{"id":1444,"date":"2026-02-06T09:07:56","date_gmt":"2026-02-06T14:07:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potlatchga.com\/?p=1444"},"modified":"2026-02-06T09:13:31","modified_gmt":"2026-02-06T14:13:31","slug":"just-when-you-think-it-cant-get-any-worse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/potlatchga.com\/?p=1444","title":{"rendered":"Just When You Think It Can&#8217;t Get any Worse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Everything I\u2019m about to say, you\u2019ve probably heard before <em>ad nauseam<\/em>. So why am I saying it? Because I have to talk to someone; the pain and shame of watching our government self-destruct and become something that defies description has become intolerable, like a migraine headache, a terminal illness, a bankruptcy, a feeling of homelessness where there is no safe place from those who would do you harm. Up until now, I could only imagine what it was like to live in Pinochet\u2019s Chile, Maduro\u2019s Venezuela, Khamenei\u2019s Iran, Putin\u2019s Russia. But now, similar repression is happening here. We are losing our individual freedoms and human rights. Who among us does not see this? Only those who remain ignorant, uninformed and partisan toadies, I\u2019m afraid.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps, most puzzling of all is the total breakdown of the bipartisan brotherhood that has characterized Americans in times of crisis, domestic and foreign. Citizens with different political or religious identities have always buried the hatchet when the country has been faced with threats from within or abroad. Such cooperation might not have always been smooth and universal, but there was sufficient agreement to face down threats to our constitutional republic or foreign dangers. After all, we were all Americans.<\/p>\n<p>Today things are different. I don\u2019t have to tell you that; we all feel it in our everyday lives. It\u2019s like one of those late movies about the Nazis when ordinary Germans went silent and watched what they said, afraid that someone might overhear them and turn them into the Gestapo. Like them, we don\u2019t talk politics except with trusted friends who share our contempt for what is happening here in our country. We mince our words at cocktail parties and scrupulously avoid anything remotely political with MAGA friends and strangers. Immigration, abortion, LBGTQ, diversity, climate theory, vaccines, conservation, and racism are off limits as are countless other topics. I have friends who are reluctant to write letters to the editor for fear of offending anyone or \u201couting\u201d themselves as critics.<\/p>\n<p>In the past, more often than not, we did not know the politics of friends; it was not important. But then, we were all just Americans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Everything I\u2019m about to say, you\u2019ve probably heard before ad nauseam. So why am I saying it? Because I have to talk to someone; the pain and shame of watching our government self-destruct and become something that defies description has become intolerable, like a migraine headache, a terminal illness, a bankruptcy, a feeling of homelessness&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-by-robert-fischer"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Just When You Think It Can&#039;t Get any Worse - Potlatch<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/potlatchga.com\/?p=1444\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Just When You Think It Can&#039;t Get any Worse - Potlatch\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Everything I\u2019m about to say, you\u2019ve probably heard before ad nauseam. 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