“You should get a gun” I’d just told my dad’s 2nd wife – the one I still think of as step even though she and my dad divorced years ago – about one of my twitter encounters and my determination to not stop. I hate guns. She knows that and she knows I’ll never own one. I grew up on a ranch so it’s not that I don’t know how to use them. I’m one of those who practices what I preach – or I sure do try to. I’ll never own a gun because I think that not one of the founders envisioned this as our “well ordered militia”.

They never envisioned the slaughter of children or people so militantly defensive of their guns that they would sooner allow terrorist to get weapons than suffer even the chance of a delay of a weapon. They never envisioned weapons that could kill 49 people in less time than it takes for a bell to toll 49 times.

They never envisioned an America where the majority were held down by the minority.

They never envisioned an America where a man so foul, so uncouth, so unskilled in the ways of government would become President despite every precaution they put in place.

They never envisioned an America where a President would openly flout the constitution and a Congress that would sit silently by.

They also didn’t envision an America where women voted, where those they held as slaves voted. They expected it though. They expected our constitution to be a living, breathing thing – one that grows and flourishes not sits still to strangle and die.

But there are things that they were very sure of

They did not see an America with a President who was indebted to foreign governments. They specifically wrote our constitution to forbid it. They wanted a President – a government – free of such entanglements – they would be rolling in their graves at the citizen united ruling. They would have been Marching in the streets tomorrow with the women against the idea of a President Trump.

I do not know our founders but I know what they valued. I was raised in it. I was raised reading about them. Reading about our history.

Trump is everything that they were against.

They held a revolution to object to taxation without representation.

They knew that the only way our experiment in governance could last would be with an educated population.

They understood the power of the press.

Today, Republicans refuse to compromise. They used the Supreme Court as a political weapon. Not just in refusing to fill a seat when Justice Scalia died but long before that as they started a narrative of “activists judges” in response to rulings that they did not like. They made the Supreme Court a tool – not the co-equal branch of government that it is. They forced the sequestration by their unwillingness to give. It was the so called nuclear option. They chose it.

That should be a chilling message to all of us.

The Republicans, over the last 8 years especially, have become willing to use that nuclear option over and over again. They choose it over compromise.

Our government was always meant to work in compromise and it used to. No one was ever totally happy and we marched forward together.

Until the Party of No came replaced the Republican Party – ironically calling themselves the tea party – this militant arm decided it was their way  or no way and that was what it became. In the not so distance past it didn’t take 60 votes for anything to happen in the Senate. Just wait pretty soon it won’t again – and that will be when things get really bad. We’ll have taken any minority voice away.

Before we know it things will be flowing again – unless we are very active – and they will be undoing everything that we gained in the 20th century. The social safety net will be undone for quicker than we realize if we do not lift our voices as one. Rights will follow. Rights of freedom. Rights of equality. Rights of Democracy. They are all on their way out.

In our country, one party rule was never meant to be, it is the very thing that we fought the war for our freedom to stop.

To quote from the Hunger Games

Everything old can be made new again – even Democracy.

But only if we realize that we need to fight. If we can’t make the halls of Democracy work again we will be in a very bad place. History will repeat itself – only this time we’ll have the madman and he’ll have a nuclear arsenal an we know already that the Republican’s of today are willing to take the nuclear option.