Letters

Lies are like cancer: Until we shine truth to dispel the distortion, they metastasize and consume us.

Cancer comes to teach us who we are, or to take us out. It’s a disease of distortion and forgetting. Cells forget their purpose, function and boundaries. Their distortion agitates an interference pattern that weakens and disorganizes healthy cells, then feeds upon them to traverse the body and shroud organs. Until, debilitated by fighting and consuming itself, the host succumbs.

That’s where we stand now, as a nation, at this midterm election. Holding the line against the Big Lie. Do we succumb to distortion or remember our goodness, recollect ourselves and survive?

For four long years, the American public was battered by 30,573 lies: crazy angry tweets, “alternative facts,” the fallout of “perfect phone calls.” The distortion demanded our complete attention. All the oxygen was sucked from our executive function by our Executive Dysfunction.

One by one, our safeguards caved and bought into the lie: Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy. Moderate Republicans withdrew. Honest Republicans seeking the truth were vilified and canceled by their colleagues, who grow rabidly intransigent.

We polarized. Half the country radicalized grievance into self-justified willfulness: My way or nothing. The other half adhered to a different playbook, somehow always footing the political bill. We grew incoherent. Elected legislators prioritized cruel memes over the drudgery of agreement and representation. They ghosted us, defaulted on basic services and abandoned leadership.

Our Supreme Court, former bastion of nonpartisanship, succumbed to the advance of the Lie. With the stroke of a pen, “settled law” with the liberty of 160 million American women, revoked. The promise of state jurisdiction over abortion law now moves toward a national ban, with more liberties facing the Supreme Court’s chopping block.

In our effort to maintain democratic homeostasis, legislators, prosecutors, free press and brave individuals have labored courageously to staunch advancing falsehood, through two impeachments, a political insurrection incited by a president, the January 6th Committee hearings, and multiple criminal and civil lawsuits.

Yet the most dangerous mother of all lies is the ticking bomb we face now: that the 2020 election was stolen. This lie subsidizes all of Donald Trump’s other lies. It monetizes the base, pays for legal defense, tethers party to the brand and positions them all for the next denial. If I lose, it’s fraud. This is the litmus lie: Any candidate who propagates this lie is preparing to take the country by force.

This is the lie we must vote against to secure our liberties and preserve our democracy.

November 8, look the lie in the eye and face it with your vote.

Adele Kristiansson

Water Mill