Some weeks ago, I wrote in this space about speaking with our neighbors with civility and acceptance. I stand by that philosophy today and want to exhort people to pick up this mantle. Last week a new administration was sworn in and began a flurry of activity by issuing Executive Orders and memos by the dozen. Many of our community are overjoyed by this new administration’s agenda. And many are as terrified as the others are overjoyed. Immigrants, LGBTQ+, and others are concerned. My observation months ago was that the then-candidate attempted to distance himself from Project 2025. But time clarifies things, and this last week, what has been crystal clear to me is that Project 2025 is already in full swing.
This agenda will not simply serve to “Own the libs.” It will diminish our nation wholesale in nearly every capacity, fully disrupting not only our national politics but the way in which the US has been viewed internationally. Efforts to stamp out DEI have gone down the rabbit hole so far as to call for the striking from US military professional military education (PME for you vets out there) the teaching about the Tuskegee Airmen. And those of the overjoyed I described category above are too often giving full-throated support to this. Last Monday, our new president went to church and was openly and unabashedly called upon to act with mercy. His response was to brush it off. And the response of a notable Republican Congressman was to suggest that the priest/minister who delivered that call for mercy, who is a US citizen, be deported.
This is but the tip of a massive iceberg of what I find to be unacceptable behaviors. And these unacceptable behaviors are causing, for good reason, a great deal of fear among our neighbors. Having grown up here on the shore and enjoying most of my life in a community that has come together when awful things happen—from storm surges that flooded bayside villages to the long hard winter of 1977 when watermen could not get their boats out—this community leaned on one another to get by. But in recent years, the community has devolved into tribalistic behaviors that do not serve any of us.
We are being manipulated by massive forces controlled by people with unimaginable wealth to act against our best interests. We do not have to accept this. We are called to reject this and seek to bond with our neighbors with compassion and peace. We are better when we take care of our neighbors, and whether we agree or disagree on whatever nonsense is being propagated from Washington, there are more of us out here in rural America than there are of the oligarchs and politicians. The power they have is theirs only because we gave it to them. If you feel anxious in these times, try to find just a single issue that you might agree on with someone that you otherwise disagree with. Show them your humanity. Show them that you are so very similar to them that they can no longer see you as “other,” and you may begin to see them as “neighbors” just the same.
We must reject this division or risk that the nation and world that we came up in will be irrevocably altered—and for the worse, far worse.
James Siegman
Talbot County
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