Dr. Elizabeth A. Flynn

The editors of the Marquette Mining Journal, in their Feb. 8 editorial, which was reprinted in the Daily Mining Gazette on Feb. 10, ask when the political climate will improve in this country?

They suggest that the Trump impeachment process and our Defund Bergman Campaign will not make any difference and will further divide a divided country. They mention the pandemic and sound weary. We all are.

The Mining Journal editors and the Daily Mining Gazette editors greatly underestimate the threat to our democracy Donald Trump still poses. They see him as repairing to Mar-a-Lago and entertaining the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Roger Stone. We see him as continuing to control the approximately 40% (about 66% in the First Congressional District) of the electorate who supported him for four years and in the current election.

Why did Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy visit him there? Why is QAnon believer U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, with close ties to Trump, bringing in large sums in donations? Why are the 147 Republican congresspeople who voted to decertify the election still supporting him? Why is the disinformation Trump spewed every day still with us?

Our country is indeed in the midst of a crisis as serious, and in many ways more serious, than others I have seen in my lifetime, and I have lived through a lot. My father was fighting in World War II when I was born in December 1944; Germany would surrender six months later. President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, my second year of college. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968. As a graduate student, I was on the campus of Ohio State University when students took over the administration building in the spring of 1968.

The National Guard occupied the campus shortly thereafter, and at nearby Kent State, not long after that, four innocent students were killed. My late husband was drafted, fought in Vietnam and lost sight in one eye when his hill was overrun in 1969.

The Watergate scandal culminated in the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974. My late husband died of cancer in 2000, perhaps a result of his exposure to agent orange in Vietnam. In 2001, 9/11 occurred.

In the national tragedies I mention, the country united around a common moral outrage–Adolph Hitler, the assassins of Kennedy and King, the National Guard, the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon’s transgressions, the 9/11 terrorists. If we are not united now after the 1/6 tragedy, it is because large percentages of the population, and clearly a majority of our Republican senators, refuse to recognize the danger Donald Trump posed and still poses to our democracy.

The impeachment of Donald Trump had and the Defund Bergman Campaign has the highest motives, to make Trump, his followers, and U.S. Rep. Bergman accountable for their actions. Rather than dividing our country, they have the potential to heal us because they have concern for the welfare of others as their center and thus promise to transform the irresponsibility and self-centeredness that are destroying any sense of community and common humanity upon which a healthy society depends.

According to Donald P. Bellisario of the Arthur Page Center in the College of Communication at Penn State, responsibility involves morally based obligations to others and to ethical moral codes. Accountability involves a preparedness to provide an explanation to others for one’s judgments, intentions and actions.

The impeachment trial presented incontrovertible evidence that Trump was responsible for the Jan. 6 uprising and must be held accountable. The technicality that the impeachment was unconstitutional because Trump is no longer in office was an excuse for senators loyal to Trump to vote to acquit him.

Mitch McConnell said as much. The Defund Bergman Campaign, which is comprised exclusively of individuals from the First Congressional District, calls for Rep. Bergman to take responsibility for his actions and to explain why he voted to give away the votes of his constituents, voting being the most fundamental principle of a democracy, and why he decided to violate his oath of office and the Constitution of the United States.

We are optimistic that the historical record that results from the impeachment hearings as well as the Defund Bergman Campaign will lead to greater healing rather than greater division because both will make clear the damage Trump and Bergman have done to our democracy.

Editor’s note: Dr. Elizabeth A. Flynn of Hancock is affiliated with the Defund Bergman Campaign. She is a professor emerita, Department of Humanities, Michigan Tech University in Houghton.