TRAMPLED RIGHTS, LOST RESPECT: WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE?

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 16, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“TRAMPLED RIGHTS, LOST RESPECT: WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE?”

 

America is now a country where lawful residents can be grabbed from streets and sidewalks by black-masked operatives for government agencies acting without warrants and sent to prisons in foreign countries.

 

It’s also where the voter-established California Coastal Commission, despised by the current president, can tell an oil company to cease making changes on ocean-bottom pipelines – and then see the order ignored. This is still playing out near Gaviota in Santa Barbara County, but for sure at least some respect for legal authority has been lost.

 

It’s a country whose president sought impeachment for judges whose decisions he does not like, while his appointees sometimes pick and choose which legal rulings to heed.

 

It’s also where a non-elected “official” heading a quasi-government agency called the Department of Government Efficiency could fire hundreds of workers from the Social Security Administration, making citizen dealings virtually impossible with an agency serving more than 70 million Americans until someone said “Oops” and a partial emergency fix followed.

 

At the same time, decades of formal assurances that tax filings will be confidential were reversed with no notice, to make deportations easier. Never mind that no one will ever trust the IRS in the same way again.

 

Any of these actions might normally draw equally or similarly forceful reactions of some kind under Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion. That law, long fundamental in both physics and politics, says “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

 

California saw this in a big way during the Vietnam War, when for every draftee sent off to fight in the jungles of Southeast Asia, at least one and often more persons took to the streets in myriad protests fueled by outrage.

 

There has been no similarly organized anger today, not even when millions of Americans lost trillions of dollars in value from their 401Ks and other investment accounts due to an on-again, off-again tariff war started by a president using powers many lawyers say he does not possess.

 

Several pundits postulate that when 3.5 percent or more of this nation’s citizens protest government actions, members of Congress from both major parties feel sufficiently threatened to begin opposing or at least questioning the policies drawing public ire.

 

That has not come near happening this year. Major cities saw large rallies in both early and late April, including one that stretched 20 blocks through lower Manhattan and another where Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders drew more than 36,000 in Los Angeles.

 

But overall crowds numbered fewer than 2 million each day, according to most unofficial estimates. That was exponentially short of the approximately 13 million that would make up 3.5 percent of Americans.

 

Any rage voiced fell far short of what it took to drive ex-President Lyndon Johnson from office over Vietnam, for one example of impactful public outrage.

 

Some of the most angry now advocate a literal interpretation of Newton’s Third Law of Motion, saying that whenever masked agents capture legal residents on city streets, beefy young men should physically accost those agents.

 

But answering violence with violence never works in this nation; even the wild demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago produced no policy change until years of nonviolent protests followed in myriad other locations.

 

To be effective this time, popular protests could be staged outside IRS offices, health clinics and research laboratories shut down by fiat even though their funding was supposedly guaranteed via acts of Congress signed by previous presidents.

 

Even these would not accomplish much unless they were constant and very large, perhaps closing down major streets for days or weeks at a time.

 

President Trump has loudly justified some of his most questionable moves this year as mandated by a significant national majority in the last presidential election. Yet, Trump won election by fewer than 1.6 percent of the total vote, falling short of an overall majority popular vote.

 

Which means that even if there were a mandate, it was given by fewer than half of American voters, scarce justification for the scale of changes now seen in the character of American life and public affairs.

 

-30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net