which is robbing him of his kindness, his gentle wisdom, his loyalty, his honesty -- and all the myriad qualities that have made him himself for these last thirty years.

Who is responsible for this unthinkable loss?  Christopher Wray?  Tom Lyons?  Brandan Pesa?  All of these men, certainly.

The far right, within the FBI and elsewhere, desires to claim provenance over who among law-abiding Americans will live and who among law-abiding Americans will die.

The far right wishes to claim control over who among law-abiding Americans is entitled to good health and who among law-abiding Americans must live in pain, disease, and neglect.

The far right wishes to decide who among law-abiding Americans is entitled to access medical care and who among law-abiding Americans is to be denied.

And, more than this, the far right wishes to exert totalitarian control over the thoughts of law-abiding Americans -- over their political beliefs, over their careers, over their families, over their finances, over their elections, over their faith.

Beyond this, the far right wishes to inflame and sustain certain fears and hatreds within Americans that will serve to keep us divided and in conflict, thereby consolidating its hold on power for the foreseeable future.

A substantive portion of the country is listening to the narrative of the far right with seriousness, attention, and belief.

How can we respond when half the country has lost its commitment to the civil liberties and human rights that have rendered the American experiment a luminous endeavor toward the freedom of mankind for these last two hundred and forty-seven years?

With steadfast generosity, with eternal kindness, with a ready sense of humor, with a profound faith, and with a celebration of the small gifts present in the moment at hand.

Yet, it is also necessary to respond with limits.

A young man engaged in knowingly deceitful statements to law enforcement is not going to be taking a trip to Yellowstone -- no matter why he thinks those falsehoods may be justified.

Similarly, the liars within the far right can no longer hold positions of trust in our society, no matter why they believed those lies made sense at the time.

In this battle for the soul of our nation, those who love democracy must also love truth, for the one cannot endure without the other -- cherished and upheld by a worthy electorate.

Those who treat the facts as malleable, ethics as situational, or the will of mankind as an instrument to be wielded toward the power of an unelected few must be reacquainted with the rule of law.

Those on the far right who have forgotten respect for honesty must relearn it, or grasp it for the first time.

No American citizen is obligated to be the victim of the far right's schemes, predations and deceits.

No citizen of the world is either.

What is the proper response when half of the country has lost its mind?

The proper response is a reminder that the soul is more important than the mind.  

My son -- though he has a brain tumor -- still has a soul that is worthy of the truth -- the truth of his diagnosis, the truth of his prognosis, the truth of his fundamental right to the sovereignty of his own spirit. No human being has the right to take that sovereignty from him.  It is a crime of the highest order that the far right has attempted to do so.

So, too, our nation has a soul that is worthy of the truth.  No human being has the right to rob Americans of the honesty that is necessary for democratic self-governance.  No political party has the right to steal the sovereignty of our nation's electorate.  Its independence, its free will, its inviolable Constitutional rights must remain its own.

The soul of the nation is more important than the co-opting of half of the nation's minds through disinformation, deceit, and criminality on the part of the far right.

It is that soul to which we must now speak.  Compellingly, justly, resolutely and wisely.

For those who question whether Americans have the fortitude for that dialogue, I can only answer that I do.

Lane MacWilliams