On this January 6...a year after the mob violently stormed the Capitol, other memories of bygone eras, 1980's to the early 1990s, come back to me. How times have changed since then when I administered fair and free elections and I was threatened by domestic terrorism, but it was not because I was an election official. I spent nearly 8 years as a Denver Election Commissioner, a duty of my position of Denver's Clerk and Recorder...and twice president of the then three-person commission. Never was I ever asked to lie, cheat about the outcome of any election, "find missing votes", and never was my life or my family's safety ever threatened if I failed to do another party's bidding. https://www.reuters.com/.../usa-trump-georgia-threats/
Several recent polls show about 40% of those who identify as Republicans believe it is justified to commit violence against the government. They have a twisted view of what Democracy means and they are killing its fundamental purpose with their "kindness". The writers of the Constitution tried to formulate a system that gave opponents a voice to make their case, but only if they did it peacefully...and recent court decisions have rulings that violent acts are not first amendment rights protected by the Constitution. Our founders also attempted to avoid a violent transition to new governance through an elaborate electoral process, which Trump's allies attempted to circumvent and to twist interpretations to overturn the 2020 election, as recently evidenced by both the special Jan. 6 Congressional committee and well-documented investigative journalists. A year later there is still no evidence the 2020 election "was stolen", in spite of "forensic audits" and unanimous court decisions by even Trump appointed judges, all thrown out for lack of evidence. For the majority of Republicans, even that they were lied to by those trying to keep Trump in power a second term, is a reality that is still hard to accept.
I do know what it is like to be a target of domestic terrorism. While I was Clerk and Recorder, my husband was a Democratic National Committeeman with a national platform and an outspoken critic of those in the land of his birth (Yugoslavia), remnants of the fascists in World War II, immigrants to the US, too, seeking to split up their old country. For a couple of years, the Denver bomb squad opened packages from unknown senders on our back porch because the fascist immigrants to the US sent letter bombs to those who did not support their hyper Croatian nationalist goals to restore fascism to a separate province, breaking up Yugoslavia. The breakup eventually happened in the mid-1990s in the genocidal civil war conducted not by Croatian fascists but by Serbian hyper ethnic nationalists, infamous for being prosecuted later in an international tribunal for "ethnic cleansing". There were 300,000 victims in a population the size of Colorado's. The country remains the poorest in Europe and is again threatened by Serbian separatists. Let that be a lesson for those supporting US extremist white nationalists who advocate violence and separatism, too. Be careful what you wish.
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