There is no coming back from [waves hands] all of this. Trump could be impeached tomorrow and thrown in prison the day after, along with everyone who supported him, and it would not change the fact that this happened, that this was allowed to happen.
The midterms could come around and the Democrats could win a super-majority landslide victory and pass new laws to curtail the power of the President and to enact new safety systems for this kind of abuse and it still wouldn’t change the fact that this happened, despite the laws at the time. There is no going back to “the way things were.”
Once you step into lawlessness, once you start ignoring your own laws and rules, there is no going back – because no matter what new laws or rules you create, there will always be the knowledge that the prior laws and rules were broken before, so who’s to say they won’t be broken again? Like Yoda said, “once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.”
That’s not to say we shouldn’t try to undo all this, and to enact new laws to try and prevent it in the future – but we also can’t lie to ourselves and believe that we can just make up some new rules and everything will be better and the problem is solved and it’ll never happen again. Because a core element of trust has been forever lost because of all this.
We can (and should) certainly try to restore that trust, to rebuild it, but there is no magic wand, there is no fast track for trust – the only answer is time, and most likely it will be a long time; maybe even generations.
But given the alternative, we owe it to ourselves – and to our future generations – to try, and the sooner we start, the less time we’ll have to wait.
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