We are not broken

Protesters outside ICE detention facility in Newark on Sunday

The way you wake up in the morning is so, so important. Here at the Harris-Truscott manse, our mornings are managed by five cats and one dog, Ruby, who has been with us seemingly forever.

This morning, when she came downstairs after her ablutions, Tracy described the raucous scene outside the door of my bathroom, unheard by me because the minute I enter in the morning, I turn on NPR’s “Morning Edition.” Two of the cats were sniffing eagerly at the bottom of the door, one of them was attempting to climb the door jam as he reached for the doorknob, with the other two chorusing meows in concert with Ruby’s whining from across the hall at the top of the stairs.

All this was after Box Cat had perched herself atop Tracy’s inert body hoping her weight would wake her, while Ruby tap-danced her nails on the wood floor surrounding the bed, assured from long experience that the sound would awaken me, which it did.

Within my bathroom across the hall and behind the door, however, it was another story. NPR was running a taped interview with Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut about the publication of his new book, Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America. I don’t know what it is about politicians that they seem to want to pack the entire contents of their book into its title, as Murphy apparently thought he needed to do.

I like Senator Murphy. He’s been junior senator from Connecticut for 13 years now. He’s a Democrat. He stands for all the right things. He manages to get himself on MSNBC often enough that you can see the ambition to move higher up the political food chain coming from him like steam. I don’t have an opinion about what kind of president he would make, should a run for that office by Murphy come to pass, but I do have an opinion about the interview he gave to NPR about his book.

He’s wrong. We are not a broken country. We are a country with problems, some of whose citizens believed electing a charlatan would help to solve them, but we’ve done that before, and we’ve done it in much the same stupid way. Murphy complained to NPR, “We have a sick country, and Trump is the symptom of that sickness,” and “you could have written one term of Donald Trump off as an anomaly, but the second time around, everybody knew who he was.” The same could be said, and was said, about Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection win, when he carried 49 of 50 states at a time when he was responsible for the worst and most unpopular war this country had ever seen.

I covered the 1972 Nixon campaign. Nixon was so utterly corrupt that he engineered Watergate to ensure his victory even though he was so far ahead, you couldn’t find McGovern with a pair of binoculars. We weren’t “sick” in 1972. As an electorate, we were stupid and gravely misinformed, but we were, and have been, stupid and misinformed before, and we doubtlessly will be again.

Murphy lays out our national illness at the feet of six usual suspects which he calls cults: big business obsession with profits, consumerism, globalism – whatever the hell that is – technology and social media, credentialism, and corruption. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and yeah. Then he says even Democrats are to blame, that “both parties contributed to breaking a country that used to care more about the we than the me.”

Try telling that to Nixon voters in 1972, and then tell it to Obama voters in 2008 and 2012. Murphy treats the swings in our political life as if they’re Ebola, an infection without a cure or even a vaccine. He’s wrong. We’ve gotten it right -- the future of the country for want of a better description -- before, and we’re going to get it right again.

The thing that bothers me the most about Murphy’s take is the idea that we are somehow “broken.” Tracy and I live in Milford, Pennsylvania, in the northeast corner of the state. Since the 2024 election, we have a terrible Republican congressman, Rob Bresnahan, another stinking rich Republican “businessmen” who ran for office griping about members of Congress getting rich off stock trades for which their political office gave them inside information, and then he proceeded to become one of the most prolific traders in the House, with more than 600 stock trades in just over a year.

I know, Republican corruption, big money, yada-yada-yada. But we’re going to get rid of this asshole in the midterms. You can see it in the streets around here. Every Wednesday, activists stand on the main corner in town waving signs critical of Trump and Bresnahan, and every time I drive by there, I hear horns honking in support. The turnouts for No Kings protests have been massive for a little town of just 1,000 residents, with people coming from all around northeast Pennsylvania.

Murphy told NPR this morning, “We’ve made a lot of decisions in government to strip work of purpose and dignity and to make it a lot harder for people to find positive connections and friendships and relationships in their life.” That’s just wrong. First of all, “we” didn’t do anything of the sort. I live in our small town. I get out every day and interact with people who run local businesses. While I don’t have access to their profit and loss statements, in the middle of this Trump-generated surge in inflation and high gas prices and all the rest of it, I deal with people every day who have smiles on their faces and are doing more than just getting by. I don’t know which political party they vote for. I don’t even care if they helped put Trump in office. They aren’t “sick” or “broken.” They have become my acquaintances and in some cases friends, and they are my fellow citizens.

The problem with books like Murphy’s and attitudes like his is that he’s lost the thread. I don’t know if it happens to these people when they move to Washington, but he’s forgotten that we don’t live on the floor of the Senate or the House, and God help us, we don’t live in the gilded nightmare that is the White House. We live in places like Minneapolis, where citizens of that city came together in the freezing cold of this past winter and quite literally drove ICE and Border Patrol agents out of their city in support of some of their neighbors who were undocumented immigrants. It’s still happening in Newark, New Jersey, at this very moment, outside the Delaney Hall “detention facility,” where crowds of people are protesting conditions that include spoiled food, unsanitary toilet facilities, lack of medical care, and shortages of bedding and blankets and pillows.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesman said Governor Mikie Sherrill was denied entry over the weekend because of “riots by agitators [who] surrounded Delaney Hall Detention Facility, many carrying anti-ICE signs and Antifa flags.”

They can call the protesters Antifa or agitators or whatever they want. In Newark just as in Minneapolis, they’re local citizens taking a stand against a corrupt and ugly administration that is breaking the law as it mistreats the people it is supposed to serve.

This is not a sign of a broken or sick America. We are a healthy country with citizens who are determined to keep it that way, and we will prevail.