Resetting moral compass for 2021
The New Year is upon us.
At this time a year ago — on Dec. 29 — I wrote a column that looked ahead to 2020. The headline: “Will 2020 be moment of truth, or moment of alternative facts?”
We had no idea 2020 would bring us COVID-19.
I’d begun the column invoking George Orwell’s depiction of a Dystopian society where mandatory loyalty to Big Brother obliterates independent thought. The Party determines truth. In Orwell’s words: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
The protagonist Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth. His job is rewriting history to reflect the Party agenda. He and co-worker Julia share a dream: freedom from totalitarian tyranny in the service of truth. Arrested by the Thought Police, Winston succumbs, forsaking Julia in total submission to Big Brother. Going beyond simple loyalty, he leaves the reader with the disturbing conclusion that he actually loves Big Brother.
That column was written just after the House of Representatives impeached President Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The column viewed the impeachment as signaling that our moral compass still guided us toward democracy. By holding Trump accountable, we would not succumb to lies and autocratic rule. Impeachment engendered hope. Truth would prevail.
Despite Trump’s assault upon our Constitution, the hate he spews, the divisions he delights in creating, the false narratives he promotes, the continual threat he poses to democracy, we would never submit to Orwellian newspeak, doublethink, and reality control.
We had impeached him. Even after three years of his unending lies — at that point 15,413 lies, according to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, now more than 25,000 — we’d kept our bearings. But that wasn’t really true. Republicans had completely surrendered to the lies.
PolitiFact’s 2019 Lie of the Year was Trump’s claim that the whistleblower got the July 2019 phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky “almost completely wrong.” The truth of that phone call was, of course, the basis for impeachment.
During the impeachment proceedings House Republicans abandoned the Constitution they had sworn to uphold. Armed with Trump’s alternative facts, they not only promoted his false narratives, but also appeared willing to spread Russian propaganda in the service of Vladimir Putin’s objectives.
Last December’s column sought glimmers of hope that the Senate trial scheduled to begin Jan. 16 might convict Trump and remove him from office.
“The Republican-controlled Senate has an awesome responsibility,” the column concluded. “Depending upon how it conducts the impeachment trial, 2020 could be the year we decisively reject alternative facts, or the year our reality moves closer to a fictional 1984.”
On Feb. 5, Senate Republicans — all but Sen. Mitt Romney (RUtah) — voted to acquit Trump, thereby rewarding a would-be dictator who would have us live in an autocratic world where truth and lie become interchangeable, where black is white, right is wrong, and bad is good.
A month after the impeachment trial this Orwellian world became deadly. COVID-19 would become our 2020 reality.
Throughout 2020, Trump denied and distorted the reality of this pandemic, even as the death toll continued to mount. It was no worse than seasonal flu. It would magically disappear. It could be treated with unproven remedies. It wouldn’t exist if we didn’t test for it. Mask wearing and public health measures were political statements. Eventually Trump began promoting super-spreader events based on a lethal herd immunity policy.
Then, as more and more of us became ill and died — as of this writing more than 18 million cases, 323,000 deaths, more than 3,000 dying each day — he washed his hands of it.
PolitiFact’s 2020 Lie of the Year: claims that deny, downplay or dis-inform about COVID -19.
Senate Republicans failed to remove this dangerous man from office in February, but in November we, the American people, did just that. Despite the illness, death, and economic hardship that came with 2020, looking back we can still be thankful. The year kept us on the path of truth.
As Trump now indulges in the last big lie of his presidency — that he won the 2020 election — and creates departing chaos, we enter 2021 having rescued democracy with our moral compass intact.
Alma Rutgers served in Greenwich town government for 30 years.